Two of You Carrying the Same Thing

There are eleven cars in the line and the man in the high visibility jacket keeps waving people forward two at a time, which means the two of them have been sitting in the same car, engine off, for nine minutes without speaking.

Then it is their turn. She opens the boot. He is already at the far end of the wardrobe before she has straightened up, and without a single word passing between them they take a corner each, count nothing out loud, lift on the same beat, turn the whole thing sideways to clear the wing mirror, and walk it to the dumpster in step. He takes the weight when the door swings loose. She catches the shelf before it slides. Twenty years of moving furniture together and their hands still know each other perfectly.

They set it down. They walk back. They get in the car. And by the time the barrier lifts, the silence has closed over the top of it again like water.

Two years, this has been going on. Two years of the same argument in about nine different costumes, and she cannot tell you now what the original one was about, only that she can feel the next one coming three sentences before it arrives, and that she has started drafting her reply while he is still speaking.

You know that car. And here is the thing that is actually breaking your heart, and you may never have put it into words: you are not fighting a stranger. You are fighting somebody whose hands know yours. And somewhere in the last two years you moved them, quietly and without deciding to, into the position of the enemy.

Say the safe thing first

Before one more line, this, because it comes before everything else and it is never buried on this site.

If what is happening in your house is not an argument but harm, if there is fear in it, if somebody is being hurt or controlled or made small, then nothing in this article is asking you to stay, to endure, or to be understanding about it. Please tell somebody today who can actually do something: the police on the emergency number where you live, your doctor, or a domestic abuse line, 0808 2000 247 in the United Kingdom and 1-800-799-7233 in the United States. And if it has got as far as not wanting to be here at all, ring a crisis line today, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom. Safety is not the opposite of faith. It is very often the first thing God does.

If that is not your house, and what sits in the car is two people who love each other and have got locked, read on, because there is something being held in the wrong hands.

You are safe to keep reading, and nothing on this page has ever asked anybody to stay somewhere that is not safe. Genesis 13:8 has a man refusing strife with his own kin before anything else is settled, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a person out of the position of the enemy without requiring a conversation first.

Nobody in your house is the enemy

Here is the sentence this whole site is built on, and I am going to say it plainly rather than gently. You are not in a war with a person, and the one you live with was never on the other side of it. Scripture is unambiguous: our struggle is not against flesh and blood, and the Holy Spirit has never once handed a believer another human being as their opponent. Whatever is against your household is not either of you.

That is not a nice way of saying you should be more patient. It is a statement about the actual geography of the thing. There is a pressure on your house. It has been there two years. And in the absence of anything visible to face, a tired human being will always, always resolve the pressure onto the nearest available face, because a face can be argued with and a pressure cannot.

Look at Abram for a second, because he does the exact opposite and it costs him.

The herdsmen of Abram and the herdsmen of Lot are quarrelling, and it is a real dispute over real grazing land, and Abram does not adjudicate it. He does not gather evidence. He does not establish who started it.

Let there be no strife between me and you, for we are men who are brothers.Genesis 13:8

Notice what he refuses to do there. He refuses to let the shape of the conflict be me against him. The strife is real, the shortage of land is real, and he simply will not accept the arrangement where the person is the problem. And then he pays for it, by handing Lot the choice of the whole country, which is the most expensive sentence in the chapter.

You have been given the freedom to refuse the arrangement, and it is a real freedom rather than a nice feeling. That is what Scripture models in Abram and it is what the Holy Spirit works in a household, and refusing it does not require the other person to agree, to notice, or to change one thing about how Saturday goes.

The thing your hands already know

Go back to the wardrobe for a second, because your hands have been telling you something your mouth has not caught up with.

Two people who are enemies cannot lift a wardrobe on the same beat. They cannot take a corner each and turn it sideways to clear a wing mirror without counting. That coordination is twenty years old, it is still fully intact, and it survived the whole two years without either of you maintaining it. Whatever is broken between you, that is not broken. It has been sitting there, working perfectly, every time either of you needed both hands.

You are still on the same side as the person in that car, and that is a fact about your house before it is a feeling about your week. The word calls two people in one household kin rather than combatants, and the Spirit of God is at work in the middle of that house, on both sides of a silence, at the same time.

So there is something to say out loud, and it is smaller than you think and it is not a conversation.

Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Said. And the thing in the way is not the person whose hands know yours. It is a position. It is an arrangement, two years old, in which somebody you love has been standing in a place they were never put by God, and you are the only one of the two of you reading this, which means you are the one who can take them out of it.

You have real authority to refuse an arrangement over your own household, and it belongs to you because you are in Christ rather than because you feel forgiving today. The written word gives the standing and the Holy Spirit carries what is said. It commands nothing about him. It changes where you are standing, and that is entirely enough to be getting on with.