We Helped The First One

Nobody has said it and everybody knows it.

It is at breakfast. It is in the room when the four of you are watching something. It was there at your mother's in August, sitting between two people on a sofa while everybody talked about the weather.

Four years ago you were able to do a thing for your eldest, and this year you cannot do it for your second, and the reason is nothing more exotic than that four years happened.

That is the whole of it. Not a decision. Not a preference. Four years, and a different set of circumstances at each end of them.

And yet in the house it does not feel like arithmetic. It feels like a favor was done for one person and withheld from another, and the person it was withheld from is nineteen and living in the same building and has said absolutely nothing about it, which is worse than if he had.

He has been very good about it. That is the sentence people keep using. He has been very good about it.

Here is what I want to say before anything else. The thing sitting in the middle of that house is not going to be resolved by fairness, because it cannot be made fair. It is going to have to be resolved by somebody saying it out loud, and it has to be one of you.

A man's life consisteth not

There is a warning in Luke that people use as a rebuke about greed, and it is a good deal more useful than that.

And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. (Luke 12:15, King James Version)

Read the second half slowly, because it is a statement about arithmetic.

A man's life does not consist in the abundance of what he has. Consist is a strong word. It means: is not made up of, is not composed of, is not constituted by. Whatever a life is made of, it is not made of the size of what was handed to it.

Which means the difference between what your eldest received and what your second will receive, whatever the figure is, is not a difference in the size of their lives.

You are looking at two lives that are not made of what was handed to them, and a gap between two years has never once been a gap between two children. Luke 12:15 says outright that a life does not consist in abundance, and the Holy Spirit is the one in a front room where four people are watching television and nobody is watching television.

And notice the first half, which is the part that keeps this honest.

Take heed, and beware of covetousness. That warning is not aimed at rich people. It is aimed at anybody, in any circumstance, who has started to measure a life by a total. Which includes a nineteen year old comparing his year to his brother's, and it includes two parents comparing this year to four years ago.

You have all four been doing the same arithmetic in different chairs, and a household comparing itself to its own past has never once been a household that stopped loving anybody. The written word aims the warning at everybody in the room rather than at one person, and the Spirit of God is the one who names the thing that four people are doing separately.

Fairness is the wrong tool

Now the practical half, and it is the reason nothing has been said.

Fairness has been the tool in this house since the spring, and fairness cannot be applied backwards.

There has been a lot of thinking about it. Some version of evening it up later, or explaining that the circumstances were different, or working out what the equivalent would be in today's terms. And every single one of those routes ends in the same place, which is a conversation where a nineteen year old is handed an explanation for something he never asked to have explained.

An explanation is a defense. And a defense implies an accusation, and he has not made one, and the moment two parents defend themselves he learns that there was something to defend.

You are allowed to be in a hard year without arguing your own case, and a household in a thinner season has never once owed anybody a defense for it. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a case out of a parent's hands before it ever gets made, and Luke 12:15 dismantles the measuring instead of settling the account.

You are able to stop building a defense nobody asked for, and an unfair year has never once required a household to prove that it meant well. Luke 12:15 takes the measuring apart rather than balancing it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stops a family from arguing a case that has no accuser.

Here is what he is actually waiting for, and it is much smaller than a defense.

He is waiting to find out whether the adults in the house can see it. That is all. Not fix it. See it.

Because right now, from where he is sitting, there are two possibilities and he cannot tell which one is true. Either his parents know this is rough and are saying nothing, or his parents have not noticed. The first one he can live with easily. The second one is the one that goes in and stays in.

The difference between two years is not a verdict on either child.

You are able to be seen seeing it, and a young person who knows his parents have noticed has never once needed the situation to change to be all right. Luke 12:15 refuses to let a life be measured by a total, and the Spirit of God is the one who is in a room where somebody is finally looked at directly.

Say that it is not fair

So here is the thing to do, and it is four words long, and the second half of the instruction is the difficult one.

Say to the second one, out loud, that this is not fair. And then do not explain it away.

Not "it is not fair, but you have to understand". Not "it is not fair, and we feel terrible". Not "it is not fair, though your brother had his own problems". Every one of those is the explanation arriving at speed, and the explanation is the thing that undoes it.

Just the sentence. This is not fair on you. Then stop.

You are able to say a true thing and let it sit there unexplained, and four honest words have never once needed a paragraph behind them to be worth saying. The Holy Spirit is the one in the silence after four words that nobody softened, and it is written in Luke 12:15 that a life does not consist in the abundance of things.

He will probably say it is fine. He has been saying it is fine for six months. Let him say it, and do not argue with it, and do not repeat yourself.

The words have been said. That is the whole objective. From this evening onward the thing in the middle of the house has been named by an adult in it, and it stops being a thing everybody is carefully walking around and becomes a thing that has been mentioned.

You are able to name a thing once and let him do what he likes with it, and a sentence spoken into a room has never once needed a reaction to have worked. Scripture states the principle and moves straight on without pleading, and the same Spirit who kept it that brief is with you when you stop talking.