I Called It Peacemaking

It is the same joke and it has a name now, which is how you know it has gone too far.

His brother-in-law borrowed the trailer in 2016 and brought it back with a bent axle and did not mention it, and there have been eleven other things since, and none of them individually is worth a fight.

The joke is about the trailer. It comes out at every gathering. It is funny the way a thing is funny when everybody has agreed in advance to find it funny, and it always ends with a look round the table, and everybody laughs, and he laughs.

Nine years.

What has changed, and this is why he is reading something like this at all, is that his own son did it in March. Fourteen years old, at a table, in front of everybody, and it was a good imitation, and the boy did not mean anything at all by it. He learned it the way children learn everything, which is by watching what is allowed.

His wife caught his eye across the table and neither of them said anything about it afterward.

He has called his silence peacemaking for nine years. He would tell you that somebody has to keep the peace at a family table and he is not wrong about that.

If you have kept a peace like that, this article is for you, and I am going to be plain.

What discretion actually looked like

Let me say the plain thing first, because you may have been waiting nine years.

Absorbing is not automatically peacemaking. Sometimes silence is a genuine act of peace and there is a real gift in letting things go, and this page is not going to take that off you.

But peace has a definition and it is not the absence of noise. A table where a man is diminished twice a year and everybody has agreed to find it funny is not at peace, it is arranged.

Now read about a woman who is praised in Scripture for discretion, and look carefully at what her discretion consisted of.

Abigail's household was about to be destroyed because of an insult her husband had given. She had a violent situation running at her at speed and about four hours to work in.

She did not absorb it. She did not wait quietly. She loaded provisions, went out to meet an armed man, and spoke plainly to him about what he was about to do.

And David said to Abigail, Blessed be the LORD God of Israel, which sent thee this day to meet me: And blessed be thy advice, and blessed be thou, which hast kept me this day from coming to shed blood.1 Samuel 25:32

Blessed be your advice. That is a man thanking somebody for stopping him.

You are allowed to act rather than absorb, and acting is what the blessing in that passage was actually for. That is not my opinion about your family. It is written in 1 Samuel 25:32, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a man's ears into the place where he actually lives.

So nine years of laughing along has not been peacemaking. You have a dignity God gave and no joke at a table can spend, and it is intact this evening. The word settled that long before the trailer, and the same Spirit who inspired it is at that table while you read this.

The thing your son learned in March

Here is the part that brought you here, and it is worth saying carefully because you are not being accused of anything.

A boy of fourteen does not decide to mock his father. He watches a room for years and learns what the room permits, and then he does the thing the room permits, and he is startled if anybody objects because nobody ever has.

He was not being cruel. He was being accurate about the rules of that table.

And here is what is hard and true: the rules of that table were set by the person who has been laughing for nine years, which is you, and not by the man who tells the joke.

I say that without any blame in it. You did it for the best reason there is. You were holding a family together and you paid for it out of yourself, and that is not a small or a shameful thing.

But it has stopped being only about you, and some part of you knew that in March, which is why you and your wife did not talk about it afterward.

You have permission to say one plain sentence at that table, and it is not the same act as starting a fight. 1 Samuel 25 blesses a woman for speaking rather than for absorbing; His Spirit is the one who makes a man able to say a true thing in a room without raising his voice.

Now, plainly, and this is the part that matters most. Nothing here is telling you to cut anybody off, and nothing here is telling you to make a scene at Christmas, and nothing here is adjudicating your brother-in-law, whom I have never met and who may well be a decent man with a blind spot. This page does not know your family and will not pretend to.

What can be said is that you are allowed to name it, once, quietly, to somebody. Your wife. Your sister. The man himself, privately, in a shed, in about four sentences. And if any part of what happens in that family involves somebody being harmed, nothing here is asking anyone to absorb that: tell one person who can act, and in the United States 988 answers by call or text at any hour.