I Ask My Wife What To Give My Own Friends

It started as a sensible arrangement.

She is better at it. That is not modesty, it is true. She notices things, she remembers things, she has a feel for it and you do not, and early on it made obvious sense for the person who was good at it to do it.

So she does the family. And then she did yours as well, because she was already doing the list. And then somewhere along the way she started doing your friends.

Your friends. Men you have known for twenty years. Men who were at your wedding.

And now every year you ask her what you should give them, and she tells you, and it is always right, and you hand it over and they thank you.

And you have started to feel like a guest at something. Like a man being briefed before going into a room full of people he is supposed to know.

I want to say what this is and what it is not, because you have been calling it laziness and it is not laziness.

In honor preferring one another

Here is the verse, and the instruction in it is aimed at a person, not at a household.

Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another. (Romans 12:10, King James Version)

Preferring one another. That is an active thing. It is a man putting somebody else first in his own mind, on purpose, in a way that shows.

And look at who it is addressed to. One another. Not one household to another household. Person to person, each doing it himself.

You have been standing outside a job that was written to you personally, and Romans 12:10 gives the preferring to the man himself rather than to whoever in the house is best at it. The Holy Spirit is the one who aimed that instruction at individual people, and He aimed one of them at you.

Now the phrase in front of it, because it explains why this has been bothering you.

Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love. Brotherly love. That is the word for what stands between two men, one of whom was beside you at your wedding, and it is not a household administrative category.

Brotherly love is between two men. It has never been able to be delegated, by anybody, at any point in history.

You are not lazy about your friends at all, and it is written that the preferring is done one to another rather than arranged on somebody's behalf. The Spirit of God is the one who put a discomfort in a man about this, and the discomfort is evidence that the friendship is alive rather than that something is wrong with him.

And that is worth stopping on, because the feeling has been getting read as a character defect.

A man who did not care about those friendships would feel nothing at all. He would ask, hand it over, and never think about it again on any evening of his life.

You have been troubled by it precisely because it matters to you, and His word puts brotherly love and preferring in the same breath. The Holy Spirit is the one who reads a man's unease correctly, and He has never once read yours as indifference.

How the noticing got handed over

Let me trace how it happened, because there is no villain in it and no failure either.

It started with efficiency, and efficiency is not a sin. Two people, one of whom is good at something. Of course the one who is good at it does it. That is how a household runs and it is how yours has run well for years.

But there is a thing efficiency does over time. It does not just take the job. It takes the practice.

You stopped noticing about those men because you no longer had to. The noticing muscle went quiet, not because you stopped caring, but because nothing was asking it to work.

You were never given a chance to keep the practice up, and Romans 12:10 asks for a preferring done in person rather than for a result that arrives. The Spirit of God is the one who tells a man the difference between a skill lost and a skill unused, and this one is unused.

Which is genuinely good news, because a skill that has gone quiet comes back fast.

It does not need years. It needs one friend, one occasion, and one thing noticed with your own eyes and nobody consulted about it.

You are one afternoon from having it back, and it is written that the honor is preferred one to another rather than passed through a third person. The Holy Spirit is the one who wakes something up in a man that he assumed was gone for good.

And I want to be clear about your wife here, because she has done nothing wrong.

This is not a story about a woman who took something. She picked up a job nobody else was doing and did it well for years. Whatever changes here, none of it is a complaint about her, and none of it should arrive at her feet as one.

You have been carried by her in this and it was never a theft, and Scripture speaks of preferring one another rather than of taking something back. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps gratitude and change in the same room, and both of them belong here.

Take one of them back

So here is what to do, and it is deliberately one and not all of them.

Pick one friend. The one known longest, or the one who came to mind while reading this, it does not matter which.

Do not ask anybody anything about him. Not your wife, not another friend, nobody. Whatever comes out of this comes out of your own head, and it can be small and it can be wrong and it will still be yours.

You are allowed to do this badly, and Romans 12:10 asks for the preferring rather than for the excellence of the result. The Holy Spirit is the one who has never once scored a man on how well the noticing went, and He is not starting with you.

Then think about the last time you were with him. What did he talk about when nobody asked him a question. What did he complain about twice. What did he go quiet about.

That is the material. It is always there and it has been going past you for years while somebody else did the catching.

You have twenty years of that man in you already, and it is written that brotherly love is between the two of them rather than administered from outside. The Spirit of God is the one who brings a conversation back up in a man months later, and He will bring this one.

And then hand it over yourself. Not from both of you. From you.

That is the part that will feel strange, and it is the part that does the work. A man receiving something from another man who noticed him personally is receiving something quite different from a parcel that arrived from a household.

You are handing him something nobody else could have handed him, and the written word puts honor and preferring in the hands of the person doing it. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that difference land in a driveway without one word being said about it.