It Is Not My Place

Nadine has decided three times not to say anything to Tanya, and every one of those decisions felt like humility.

Tanya is twenty-six. She is bright and she is funny and she has a way of telling a story that makes a whole room stop what it is doing. And she has been saying, for about five months, in an increasingly settled voice, that she is done with her mother.

Not a row. That is the thing. There is no dramatic incident. It is a slow decision, worked out over a lot of evenings, and she has good reasons, and Nadine knows most of them and they are real reasons and nobody could sit there and tell her they are not.

And Nadine did the same thing at twenty-nine.

Eleven years of it. She has told almost nobody. She would not describe those eleven years as a mistake exactly, because there were things in that season she genuinely could not have survived otherwise. But she knows what the fourth year was like. She knows what it does to Christmas, permanently, even after. She knows what it is to be at a graveside in 2019 wishing for one conversation and knowing exactly which year she stopped being able to have it.

And three times she has decided to say nothing.

Because it is not her place. Because Tanya is grown. Because she does not know the half of it. Because who is she, with her history, to be advising anybody.

Every one of those is a real thought and none of them is dishonest.

Wednesday, at the salon, Miss Cherelle, who is seventy and has never once been troubled by whether a thing is her place, said it while she had her hands in somebody's hair.

"She is going to do it, you know."

Nadine said, "I know."

"You not going to say anything to her?"

And Nadine said, "It is not my place."

And Miss Cherelle said, without looking up, "Then whose place is it, baby? Because everybody else is being polite too."

And then, "That girl is going to walk right past four grown women who all know what it costs, and not one of us will have said a word, and every one of us will have called it respect."

The wounds of a friend

Proverbs puts two things side by side that people usually get the wrong way round.

Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but deceitful are the kisses of an enemy.Proverbs 27:6

Faithful are the wounds. Not helpful. Not necessary. Faithful, which is a word about loyalty, about a person keeping their side of something.

And then the other half, which is the one that should stop you: deceitful are the kisses of an enemy. Proverbs is saying that pleasantness can be the dishonest option. That a room full of warmth and nobody saying the true thing is not the safe outcome, it is the deceptive one.

So hear this over you, sitting under the dryer with your hands in your lap. You are able to say a true thing to somebody you love, and the silence you have been calling respect for five months is not the neutral choice. That is written in Proverbs, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives a person both the words and the moment, which means you are not being asked to manufacture either one.

Now let me guard this with everything I have, because this is the exact message that goes wrong and hurts people.

You are saying one thing. You are not managing an outcome.

Here is the line, and it is the whole safety on this article. The saying is yours. The choosing is hers. And the carrying is His.

You do not get to decide what Tanya does. You are not permitted to keep raising it, to withdraw warmth if she does not take it, to bring it up again in six weeks with a slightly different angle, or to make your relationship with her conditional on her agreeing. Any of that has stopped being faithfulness and become pressure, and pressure never once changed a heart.

You say it once, kindly, with her name at the front of it, and then you love her exactly the same whatever she does.

And let me name the second thing, because it is what is actually stopping you.

You think your history disqualifies you.

It does the opposite. Nobody in that salon can say what you can say, because you are the only one who has been in the fourth year. A stranger's opinion about her mother is worth nothing. A woman who did it herself, and is not condemning her for considering it, and can say plainly what it cost, is worth everything, and that is not despite your eleven years, it is out of them.

Scripture says God comforts us in our affliction so that we can comfort those in any affliction with the comfort we ourselves received. That is the design. The Spirit of God takes what a person went through and turns it into something they can hand somebody else, and He does not wait until they have got over it first.

You are not the only thing standing between that girl and eleven years. God is, and He was in your eleven years too, and He is not relying on you getting the wording right. That takes the weight off, and it is exactly why you can afford to say it.

There was a man five hundred years ago who wrote to a friend that he would rather wound him with the truth than flatter him into a ditch, and then added, in the same letter, that he had done the same thing himself and worse, and was writing as one beggar to another.