Four Words From The Aunt You Fell Out With

The argument happened at a kitchen table in the autumn of 2016, and it was about a real thing.

I am not going to tell you what it was about. It is not mine to name and it is not this page's business, and anyway you know exactly which conversation it was in your own family, which is the only one that matters here. What I will say is that it was a real disagreement between two people who had both thought about it, and that neither of them was being stupid, and that when the raised voices came it was because both of them cared about being right in front of God, which is not a low motive even when it goes badly.

It went badly. She said the sentence about his mother. He said the thing about her twenty years in that place. The tea went cold in front of both of them and somebody's cousin took the children into the garden.

That was Aunt Merle, and that was nine years ago, and after that there were Christmases where they were in the same room and did not speak, and eventually Christmases where one of them did not come.

Then in February he got ill.

Not dramatically. That is the strange part. He got the kind of ill that has no story in it: a chest thing that turned into another chest thing, eleven days in the back bedroom with the curtains half shut and a glass of water going warm on the bedside table, and the ceiling growing a crack he had never noticed before, and the particular loneliness of being unwell in a house where everybody has to go to work.

His mother must have said something on the phone. He never asked.

On the ninth day the front door went, and there were voices in the hall, and then Aunt Merle was standing in the doorway of the back bedroom with her coat still buttoned to the throat because she was not stopping.

She put a flask on the windowsill. She put a blue plastic bag of oranges on the chair, which is the most Merle thing that has ever happened, because she has never once in her life arrived anywhere without fruit.

She did not sit down. She did not say sorry, and he did not say sorry, and neither of them mentioned the kitchen table, and afterward he thought that was probably the only reason it worked at all.

She came to the end of the bed. She put her hand flat on the covers over his shin, the way you would steady a boat.

And she said four words.

"Lord Jesus, cover him."

That was all. Then she said something about the flask being sweetened already and he should drink it while it was hot, and she was gone down the stairs, and the front door went, and he lay there in the half dark and could not work out why his face was wet.

The name she reached for

Let us take our time with this one, because there is something in it that could go wrong if we hurry.

The disagreement was real. Nine years on it is still real, and if the two of you sat down at that table tonight you would still not agree, and I will not stand here and tell you that what you fell out about was small or silly or beneath grown people. It was not. You do not honor anybody by pretending their convictions are decoration. She meant hers. You meant yours. Both of you still stand on what you believe to be true, and that is not the failure in this story.

Here is what is in the story, and it went past almost too fast to catch.

When Merle got to the end of that bed, with nine years of silence in the room and a coat she had not unbuttoned, she reached for something. And what her hand closed on was not her tradition, or her side of the argument, or a single one of the sentences she had been ready to say in 2016.

She reached for the Name.

The same Name you reach for. Not a related name. Not a version of it. The one Name, the one Person, the one Lord, and she called on Him over your shin in a back bedroom in February as naturally as breathing, because that is what she has been doing since before you were born.

You are not on your own out here. That is not a comfort I am inventing to make you feel better. Romans 10:12 says there is no difference, that the same Lord over all is rich to all that call upon Him, and that sentence was written by the Holy Spirit through a man addressing people who could not agree about almost anything, and the same Spirit carried it into a room with a flask on the windowsill. The ground under you is wider than it has felt.

For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.Romans 10:12-13

Read the last line of that again. Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord. Not whoever calls correctly. Not whoever calls from the right building. Whosoever calls.

Now, I want to be careful, because there is a cheap version of this message and it does damage.

The cheap version says the differences do not matter. It says everybody is basically saying the same thing so let us all stop arguing and hold hands. That is not what happened in that back bedroom, and it is not what this page is for. If the differences did not matter, then Merle wasted nine years on nothing, and so did you, and both of you are fools. I do not believe that about either of you. I believe you were both trying to be faithful, and that is a costly thing to do, and it goes wrong between good people all the time. Scripture never once asked anybody to hold a conviction loosely, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by two people who both cared about being right in front of God.

What happened is not that the differences vanished. What happened is that something older than the differences turned out to still be there underneath them, and it held weight, and it held weight at exactly the moment weight had to be held.

You have that older thing. It was never removed from you and it was never removed from her, and Scripture calls it one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, and His Spirit keeps that floor under both of you whether the two of you are speaking or not.

And that means the loneliness you have been living in is partly a misreading. You built a map of who is yours and who is not, and you drew it out of arguments, and arguments are a terrible material for a map. There are people on the far side of your map who are calling on the same Name tonight, out loud, in kitchens and cars and back bedrooms. You are surrounded, and you have been counting wrong. The word says the Lord knows the ones who are His, and the Holy Spirit does not consult your map before He fills somebody.