Brilliant For Strangers And Frozen For My Mother

You are good at this. Genuinely, unusually good.

The woman at work who you have spoken to perhaps thirty times in two years. You got her something last spring that stopped her in the corridor.

Your husband's colleague. Your neighbor. The friend of a friend you met twice. You see people. You catch the thing they said in passing. You put something in their hands that is exactly right and slightly surprising and you do it without breaking a sweat.

And then there is your mother.

And in front of your mother the whole thing goes out like a light. You stand there with nothing. Fifty years of knowing that woman, and a stranger from the office is easier.

It does not make sense, and it has been quietly bothering you for a long time, because the obvious explanation is an ugly one. That you know strangers better than your own mother. That there is something wrong with you and it points in exactly the direction you least want to look.

That explanation is wrong. I want to tell you what is actually happening.

A word fitly spoken

Here is the verse, and everything turns on one small word in it.

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver. (Proverbs 25:11, King James Version)

Fitly. Not greatly. Not impressively. Fitly, which means fitted, the way a thing is fitted to the space it goes into.

The picture in the second half is a small ornament. Fruit worked in gold, set into silver. It is not a monument and it is not a proclamation. It is a small object, made carefully, sized to the setting it sits in.

You have been reaching for a monument and the verse asks for an ornament, and Proverbs 25:11 measures the thing by how well it fits rather than by how much it weighs. The Holy Spirit is the one who chose that picture rather than a bigger one, and He chose small on purpose.

Now put your mother next to that.

With the woman from the office, the fit is easy to find, because the space is small. One remark she made about her garden. That is the whole space, and something can be fitted into it exactly.

With your mother, what size is the space? Fifty years. Every argument, every silence, everything she did that you have never mentioned, everything you did that she has never mentioned. That is the space you have been trying to fit something into.

You are not blank in front of her at all, and it is written that a word fitly spoken is fitted to its setting rather than made large enough to fill everything. The Spirit of God is the one who shows a woman what she has actually been attempting, and what you have been attempting is impossible for anybody.

There is nothing that fits fifty years. Nothing has ever been made that fits fifty years. The blankness is not ignorance and it never was. It is a correct reading of an impossible brief.

You have been right the whole time, and His word is careful to speak about one word rather than about a summary of everything between two people. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes an impossible brief off a woman's shoulders, and He is taking it off yours.

The weight is what freezes you

Let me say it the other way round, because it explains why the strangers are easy.

With a stranger, nothing is riding on it. If it lands, lovely. If it does not, nobody's history changes. So the seeing is clear, because nothing is being carried while you look.

With your mother, everything is riding on it. Every unspoken thing in the family is standing behind that one moment, and some part of you has decided that whatever you hand over is going to be read as a statement about the whole of it.

That is a lot to ask an object to say. No object has ever managed it.

You were never freezing because you do not know her, and Proverbs 25:11 puts the goodness of a thing in its fittedness rather than in how much it is asked to carry. The Spirit of God is the one who unhooks a moment from everything standing behind it.

And here is the quiet part underneath.

You want it to be right for her more than you want it to be right for anybody else on earth. That is the actual reason for the freeze. The freeze is love with too much weight on it, which is a completely different thing from not knowing somebody.

You are frozen by how much this matters, and it is written that apples of gold are set in pictures of silver rather than poured out by the bucket. The Holy Spirit is the one who reads a freeze correctly, and He has never once read yours as coldness.

Make it small on purpose

So here is the way through, and it will feel wrong for about a week.

Make it small. Deliberately. Not small because there is nothing else available, but small because small is what fits.

Do for your mother exactly what you do for the woman at the office. Take one remark. One thing she said in passing in the last year. One small space, and fit something into that space and nothing else.

You are allowed to aim at one afternoon rather than at five decades, and the passage sets a single fitly spoken word in silver rather than a whole speech. The Spirit of God is the one who makes one fitted thing land harder than a large one, and He has been doing that since the verse was written.

And do not explain it. This is the part that matters most and it is the hardest.

Hand it over without the sentence that starts, it is only. Without the apology, without the account of what you nearly did instead, without the reason it is small this year.

Because the moment that sentence appears, the thing stops being a fitted word and becomes a report on your own inadequacy, and she hears the report and not the word.

You have already made it fit before you hand it to her, and it is written that a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold rather than like an explanation. The Holy Spirit is the one who carries a small thing across a room, and He does not need it to be introduced.

And one more thing, because it is what you are actually afraid of.

She may not react the way the woman in the corridor did. Mothers frequently do not. That reaction is not the measure of whether the thing fitted, and it never was.

You are not waiting on her face to find out whether you got it right, and the written word settles the goodness of a fitted word without saying one thing about how it lands. The Spirit of God is the one who knows what a small thing did in a room, and He knows it whether or not anybody says so.