We Have Been Telling People It Is Going Well

The story is very good now.

It has been running since September and it has developed. There is the part about the room. There is the funny thing about the first week. There is the phrase you both use, which one of you invented in about the second week and the other one has adopted, about how he has really landed.

You are both fluent in it. You can deliver it in about forty seconds at a door or at a table, and it is warm and it is specific and it does not sound rehearsed at all.

It stopped being true in the middle of October.

Not entirely. Some of it is still accurate. But the phrase about landing has not been true for about six weeks, and neither of you has adjusted it, and last Sunday one of you said it to somebody and the other one heard it and something small happened in the room that neither of you mentioned afterward.

Here is what I want to name at the very start. This is not lying and I am not going to call it lying, because it is not what happened.

What happened is that a household built a public account of a good thing, the way households do, and then the thing changed and the account did not, because there is no natural moment to stand at a door and issue a correction to a story nobody has asked about.

Do I now persuade men, or God

There is a line in Galatians where Paul asks himself a question in public, and the question is the useful part.

For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. (Galatians 1:10, King James Version)

Notice that he asks it about himself.

This is not a warning aimed at other people. It is a man examining his own motive out loud, in a letter, and the fact that he thought it worth asking tells you that this is not a fault of weak people. It is a pull that operates on everybody, all the time, including the most confident man in the New Testament.

You are being pulled by a thing that pulls on everybody, and managing what people think has never once been a fault of one particular family. Galatians 1:10 has a strong man asking the question about himself in public, and the Holy Spirit is the one at a table where a phrase came out on Sunday and did not fit.

Now, the phrase in the middle: if I yet pleased men.

Yet, meaning still, meaning as an ongoing operation. He is not describing a single act of flattery. He is describing a mode: living with an eye on how it plays, continuously, in the background of everything.

And that is exactly what has been happening since October, and it is exhausting, and neither of you has named it because it never had a name.

You have been running something in the background for six weeks, and an unnamed mode has never once been able to be put down, because nothing without a name can be set aside. The Spirit of God is the one who gives a thing a name so that it can be dropped, and the written word names the ongoing version rather than the single act.

What the story is costing him

Now the practical part, and it is about your son rather than about you.

He knows the story exists.

He has heard the phrase. He has heard one of you deliver the forty second version on the phone to somebody. And a nineteen year old who is having a hard time and can hear his parents describing him as having landed does a piece of arithmetic that goes: if that is what they are telling people, then telling them the truth means asking them to go and untell it.

And so he does not.

You are able to release him from a story he never agreed to, and a public version of a young man has never once been a version he was consulted on. Galatians 1:10 sets the pleasing of men against the serving of God as two directions rather than two degrees, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a family what its own account costs the person it is about.

And there is a second cost, which lands on the two of you.

Every week the public version stays in place, the gap widens, and the correction gets larger. In October it would have been a shrug and a sentence. By Christmas it will be a thing that has to be explained, with a chronology attached, to people who will wonder why nobody mentioned it before.

That is not because either of you did anything wrong. It is simply what an out of date account does over time.

A change of course is not a verdict on a family.

You are watching a small correction grow into a large one, and six weeks of an out of date story has never once been a moral failure in anybody. Galatians 1:10 names the pull without shaming the one who feels it, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a Tuesday correction available before Christmas arrives.

Tell one person the true version

So here is the thing to do, and it is one person and one sentence.

Tell one person outside the family the true version, in one sentence. And do not correct it afterward.

One person. Not an announcement, not a round of calls, not a message to a group. Somebody ordinary, who asked once and would ask again, told once, plainly.

Actually he is finding it hard. That is the whole sentence.

You are able to change the account with one sentence to one person, and a true version said once has never once needed to be issued to everybody to be true. The Holy Spirit is the one standing beside somebody who says the accurate thing at a door, and it is written in Galatians 1:10 that a man asked himself which direction he was facing.

And do not correct it afterward. That instruction matters more than it looks.

The instinct, immediately after saying the true thing, is to soften it. But he is doing all right in himself. But these things take time. But it may settle. Every one of those is the story reasserting itself in real time, and it will undo the sentence you just said.

Say the accurate sentence, let the other person say whatever they say, and go home.

You are able to say a true thing and leave it standing, and one accurate sentence has never once required a qualification to be fair to anybody. Scripture puts the question in two directions rather than in degrees, and the same Spirit who framed it that way is at the door when you resist the urge to soften it.

And here is what happens next, which is why one person is enough. The version you say out loud becomes the version you are carrying. From that evening the two of you are no longer maintaining anything, and the next time somebody asks, the true answer is already the one in your mouth.