They Gave Up Too Much For Me To Say This

You know exactly what it cost.

Not roughly. Exactly. You know what was not replaced, and what was not done to the house, and what your mother said no to in the spring and pretended was about something else.

Nobody told you any of it directly. You worked it out, the way children in families like yours always work it out, from the shapes of what stopped happening.

And so when somebody at home asks how it is going, there is only one available answer, and you have been giving it since September.

It is good. Yeah, it is really good.

And here is the sentence underneath that, which you have never said to anybody and which runs at about eleven every night: they gave up too much for me to say this is hard.

I want to deal with that sentence directly, because it is doing a very great deal of damage and it is built on something that is not true.

Put thou my tears into thy bottle

There is a line in Psalm 56 that is one of the strangest and most tender images in the whole book.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8, King James Version)

Tears, collected. Kept. Written down.

Not assessed. Not weighed against circumstances. Not compared against what the person had been given or what others had suffered. Collected, as a thing worth keeping, by somebody who thought they were worth the keeping.

And notice the question on the end: are they not in thy book. He is not asking to be believed. He is stating, as an obvious thing, that a record exists.

You have tears that were collected rather than assessed, and something worth keeping has never once had to justify itself against what anybody else gave up. Psalm 56:8 puts the tears into a bottle and into a book without one word of evaluation, and the Holy Spirit is the one in a room at eleven at night in the ninth week.

Now the first clause, which most people read past: thou tellest my wanderings.

Tellest means counts. The whole verse is about accounting: the wanderings are counted, the tears are kept, the record is written. It is an enormous amount of attention paid to one person's difficulty.

And nowhere in it is there a comparison. Nobody in that verse is told that other people have wandered further.

You are being counted rather than compared, and a difficulty that is being recorded in detail has never once been a difficulty that somebody thought was too small to matter. The written word does the counting without ranking it against anybody, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a record with no comparison anywhere in it.

What the arithmetic is actually doing

Now let me take apart the sentence, because it contains a piece of arithmetic that does not work.

They spent something. That is true. And the conclusion drawn from it is: therefore I owe them a good report.

But look at what that arrangement actually produces, from their side.

They went without in order to give their daughter something. What they are receiving in return is a person who tells them nothing true, twice a week, for a year. That is not what anybody intended. Nobody in that house said no to something in the spring in order to be given a series of cheerful phone calls from somebody who is struggling alone.

You are paying them back in a currency they never asked for, and a family who gave something up has never once been buying a good report. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes apart a debt that was never issued, and Psalm 56:8 collects the tears without measuring them against anybody's expense.

And here is the second thing, and it is the one that will matter to your mother if she ever finds out.

The silence is the expensive part.

If she learns, in three years, that her daughter had a very hard first year and told her nothing because of what the family had spent, that will hurt her considerably more than the difficulty itself ever would have. It will convert the thing she gave gladly into a thing that cost her daughter something, and no parent anywhere wants that.

Finding something hard is not a verdict on anybody.

You are able to keep what they gave from turning into a bill, and a gift that made somebody go silent has never once been the gift anybody intended to give. Psalm 56:8 records the wanderings and the tears together with no ledger anywhere in it, and the Spirit of God is the one who protects a gift from becoming a debt.

One hard thing, with the word grateful left out

So here is the thing to do, and there is one word that has to stay out of it.

Tell one person at home one hard thing. And do not put the word grateful anywhere in the sentence.

One hard thing. Small and specific. Not the whole architecture of it. The particular thing that was difficult this week.

You are able to say one hard thing without a preamble, and a specific difficulty has never once needed a frame around it to be sayable. It is written in Psalm 56:8 that the tears go into the bottle without being weighed against anything, and the Holy Spirit is the one in the room when a true sentence goes out.

And the word grateful has to stay out. This is the whole discipline.

Everything in you will want to build the sentence as: I know how lucky I am, and I am so grateful, but this bit has been hard. And that construction does something specific: it re-enters the debt into the conversation, at the front, and then the hard part arrives as an ungrateful footnote to be forgiven rather than as information to be received.

Say the hard thing on its own. Let the gratitude be a thing they already know, because they do already know it, and it does not need saying twice a week.

You are able to leave the accounting out of one sentence, and a hard thing said without a preamble has never once sounded ungrateful to anybody who loves you. Scripture keeps the tears and the wanderings without one comparison anywhere in the verse, and the same Spirit who wrote it that way is with you when the sentence goes out.

And if what is running at eleven has stopped being about a hard year and started to be about not being here at all, that is not something to be balanced against anything anybody spent. Tell somebody where you are, today, out loud, and if it is urgent go to an emergency room or ring an emergency number where you are. Nothing anybody gave up has any bearing on that at all.