I Worked It Out And Stopped Asking

You worked it out on a Wednesday in about eleven minutes.

You had a phone in one hand and you had the number that had been mentioned in passing at dinner two weeks before, and you did the arithmetic that nobody had asked you to do, and you understood the answer completely and immediately.

And then you did the second calculation, which is the one this is actually about. You worked out what it would take from them.

Not whether it was possible. What it would cost. Which things would not happen. Which conversation your parents would have at eleven at night for the next three years.

And you put the phone face down on the duvet and you lay there for a while.

That was in the spring. And since then you have simply stopped bringing it up.

Nobody noticed, which is the thing you did not expect. You thought somebody would say something. But a subject that a seventeen year old stops raising is a subject that quietly leaves a house, and by about July it was as though you had never particularly wanted it, and your mother said something in August about how you had gone off the idea, and you agreed with her.

Here is what I want to say to you first: what you did was not childish and it was not self pity. You did a genuinely loving thing on a Wednesday night, at seventeen, with nobody helping you.

But you did it wrong in one specific place, and that is what this is about.

Hope deferred

There is a proverb that describes exactly what has been happening in you since the spring.

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life. (Proverbs 13:12, King James Version)

Look at the word deferred. Not denied. Deferred.

The proverb is not describing somebody who was told no. It is describing somebody whose hope has been pushed out, suspended, held at a distance without resolution. And it says plainly what that does: it makes the heart sick. Not sad. Sick, which is a word about a system that has stopped working properly rather than a mood.

You are carrying a deferred thing and not a childish one, and a hope with nowhere to go has never once been a weakness in the person holding it. The Holy Spirit is the one in a bedroom with somebody who put a phone face down in the spring, and Proverbs 13:12 names the sickness of a deferred hope without one word of blame attached.

Now the part that matters most for what you did.

You deferred it yourself. That is the difference between you and the person in the proverb. Nobody told you to stop wanting it. You did the arithmetic, you saw what it would cost the people you love, and you took your own hope and put it somewhere out of the way, on your own initiative, to protect them.

That was generous. And it has made your heart sick anyway, because the verse does not ask who did the deferring.

You have been made sick by a thing you did to yourself out of love, and the kindness of a motive has never once changed what silence does to a person. The written word states the effect and never once asks whose decision caused it, and the Spirit of God is the one who is honest with somebody about what they have been carrying.

What you actually took from them

Now the part I most want to say, and I want to say it carefully, because you did this out of love and I am not about to tell you off for it.

The stopping felt like removing a burden from two people.

Here is what was actually removed: their chance to know what their daughter wants.

You are allowed to be known by the people who raised you, and going quiet to make yourself easy has never once been the gift it felt like on a Wednesday night. Proverbs 13:12 refuses to call a desire a fault and names only the deferring as the sickness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a seventeen year old the truth about her own kindness.

Think about what a parent has now. They have a girl who used to talk about a thing and stopped, with no explanation. If they ever find out why, and they usually do, what they discover is that their seventeen year old sat in a bedroom doing sums about their household and then quietly folded up her own hope so they would not have to look at it.

That is not a relief to a parent. That is the single heaviest thing a daughter can hand two people, and it has been handed over slowly since the spring without either of them knowing.

Your family being unable to fund something is not a verdict on your family.

You are able to give them back the true version, and a seventeen year old protecting her parents has never once been the same thing as helping them. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a person the actual weight of what they have been carrying alone, and Proverbs 13:12 names the sickness plainly and does not soften it for anybody's good intentions.

And here is the thing you cannot see from inside it.

There is an enormous difference for a parent between "we cannot give her what she wants" and "we cannot give her what she wants and she has stopped telling us what that is". The first one is a hard fact about a household. The second one is a hard fact plus a daughter who has gone quiet, and the second half is the part that keeps a mother awake.

You are able to hand a household back one true sentence, and telling somebody what you want has never once been the same thing as asking them for it. Proverbs 13:12 speaks of desire coming as a tree of life and never once treats the wanting itself as a problem, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates a want from a demand.

Say that you still want it

So here is what to do, and the second half of it is the entire craft.

Tell one of your parents that you still want it. And say nothing at all about whether it is possible.

Not "I know we cannot". Not "I am not asking". Not "I know it is not going to happen, but". Every one of those is you doing their job for them, which is the same thing you did on the Wednesday, and it will produce the same result.

Just the true sentence. I still want it. I stopped talking about it but I never stopped wanting it.

You are able to say what you want without managing what it costs them, and one honest sentence has never once been a demand on anybody. It is written in Proverbs 13:12 that when the desire cometh it is a tree of life, so the wanting is treated as a living thing rather than a fault, and the Holy Spirit is the one in the room when a young person finally says the true sentence out loud.

They may not be able to do anything. Understand that clearly before you say it, so you are not saying it as a lever.

You are not saying it to change the number. You are saying it because a household where the daughter has quietly deleted her own hope in order to be easy to look after is a household running on a lie that everybody is being polite about, and somebody has to stop first, and it is going to have to be you.

You are able to stop first in your own family, and being seventeen has never once disqualified anybody from being the one who tells the truth in a house. Scripture puts the deferred hope and the living desire in one verse and lets both of them be real, and the same Spirit who wrote that line is standing in your kitchen when you speak.