Thirty Years Of Being Civil

Nobody in that family has any idea there is anything wrong.

That is not an accident. It is thirty years of steady, deliberate, unremarked work by one person, and the work has been so good that the situation it manages has become invisible even to the people inside it.

You have never once been sharp. You have never made a face. You have asked about the health of somebody you have every reason to have written off, and you have listened to the answer, and you have asked a follow up question, and you have done that a hundred and twenty times over three decades.

And in the last two or three years you have started to be tired in a way you cannot explain.

It is not physical, or not only. It is a tiredness that arrives specifically in the weeks before that day, and it feels older than you are.

Let me say the thing that I think has never been said in your hearing.

Civility is work. Real work, of a demanding kind, done continuously, with no acknowledgement, by one person, for thirty years. It is not the absence of a problem. It is the presence of a labor so consistent that everybody has mistaken it for the weather.

A soft answer turneth away wrath

There is a proverb about a soft answer that gets used to instruct women like you, and I want to read it properly.

A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger. (Proverbs 15:1, King James Version)

It is a statement about effect. A soft answer turns wrath away. It is describing what happens in a room, mechanically, when somebody chooses their words carefully.

And notice what it does not say. It says nothing whatsoever about how the person giving the soft answer feels. It makes no claim that they are calm. It does not require them to have forgiven anybody, or to be free of anger themselves, or to have arrived at any settled state at all.

It is about the answer. Not about the interior of the one answering.

You are able to give a soft answer while feeling nothing soft at all, and it is written into Proverbs 15:1 as a statement about effect rather than about a person's heart. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps a woman from reading a verse as a demand it never made, and Scripture describes what turns wrath away without one word about how the answerer feels.

That is the release. Thirty years of soft answers have been genuinely soft answers, and it was never a lie that you did not feel soft.

You have been doing exactly what that proverb describes for three decades, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells the difference between an honest civility and a pretense. The written word never once required the interior to match, and Proverbs 15:1 measures the effect on the room rather than the state of the woman.

What has never been counted

Now the part that has cost you, which is not the civility.

Nobody has ever counted it. Not once. Not one person in three decades has said: that must take something out of you.

And because nobody has counted it, it has never been counted at all. It gets carried as though it were free, and then been baffled by a tiredness that seems to have no cause, and then privately wondered whether something is going wrong with you.

Nothing is going wrong with you. You have been doing unpaid skilled labor for thirty years and the invoice has finally arrived.

You were never tired for no reason, and Scripture puts real weight on the words a person chooses rather than treating them as nothing. Proverbs 15:1 treats the soft answer as an act with an effect, and the Spirit of God is the one who counts a work that no human being in that family has ever noticed.

And here is the second thing, which is quieter and which I suspect is the real ache. You have wondered, more than once, whether the civility has been a kind of cowardice. Whether a braver woman would have said something in about year four and had it out.

I do not think that is true, and I want to say why in plain terms. Having it out would have cost other people a great deal and would very likely not have changed the person at all. What you chose instead cost you and protected everybody else, and that is not cowardice by any definition worth using.

You were never being a coward for three decades, and the written word describes turning wrath away as an achievement rather than as an evasion. Proverbs 15:1 credits the soft answer with the outcome, and the Holy Spirit is the one who names a long choice correctly for a woman who has been quietly doubting it.

Name what it cost

So here is the assignment, and it is not about the person and it is not about the day.

Name out loud what thirty years of being civil has cost you, and name it to God.

Not to anybody in the family. Not to the person. To God, out loud, in a room by yourself, in whatever words come.

Something like: I have been civil to that woman for thirty years and nobody has ever once noticed that it costs me anything, and I am tired.

You are able to name a cost that nobody in that house has ever seen, and it has never once required them to see it. Proverbs 15:1 assigns the outcome to the soft answer without measuring the giver, and the Spirit of God is the one who receives an account that has never been read by anybody.

And I want to say why this is the whole of it, because it looks small.

A cost that has never been named is carried as a mystery, and a mystery is heavier than a fact. Thirty years of tiredness with no cause attached becomes a suspicion about your own health, or your own character, or your own age. Named once, out loud, in the right direction, it goes back to being what it is: the reasonable tiredness of a person who has done a hard job for a long time.

You are turning a mystery back into a fact, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman naming three decades in one sentence. The written word puts real weight on the soft answer rather than pretending it is free, and Proverbs 15:1 treats the choosing of words as an act with a real effect.