Eleven Years of Talking at Him

She knows the exact expression he makes. It is not annoyance and it is not contempt. It is a very small settling of the face that means: here we go.

He made it last Tuesday, in the car, before she had said anything, because she had turned the radio down.

Eleven years ago there was a season when she came alive to something and he did not, and she told God, in the church parking lot after the service that started it, that she would bring him with her. She meant it as love. It was love. It is still, underneath everything, love.

And what it has become is a campaign, and she knows the word and has known it for about two years.

Books left where he will see them. A podcast on when he comes into the room. A question asked at the right moment, which is to say a moment when he cannot easily leave. The occasional big conversation, always started by her, always at eleven at night, always ending the same way. Friends invited who she knows will bring it up so that she does not have to.

Eleven years. And what she cannot work out any more, and this is the thing that woke her at four this morning, is where the marriage ends and the campaign begins. She does not know, when she suggests a walk, which one is doing it.

You may be running one. And you may have started it out of love, and it may still be love, and everybody in your house may be able to feel it in the room before you open your mouth.

Without a word

Now let me put a passage in front of you, and I want to be careful with it, because it has been used badly and I am not going to use it that way.

Peter is writing to women in exactly your situation, in a world with far less room in it than yours, and here is the mechanism he describes.

Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives; while they behold your chaste conversation coupled with fear.1 Peter 3:1-2

You have something in that house that works while you are saying nothing at all. 1 Peter 3:1 locates the winning outside the words entirely, in the whole manner of a life, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been doing it underneath eleven years of your explaining.

Without the word

Set aside, for one minute, everything that phrase about subjection has been made to carry, because it is not what this article is about and it is not what is keeping you awake at four in the morning.

Look at the mechanism. Without the word.

He is describing a case where somebody does not obey the word, and he says the winning happens without the word being deployed at them. And then he names what does the work: the conversation, which in that English means the whole manner of a life, the way somebody is over years, what it is like to live in a house with them.

That is not a technique and it is not silence as a tactic. It is a statement about where the actual power is in a shared house, and it is not in the argument.

You are described as having something that works without a word, and it has been working for eleven years underneath the campaign. 1 Peter 3:1 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a letter to scattered churches and puts it on a sofa at either end of which two people are sitting.

Now the hard thing, because this is the landing category and its rule does not bend: nothing here is exercised over anybody's will, and that includes a husband's.

He is not a project. He is a man who has been living for eleven years with somebody he loves who has been, in small ways, every week, trying to get at something inside him. And the small settling of his face is not contempt for God. It is a man bracing for a thing he has been braced for since about the third year.

You are released from the job of bringing him, and it was never handed to you. Scripture describes the winning happening without a word and does not assign the wife the result, and the Spirit of God has been in that house every one of the eleven years without a single book left out.

What the campaign is actually made of

And here is the thing I want you to hear, because it is not a rebuke and I do not want it heard as one.

The campaign is not manipulation with a nice face on it. It is grief with a job to do.

Something happened to you eleven years ago that was the best thing that ever happened to you, and the person you love most on earth did not come with you, and that is a loss you have never once named as a loss. You have been treating it as a problem to be solved because a problem can be worked at and a grief can only be carried.

You are allowed to be sad about this and not required to fix it. His word says it and does not soften it, and that is the honest reading of a passage that puts the winning outside the words entirely, and His Spirit is the one who has carried both of you while you worked.