Taking It Is Not Meekness

There are eleven of them and they have known each other since school and he is one of the eleven.

Thirty years of a group like that. Weddings, two funerals, a group message that goes off forty times a day, a week away every September that he has never missed.

There is a way he is talked about in it. It started as a joke about the kippah when they were sixteen, and it moved on to being about the praying, and now it is about him generally, which is the direction those things go.

Nobody in that group would call it cruelty and he would not use the word either. It is affection, in the way that a certain kind of group does affection, which is by finding the one thing about a man and returning to it for thirty years.

He does not answer it. He never has. He is not slow and he could take any of them apart with a sentence and they all know it, and the not doing it has become part of the arrangement.

He worked out at about twenty five that this was meekness. That absorbing it without answering was the shape of the thing Scripture praises, and he has been at it ever since, and it has cost more than he has ever added up.

If you have built a definition out of taking it, this article is for you.

What He has already priced

Let me say the plain thing without softening.

Meekness in Scripture is strength under control. It is a man who has power and governs it, and it is a good and rare and beautiful thing, and it is not a synonym for absorbing whatever arrives.

The two got joined in your head at about twenty five and they have been joined ever since, and the joining has been convenient for ten other men.

Now read what God says about the worth of a person in a psalm about a king who is supposed to defend them.

He shall redeem their soul from deceit and violence: and precious shall their blood be in his sight.Psalm 72:14

Precious in his sight. That is a valuation, and the psalm is describing the kind of king God approves of by describing what he treats as costly.

Notice what is being priced. Not their usefulness and not their productivity. The word is blood, which in that world is the plainest possible word for a person's life.

You have a value God has already set and published, and no thirty years of a group message has revised it. That is not my kindness to you. It is written in Psalm 72:14, 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 thirty years of taking it has not been meekness. You have a dignity God priced and no group can spend, and it is intact this evening. The word settled that before you were sixteen, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the room while you read this.

What thirty years of affection like that does

Here is worth being exact about, because you have never added it up and the not adding it up is part of how it has lasted.

A joke returned to for thirty years is not a joke anymore. It is a description, and it has been agreed on by ten people, and it is the version of you that exists in the only group that has known you your whole life.

And notice the particular shape of yours. It began with the one part of you that is about God. The kippah, then the praying, then you generally. That progression matters, because it means that the thing you have been quietly absorbing for thirty years is not a joke about your driving. It is your faith being made the funny thing in the only room where you have thirty years of history.

You have carried that on your own, on the grounds that carrying it was meekness.

And you could have answered it at any point. That is the part that makes this hard to see: you have never lacked the ability, only permission, and you gave yourself the withholding of permission as a virtue.

You have permission to say a plain sentence to a friend, and one plain sentence is not the same act as taking anybody apart. Psalm 72 has God pricing a person's life as costly; His Spirit is the one who lets a man see what has been happening without needing to make anybody a villain.

Now, plainly, and this is the part that matters most on this page. Nothing here is telling you to leave that group, and nothing here is telling you to stay in it, and nothing here is deciding anything about ten men I have never met, some of whom would be genuinely shaken to be told. I do not know your friendships or what either choice would cost you, and a page that issued you an instruction would be pretending to a knowledge it does not have. That is yours, and it belongs to the people who actually know your life, and to God.

What can be said is that you are allowed to tell one of them the truth, privately, once. And if any of this has ever gone past words, or if the weight has gone as far as thinking about not being here at all, please tell somebody living today: in the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour.