The One Everybody Rings

Gav is the one people ring at eleven at night, and he is very good at it.

He does not do anything clever. He picks up, and he does not sound tired even when he is, and he asks one useful question, and then he mostly shuts up for a long time. That is the whole method and it has held about nine people together over the years, some of them through things that do not go in an article.

He has been doing it since he was about thirty. He is forty-nine.

And there has been something going on since April.

He has not told anybody. Not his brother, not Rob who he has known nineteen years, not the two or three men he would describe without hesitation as his closest friends and who would say the same about him.

Not because he is proud. He would tell you, and mean it, that other people have worse.

It is more that there is no slot for it. The arrangement in every one of those friendships runs one way. He is the one who asks. And the moment he opened his mouth about April, something in the shape of nine relationships would have to change, and he does not have the energy to renegotiate nine things while also carrying the thing itself.

So it has been four months.

Rob turned up at ten past eight on a Saturday with two coffees.

Gav opened the door and said, "All right?"

And Rob said, "No. Get your shoes."

They sat on the back of the van in the street. It was cold. And Rob said this:

"I have known you nineteen years. Nineteen. And I have rung you, I do not know, sixty times? About my dad, about the business, about the thing in 2016 that I have never told another living soul."

Gav said something about that being fine.

"I know it is fine. That is not what I am saying." Rob turned his cup round. "I am saying I cannot remember one single time it went the other way. Not one. And that is not you being strong, mate, that is nineteen years of me not asking, and I am ashamed of it."

Then he said, "So we are going to sit here, and you are going to say the thing. Not all of it. One sentence. And I will not do anything with it, and I will not fix it, and I am not going anywhere."

Now let me ask you, because you are reading this and something in your chest just did something.

Who asks you?

The instruction is to one another

James gives an instruction about telling the truth to other people, and the shape of it matters more than people notice.

Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed.James 5:16

To one another. Not upward to an office. Not downward from a position. Across, between people who are on the same level, both of whom will at some point be on both ends of it.

And notice the reason he gives: so that you may be healed. He does not present speaking out loud as an unpleasant duty. He presents it as the mechanism, the way a doctor tells you what the treatment is.

So hear this said over you, on the back of the van at ten past eight. You are allowed to be the one who speaks, and the healing James describes is not reserved for the people who ring you. That is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who makes a person able to say a true sentence out loud, which is not a matter of nerve and never was.

Now let me name the trap you are actually in, because it is not cowardice and it deserves the right name.

You have become load bearing.

That is what nineteen years does. People built things on you, honestly and gratefully and without meaning to make it permanent, and now you have a quiet belief that if you say one true sentence about April the whole structure shifts, and nine people have to reorganize what they thought about you.

That belief is doing a great deal of harm and it is not true.

Here is the safety on it, and I want it stated plainly because this is where messages like this go wrong: you are not the only thing holding this together. God is. You have been a real help to real people and He was the one holding them the entire time, and He was doing it through you rather than instead of Himself.

Which means the structure does not fall when you sit down. It was never resting on you in the way you think.

And let me say the other half, because a certain kind of reader will hear this as permission to unload everything on everyone.

It is one sentence. To one person.

James says to one another, which is a relationship, not an audience. This is not about announcing. It is not about a post, or a group, or telling nine people so that nobody has too much of it. It is one true sentence, said to one person who has earned it, and that is the whole of the instruction.

Scripture says confess to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed, and the Spirit of God is the one who does the healing part, in His own way and in His own time, so nothing here depends on the conversation going well.

There was a man five hundred years ago who wrote that a Christian who will not let another Christian speak into their trouble has not understood the gospel, because we are all beggars, and a beggar who hides his hunger from another beggar is doing something strange.