I Have Not Told Anyone Yet

It went on Monday and it is Thursday.

Four days. And in those four days you have spoken to your sister twice, to the woman at work every morning, to your mother on Tuesday for half an hour, and to the neighbor over the fence about the recycling.

And nobody knows.

It is not a secret exactly. Nobody has asked. There has been no moment where a lie was required, and if there had been you would not have told one. It is simply that the sentence has not come out, and every conversation where it did not come out has made the next conversation slightly harder.

And there is a reason, and the reason is worth naming precisely because vagueness is what keeps it in place.

If you say it out loud, two things happen that have not happened yet.

The first is that it becomes real in a way it currently is not. Right now it is a thing in your house. Once it is said, it is a thing in the world, with a shape, that other people can see and hold and ask about.

And the second is the question. Not asked unkindly. Asked the way anybody would ask it, gently, with real concern in the voice: and how are you going to manage that?

And you do not have an answer to that question. So the whole thing stays in the house.

You are a woman carrying something quietly and not a woman with something to hide, and a thing kept private has never once been a thing you were required to carry alone.

Two are better than one

There is a passage in Ecclesiastes about two people, and it is far less sentimental than it sounds when it turns up on a wedding card.

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to lift him up. (Ecclesiastes 4:9, King James Version)

Notice the reason he gives. He does not say two are better than one because company is pleasant. He says it because of falling.

That is a practical argument about load and risk. The writer is looking at what happens to a person who goes down with nobody near enough to notice, and he concludes from that that going about alone is a poor arrangement.

You have a second person available and the text calls that an advantage rather than an indulgence, and somebody knowing what happened in your house has never once been a luxury you had to earn. Ecclesiastes 4:9 argues from the falling and not from the fondness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a kitchen with a woman who has not said it yet.

Now hold that against Thursday.

Four days of conversations in which the thing was carefully not mentioned is four days of arranging to be alone when it counts. Not deliberately. Nobody plans that. But that is the arrangement that has quietly come into being, one unmentioned conversation at a time.

You were never meant to be the only person who knows what is happening in your own house, and four days of not saying it has never once made the saying of it less possible. The written word calls being alone at the wrong moment a woe rather than a strength, and the Spirit of God is the one who loosens a sentence that has been stuck in a throat since Monday.

And there is one more thing in that passage that matters here.

He says they have a good reward for their labor. Two people working have a return the one person does not get. He is not describing rescue. He is describing ordinary shared work, where the second pair of hands is simply a second pair of hands.

You are allowed to want a second pair of hands and not a rescue, and asking somebody to know a thing has never once been the same as asking them to fix it. Ecclesiastes 4:9 talks about labor and reward before it ever gets to the falling, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary sentence to a sister possible on a Thursday.

The question about money is not the question

Here is the practical half, and it is really about an assumption that has never once been examined.

The assumption is that telling somebody creates an obligation. That the moment the sentence is out, a debt of some kind exists, and the other person is now standing in front of a problem they are expected to solve, and the discomfort of that is yours to have prevented.

That assumption is doing enormous work and nobody has ever examined it.

Because there is a way to say this that does not ask anything of anybody, and it takes one sentence, and the sentence is the whole method.

You have a way to say this that asks for nothing at all, and one sentence spoken plainly has never once been a request in disguise. The written word treats two people as a better arrangement than one without making either of them responsible for the other's situation, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present while it gets said.

The sentence is: the boiler went on Monday and we have not sorted it yet.

That is all. No figures. No plan. No what we are going to do. If the question comes, and it probably will because people ask it out of kindness, the answer is: I do not know yet.

I do not know yet is a complete answer. It is honest, it closes nothing, and it does not hand anybody a job.

You are permitted to say I do not know yet and stop talking, and an unfinished answer has never once been a failure to answer. Ecclesiastes 4:9 says two are better than one without requiring either of them to have a solution in hand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a pause open long enough for it to be enough.

And here is what actually happens, most of the time, when it gets said.

The other person says something ordinary. They say oh no, or they say what a week, or they say that happened to us the year before last. And the enormous thing that has been standing in your kitchen since Monday becomes a normal size, because it has been out in the air where normal sized things live.