He Said It As a Joke

Delroy said it at the table on Sunday and everybody laughed, including Enid, and she has not slept properly since.

He is thirty-four. He was telling a story about something at work, and to make a point about being talked over in a meeting he said, in the voice he does, "Well, you know me. Ask my mother. I have been wrong since I was fifteen."

Big laugh. His sister nearly went over backward in her chair. His own daughter, who is nine and does not know what any of it means, laughed because everybody else did.

And Enid laughed too, and put more cake on somebody's plate, and heard it.

Because here is what she heard. She heard a thirty-four year old man deliver a line he has clearly delivered before, smoothly, with the timing already worked out, which means he has been carrying it long enough to have made it funny.

She knows exactly what it is about. There is no mystery. When he was fifteen there was a thing at school with a teacher, and Delroy told her the truth about it, and she did not believe him, and she said so in front of the teacher, and she made him apologize.

He was telling the truth. She found out about four months later, from somebody else entirely, and she never said anything about it, because by then it seemed like a long time ago and bringing it up would only stir it.

That was nineteen years ago.

She has thought about it perhaps a hundred times and said nothing about it a hundred times. And in those nineteen years he has turned it into about four seconds of material that gets a laugh at family dinners, and every laugh is a small deposit into a thing that has never been settled.

She was up at half past four on the Monday. And she thought a sentence that she found so uncomfortable she got out of bed and made tea rather than finish it.

The sentence was: the reason he can make a joke of it is that nobody has ever taken it seriously, including me.

Now let me ask you.

What does yours joke about?

There is a line, is there not. Something they say lightly, at gatherings, that lands somewhere in your chest before the laugh has finished.

Concealing has never made anybody safer

Proverbs puts the whole thing in one sentence with a hinge in the middle.

He who conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will find compassion.Proverbs 28:13

Conceals. Notice it does not say denies. Denying is loud. Concealing is quiet, and it is mostly done by good people, and it usually looks like leaving something alone for a very long time out of a genuine wish not to make things worse.

Will not prosper. The word carries the sense of not advancing, not going forward, being stuck. That is what nineteen years of a joke at a table actually is: a relationship that cannot get past a specific afternoon because nobody has ever named it.

And then: confesses and forsakes them will find compassion. Find, which means it is already there waiting to be found. Not manufactured by a good confession. Found.

So hear this said over you at half past four in the morning with the tea going cold. You are able to say four words to your own child, and the compassion you are afraid of not receiving is already sitting there waiting to be found. That is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who convicts a person about one specific afternoon nineteen years later, gently and without shaming, which is exactly what has been keeping you awake.

Now let me deal with the two reasons you have not said it, because they are both real.

The first is that it was a long time ago and you think raising it would stir something that has settled.

It has not settled. A settled thing does not have four seconds of polished material attached to it. Things that are settled get forgotten; things that are unsettled get turned into jokes, because a joke is what a person does with something they cannot put down and cannot pick up.

The second reason is worse and it is the honest one.

You are afraid that if you say it, he will tell you the rest.

Because there might be a rest. There might be six other afternoons you do not know about, and once you open the subject you do not control where it goes, and at seventy-one you would rather not find out that you were not the mother you have been telling yourself you were.

That fear is understandable and it is the exact thing Proverbs is describing. Concealment feels like protecting a relationship and it is actually protecting a version of yourself.

And here is the release in it. You do not have to be the mother you told yourself you were. Nobody in Scripture is. The written word says compassion is found by the one who confesses, and the Spirit of God is the one who gives a person the nerve for a conversation they cannot control the ending of.

You are not the only thing holding this family together. God is, and He has been holding it since long before that afternoon at that school, and He will still be holding it in the ten seconds after you say the four words.

Let me be clear about the size of this.

Four words, and the thing named. Delroy, I got that wrong. About the teacher, when you were fifteen. You were telling the truth and I did not believe you and I made you apologize, and I found out four months later and I never said anything.

No explanation of why you did not believe him. No account of how hard that year was for you, which it was. No request that he say it is fine.

There was a man five hundred years ago who wrote that the whole Christian life is one of repentance, and he did not mean a lifetime of misery. He meant that a person who can say plainly I got that wrong is a person who can keep moving, and that the ones who cannot say it are the ones who get stuck in a single year forever.