Eleven Years of Hints

Hal has been dropping hints about that trailer since about 2014, and Trace has never once picked one up.

Here is the situation, and it is small, and small is why it has gone on so long.

Trace is Hal's brother-in-law and a decent man. He borrows the trailer three or four times a year. He brings it back every time, which is more than can be said for some people, and he brings it back with the lights hanging off it, because he reverses by feel and there is a gatepost at his place that has taken more than its share.

And Hal fixes them. Every time. It takes him about forty minutes and costs about nine dollars and he has done it perhaps thirty times.

And every single time, when Trace next comes round, Hal says something.

"Them lights, eh."

"You want to watch that gatepost of yours."

"I have got a spare set in the drawer there if you ever need."

He has an entire library of these. He has been building it for eleven years. He has said them at cookouts and in church car parks and once, memorably, in a hospital waiting room, which even Hal admits was poor timing.

And Trace laughs every single time, because Trace thinks they are jokes.

They were sitting on a couple of upturned buckets in that shed in the fall and Hal was going on about it, and I let him get all the way to the end.

Then I said, "Hal. Have you ever said it?"

He said, "Said what?"

"Said it. Not the joke about the gatepost. The sentence. Trace, when you bring the trailer back with the lights broke, it costs me an evening, and I would like you to check them before you bring it back. Have you ever said that?"

He sat there a while.

Then he said, "No."

And then he said, and I have never forgotten it, "I have been mad at him for eleven years for not hearing a thing I never said."

Now let me ask you about yours.

It might be a trailer. It might be somebody who turns up unannounced. It might be a person who talks about your marriage in front of your children, or who rings after ten at night, or who says the same joke about your weight every single time, or who has been storing four boxes in your garage since the year your father died.

And you have hinted. You have hinted so much you consider yourself to have communicated.

Yes and no, with nothing hung on them

Jesus says something about speech in the Sermon on the Mount that people usually read as being about oaths, and it is, and it is also about hints.

But let your statement be, Yes, yes or No, no; anything beyond these is of evil.Matthew 5:37

He has just been dismantling a whole culture of elaborate promising, where people swore by this and by that so that everybody had to work out how binding a thing actually was.

And His replacement is astonishingly plain. Say the thing. Yes means yes. No means no.

Anything beyond these. Everything hung on the outside of a plain sentence to protect the speaker, to give them an exit, to make it deniable if it lands badly. That is what He is naming.

And a hint is exactly that. A hint is a sentence with an escape hatch built into it, and the hatch is the whole design: if Trace had ever reacted badly, Hal could have said I was only joking, and he would have been telling the truth, and that is precisely why eleven years of it communicated nothing.

So hear this over you, out on the bucket in the shed. You are able to say a plain sentence to a person you love, and the plainness is not rudeness, it is what Jesus actually asked for. That is written down in His own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives a person the words and the timing, which is why some of you already know exactly what the sentence is.

Now let me guard this hard, because a message like this can turn a good man mean by Tuesday.

This is not a license to let anybody have it.

Nothing here is about telling somebody what you have really thought of them for eleven years. That is not a boundary, that is a bill, and it always arrives with interest that nobody agreed to. If your sentence has a paragraph attached, the paragraph is the part you want to say and the sentence is the excuse.

One sentence. About one thing. About the future rather than the past.

When you bring the trailer back, would you check the lights. That is the entire content, and it does not require Trace to be sorry, and it does not require him to acknowledge eleven years, and it does not settle a score, because there is no score, because he never knew.

And here is the other half, and it is where the resentment actually goes.

You will need to give up the eleven years.

That is the real cost of speaking plainly late. You do not get an apology for the time you spent silent, because nobody knew you were spending it. You say the plain sentence, and he says "Oh, no problem," entirely cheerfully, and something in you will want to shout, and you will have to let it go, because he is telling the truth. It genuinely is no problem. It never was a problem for him.

Scripture says let your yes be yes, and it says as far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes eleven years of accumulated grievance off a person so that they can say one short thing without a decade in their voice.

You are not the only thing holding this family together, so it does not fall apart when you finally say one plain sentence in it.

There was a man five hundred years ago who was asked repeatedly, in a room full of powerful people, to say something ambiguous enough to satisfy everybody, and who asked for a night to think, and came back and said a short plain thing rather than a long clever one. What people remember is the courage. What is worth learning is the brevity.