Polite, and Ten Feet Apart

There are two mugs on the shelf above the kettle, washed, dried, put back at the same time, standing side by side and not touching.

She notices them at about eleven on the Sunday night, coming down for water, and she does not know why they undo her. It is a shelf. They are mugs. But she watched them being washed an hour ago, one each, at the same sink, in a silence with absolutely nothing wrong with it.

That is the thing about this house now. There is nothing wrong with it.

Her father asked her mother, earlier, whether she wanted a tea, and her mother said no thank you, love, that is kind. That is kind. In thirty one years she has never heard her mother say that is kind to her father. It is what you say to a colleague who has held a lift for you.

They are courteous. They are unfailingly courteous. Nobody raises a voice in this house and nobody slams anything, and when a person comes into a room the other person adjusts, smoothly, without looking up, so that there is always about ten feet of kitchen between them. It is choreography. It has clearly taken years to get this good.

She is thirty one and she is home for the weekend and she is sitting on the top stair at eleven at night with her arms round her knees like a teenager, and the landing light is off, and the door to their room is shut, and behind it there are two people she loves more than almost anybody alive, lying in the dark being polite.

She would rather they shouted. She has thought that all weekend and been ashamed of it every time. At least shouting is somebody still turning up.

And now I am going to stop saying she.

Because you know that landing. Maybe it is your parents. Maybe it is your son and his wife, and you are the one who lies awake in the spare room at Christmas. Maybe it is your brother, and you can hear the flatness in his voice on the phone and neither of you names it.

You have not said any of this out loud to a single person, because who would you say it to, and what exactly would you say. Nothing has happened. Nobody is being cruel. There is no incident to report. They are civil, they are functional, they discuss the car insurance, and something that used to be alive in that house has gone quiet without anybody announcing it.

And you have prayed about it, in the useless circling way a person prays about a thing that is not theirs, and you have got up off your knees not knowing what you were even allowed to ask for.

What politeness is actually made of

I want to stay on the stair with you for a moment, because there is a grief here that nobody gives you permission to have.

It is not your marriage. That is what you keep telling yourself, and it is true, and it is also why you have nowhere to put this. Nobody sends a card. Nobody asks how you are coping. There has been no event. You are watching something end at a speed so slow that you cannot point to any day it happened, and you are doing it from ten feet away, which is exactly as far as the kitchen.

So let me name it properly. You are grieving two people who are still alive and still in the room. That is a real weight, and it is heavy in a way that shocks people who have not carried it. Scripture never asks you to pretend otherwise. The Spirit who searches the deep things knows the exact shape of a grief that has no funeral and no card, and He is not waiting for you to name it correctly before He sits down on the stair beside you.

And here is what makes it worse: the politeness. If they fought, you would know what to pray. Politeness looks like peace and it does not feel like peace, and you cannot tell anybody the difference without sounding as though you want a war.

I will tell you what politeness usually is. It is what two people build when they have decided, separately and without discussing it, that the risk of reaching is no longer worth it. It is not the absence of feeling. It is a wall built out of good manners, which is the strongest material there is, because nobody can object to it.

A wall like that is not repaired by advice. It is not repaired by a daughter on a stair thinking harder. Every one of us has tried it, and we have all made the same discovery, which is that you cannot get inside another person's heart and rearrange the furniture. Not even for people you would give an arm for.

Which is exactly where this word lands.

And I shall give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I shall take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.Ezekiel 36:26

Look at who does every verb in that sentence.

I shall give. I shall put. I shall take. I shall give.

There is not one thing in that verse for you to do, and I want you to feel how good that news is at eleven at night on a top stair. The work you have been failing to do is not your work. It never was. You have been trying to perform heart surgery through a bedroom wall, and God has been standing there the whole time holding the only instrument that reaches. Read one line further. Ezekiel 36:27 says He puts His Spirit inside a person, so the hand, the instrument and the long recovery are all His, and not one of them was ever assigned to a daughter sitting in the dark at the top of a stair.

And notice what He is described as removing. Not anger. Stone. Cold. The precise material your parents' kitchen is made of.

Now I am going to be honest with you, because gentle dishonesty has done nobody in this house any good. I cannot tell you what will happen in that room. Nobody can. God does not overrule a human being's will, and anyone who promises you a date for someone else's turning is promising what was never theirs to promise. Two people in that bedroom are free, and He honors that, and it is part of why He is worth trusting.

What I can tell you is what He is like, and what He is willing to do with stone, and that He has been in that house since long before you noticed the mugs on the shelf.

So you do not stand there as the fixer. You stand there as the witness. You keep the ground. You pray honest, specific, unembarrassed prayers, and you keep loving both of them out loud, and you refuse to write the ending, in either direction. That is not a small assignment. In the Scriptures it is most of what the faithful ever actually do.