So Nobody Ever Has To Know

Aoife holds on to one thing so that nobody in her life will ever have to find out that she needed anything.

She would not have put it that way a year ago. A year ago she would have told you she was being sensible, and the word sensible would have done a very great deal of work in that sentence, and nobody would have looked at it twice.

What changed was a conversation with a woman she barely knows, in a hall, about something else entirely.

The woman was describing a stretch she had been through, and she said, in passing, without any weight on it, that the worst part had not been the trouble. The worst part had been the phone call. Having to ring somebody and let them know.

And Aoife said, out loud, before she had thought about it: I would not have made the call.

The other woman said, quite lightly, no, I know you wouldn't. And then she said something else and the conversation moved on.

Aoife has not been able to put that down since.

Because it is true, and once it was said out loud she could see what she had actually built. The thing she holds is not for a rainy day in the ordinary sense. It is not there because she is frightened of hardship, and she is not, and she has been through worse than most of the people who worry about her.

It is there so that the phone call never has to happen.

That is what it is for. It is a device for never being the one who needs something. It means that if the worst arrives, she can meet it alone, quietly, without anybody in her life ever having to reorganize a single thing on her account, and that is not thrift. That is a very expensive way of loving people, and she has been paying for it for a long time.

You have your own version. There is something you hold, and if you follow it back honestly it is not really about the trouble. It is about who would have to be told.

Nobody is asking you for it, and I am saying that here at the front. There is no ask at the end of this and there is no plate anywhere on this site.

The strength is not offered instead of the weakness

There is a sentence Paul reports as an answer to a request that was refused three times.

My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.2 Corinthians 12:9

He had asked for the thing to be taken away. It was not taken away. What he got instead was a sentence, and the sentence does not say the weakness will be removed once he is strong enough.

It says the strength is made perfect in the weakness, which is to say it is completed there, brought to its full working, and that has an implication most of us would rather not sit with: the place we are trying to make sure nobody ever sees is the place where the thing actually operates.

That is a hard verse for a woman who has arranged her whole life so that nobody has to know.

And now hear what is already true over you. The grace is sufficient, in the present tense, before anything is fixed. That is not my reading: the written word puts it in the present, spoken over a man whose situation had just been left exactly as it was, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman standing in a hall who has just heard herself say something true.

And you have never once been a burden to God. The word says casting all your care upon Him, for He careth for you, and careth is not tolerance, it is concern, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a felt thing rather than a nice line, especially in somebody who has spent decades making certain they were never anybody's inconvenience.

Nobody is asking you for anything

I want to be very plain now, because this is the paragraph where a message like this becomes an appeal, and this site would rather stop than do that.

Nobody here wants your thing. Nothing is being asked of you at the end of this article. Nothing here is gated, nothing is held back behind a payment, and no one is going to imply that opening your hand is what makes you eligible to receive from God. If a page ever does that to you, close it and do not go back, and I mean this one too.

There is no plate. Not now and not later.

And nobody is telling you to make the phone call. I am not going to hand a private person a piece of homework that involves telling other people things, from a distance, without knowing who those people are. Some people should not be told things and you may know exactly which.

And nothing about your standing depends on whether you ever ask anybody for help. The word says by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that this was never once conditional on your independence.

What the grip is actually round

Here is the question worth an evening, and it is not should I let go of it.

It is: who is the holding keeping the truth from?

Because the answer is almost never a creditor and almost always a person. It is a sister who would worry. It is a son who has enough on. It is a friend who would come, and coming would cost her something, and you have decided in advance that she should not have to pay it.

That is love, genuinely. It is also a decision made on somebody else's behalf without ever consulting them, which is the part worth looking at.

And underneath it there is very often something older: a memory of what it looked like when somebody in your family did need help, and how that went, and what was said afterwards.

And you are not the exception to being carried. Not once you have earned it: the word says bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, and the traffic in that sentence goes both ways, and the Spirit is the one who makes a person able to be on the receiving half of it without feeling that they have failed.