The Question At Every Family Gathering

You start about two days before.

Not consciously. It is simply that at some point on the Thursday, the Saturday arrives in your mind, and with it the question, and by Friday evening you have gone over it three or four times without ever deciding to.

You have three answers now.

There is the short one, which is slightly cold and which you use on people you do not like much. There is the one with the joke in it, which is your best and which you save for the moment when a room is listening. And there is the long one, the reasonable one, the one that explains the situation properly and that comes out when somebody genuinely wants to know.

And there is a fourth answer, which is the plain one, and you have never used it.

She is working at the moment. Eight words. It has never once left your mouth at a family gathering, in two years.

Here is what I want to name at the start. The preparing is not vanity and it is not shame about your daughter. It is that a question you cannot answer without effort turns into a question you have to prepare for, and once you are preparing, the gathering has become a thing you are getting through.

I am doing a great work

There is a sentence in Nehemiah that is one of the most useful things anybody in Scripture ever said to an interruption.

And I sent messengers unto them, saying, I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down: why should the work cease, while I leave it, and come down to you? (Nehemiah 6:3, King James Version)

I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down.

That is the whole of his answer. He does not defend the work, he does not explain the work, he does not persuade anybody that the work is worth doing. He states what he is doing and why he is not coming, and then he goes back to it.

You are able to state a thing rather than argue for it, and a plain sentence about what somebody is doing has never once needed defending to be true. Nehemiah 6:3 states the work and declines the descent in one line, and the Holy Spirit is the one in a kitchen on a Thursday two days before a Saturday.

And notice the phrase: come down.

He is up on a wall. Coming down is what it would cost him to engage with the question at all: leaving the work, going to where they are, and having the conversation on their ground.

He does not say the question is wrong. He says he is not coming down to it.

You have a wall to stay on and no obligation to descend to a question, and a conversation held on somebody else's ground has never once been the only place a question can be answered. The written word declines the descent without disputing anything, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a person on the work they are actually doing.

What the three answers are costing

Now the practical part, and the cost is not what it looks like.

Every one of the three answers is a coming down.

The cold one, the funny one, the long reasonable one: all of them accept the premise that something requires handling, and all of them cost preparation on a Thursday and performance on a Saturday, and all of them leave you slightly braced in a room full of people who love you.

Two years of that has turned a family gathering into an event with a task in it.

You are able to walk into a Saturday with nothing to get through, and a gathering that has a task in it has never once been the gathering it used to be. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a job out of an afternoon, and Nehemiah 6:3 answers in one line and returns straight to the work.

You are performing a task at a gathering that used to be a gathering, and two days of preparing for eight words have never once been the price a question actually costs. Nehemiah 6:3 gives one line and returns to the work, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a task back out of a Saturday.

And here is the second thing, and it is the one that will decide how the next two years go.

The answers are teaching the room.

A woman with a prepared, polished, slightly rehearsed reply has told everybody present that the subject is delicate. Not in words. In the smoothness of it. People can hear preparation, always, in every room, and what they conclude from it is that this is a topic that needed work.

Which is exactly the thing two years of effort has been trying to prevent, produced by the effort itself.

A road that is not the expected one is not a verdict on anybody.

You are able to stop teaching a room that a subject is delicate, and a polished answer has never once concealed the preparation that went into it. Nehemiah 6:3 answers in one unpolished line and goes back to the wall, and the Spirit of God is the one who ends a two year rehearsal.

Give the plain one, then ask them something

So here is the thing to do, and the second half is what keeps it from being blunt.

Give the plain answer at the next gathering, without any of the three prepared versions. And then ask that person something about themselves.

The plain answer. She is working at the moment. Eight words, in the same voice you would use for the weather.

You are able to give eight unprepared words, and a plain answer has never once been ruder than a polished one to somebody making conversation. The Holy Spirit is the one in a kitchen where an unrehearsed sentence finally comes out, and it is written in Nehemiah 6:3 that a man said what he was doing in one line and did not come down.

Then the question about them, immediately.

This is what stops the plain answer from feeling abrupt, and it does something better than that: it moves the conversation onto them, which is where a person asking a friendly question at a gathering was always going to be happiest anyway.

Ask about the thing they mentioned last time. Ask about their knee, their garden, their own son. Genuinely, with interest.

And what you will find is that most of them will take that offer immediately and gratefully, because most people at a family gathering are looking for something to talk about and were never particularly attached to the subject of your daughter.

You are able to hand somebody a better subject, and a friendly question has never once been the thing that person most wanted to discuss. Scripture answers in one line and turns straight back to the work, and the same Spirit who kept it that brief is with you at the next gathering.