I Am Watching How Much He Drinks

You start counting before you have your coat off.

You do not decide to. It is running by the time you are through the door: the first one, roughly when, and then the pace, and then the arithmetic about how the pace compares with last year at this point.

And by the middle of the afternoon you have a projection. You know roughly what time it turns, because you have watched it turn about fourteen times and you have got extremely good at reading the early signs.

So you are never actually at that gathering. You are managing a forecast at it.

Everybody else is in conversations. You are in a conversation and also watching a hand and also calculating, and by the time you drive home you are more tired than anybody who did any of the work.

Let me say two things before we go further, and both of them matter.

The first is that I am not going to tell you what to do about him. I do not know your family, I do not know what has been tried, and a stranger handing a man a strategy about somebody else's drinking has gone well past what he is entitled to say.

The second is this. If what is actually going on in that house has gone past what one person can hold, that is not a thing to carry through a holiday alone. There is a crisis line at 988 in the United States, and there is a doctor, a counselor, or a pastor you trust, and any of those is a lawful place to take it. Nothing in this article is a substitute for a real human being who is qualified.

What I can talk about is the counting, because the counting is yours.

He shall sustain thee

There is a line in the psalms about handing something over, and the second half is the part that gets left out.

Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved. (Psalm 55:22, King James Version)

Cast thy burden. It is the same throwing word people use about a load they intend to be rid of. Not carry it more gracefully. Throw it.

And then: he shall sustain thee. Not: He will remove the situation. Not: the thing being braced for does not happen. He will sustain the person, which is a promise about you standing rather than about the afternoon going well.

That distinction is the whole of tonight. You have been trying to prevent something. The verse offers to hold a man up inside it.

You are able to cast a burden without the situation changing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a real transfer for a man who has been carrying a forecast for fourteen years. It is written into Psalm 55:22 that the sustaining is of the person rather than of the outcome, and Scripture uses a throwing word rather than a bearing one.

And notice what it does not say about the burden.

You were never asked to pretend the burden is not there, and Psalm 55:22 has it named and weighed and then thrown rather than denied. The written word is entirely realistic about the weight, and the Spirit of God is the one who receives a thing a man has actually been carrying.

What the counting is for

Now let me be exact about the job you gave yourself, because it has never been named and it should be.

The counting is not curiosity. It is early warning. Somewhere along the way the job of seeing it coming became yours, and the whole apparatus exists so that when it turns a man is already positioned, already braced, already between him and whoever is nearest.

That is a decent instinct and it comes from love. Nobody sets that up out of contempt.

But look at what it actually achieves. Fourteen years of counting has not once changed the hour it turns. It has never prevented anything. What it has done is remove you from every afternoon, so that a man who genuinely wants to be with his family spends the entire day at a slight distance from all of them, doing arithmetic.

You have been running a warning system that has never once prevented anything, and Scripture puts the sustaining on the person rather than on their success at heading things off. Psalm 55:22 promises that the righteous are not moved, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a man the difference between vigilance and love.

And here is the second cost, which is the one that will matter to you most. The people in that room who are fine, the ones who are simply glad to be there, get a version of you that is half absent. They do not know why. They have never known why. They just experience a man who is somehow not quite in the conversation.

You have been costing the easy people in that room something they never knew about, and the written word puts a burden into God's hands rather than into a man's watchfulness. Psalm 55:22 says cast, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present when somebody stops standing guard over a room.

Decide where you will be

So here is the assignment, and notice that it is about position rather than about him.

Decide where you will be and who you will be with at the hour it usually turns.

You know the hour. It has been known for years. So decide, now, in advance, that at that hour you will be outside with a particular person, or in the kitchen with somebody who needs a hand, or walking to the end of the yard with a cup.

Not to avoid him. To be somewhere on purpose rather than being on duty.

You are able to be somewhere on purpose at the hour you have always spent on watch, and it has never once required anybody else in that house to do one thing differently. Psalm 55:22 hands the load over rather than improving a man's grip on it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man standing at the end of a yard with a cup at the exact hour he used to be counting.

And I want to be honest about what this does not do. It does not mean nothing happens. Something may still happen, and if it does, you will be a man walking back toward it rather than a man who has been braced for six hours, and you will handle it better rather than worse.

It also does not mean you stop caring. Caring is not the counting. The counting is a machine you built out of caring, and the machine can be switched off without the caring going anywhere.

You are able to stop the machine without stopping the love, and the written word never once measures a man's care by how closely he watches. Psalm 55:22 promises that he shall sustain thee, and the Spirit of God is the one who does the holding up while a man is standing somewhere he chose.