A Fact Is Not A Performance

It starts about an hour before anybody arrives.

The house, obviously, but that is not the part that tires you. It is the other thing. The rehearsal. Deciding in advance which stories to tell, which subjects to steer away from, how to answer if somebody asks how things are.

And then two hours of being a couple in front of people, which is not lying exactly, but which is not the same as being in a room either.

And then everybody goes and you sit down and you are more tired than the evening should have made anybody.

You have been doing this for a while now. Years, probably. And somewhere in the last twelve months you have stopped being able to do it, and the not being able to has frightened you more than anything else in the marriage.

Here is what I want to say, plainly, before anything else.

Nobody asked you to carry this. Not God. Not the visitors, who are mostly not looking. The carrying was assigned by you, and it can be put down by you, and this article is about how.

Who has been doing the carrying

There is a line in Isaiah 46 that is spoken to people who are old and worn out, and the verbs are the thing.

even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear (Isaiah 46:4, King James Version)

I have made and I will bear. Two verbs, both His, one in the past and one running forward.

The chapter is contrasting God with idols that have to be carried around on carts by the people who own them. That is the whole picture: some things you carry, and some things carry you, and the difference matters enormously.

You are held up by something that carries rather than something that gets carried, and Isaiah has never once put a covenant on your back. Isaiah 46:4 has God say I have made, and I will bear, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a tired woman notice which direction the carrying goes.

Now the question that follows from it. Which one has your marriage been, in the last three years?

You have been loading it onto a cart before every dinner party and wheeling it out where people can see it. That is what a person does with an idol. It is not what a person does with a fact.

You have been carrying something that was made to carry you, and the word has never once handed the bearing to the person inside it. The passage puts the making and the bearing in the same hands, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a load off somebody's shoulders.

What the performance is actually for

Let me name it honestly, because I do not think it is vanity and I want to say so.

The performance is not there to impress anybody. I have watched people do this for years and it is almost never that.

It is there out of fear that if the truth of a thin year were visible, somebody would draw a conclusion about the marriage, and that their conclusion would then somehow become true. As though a marriage were a thing held in place by what people believe about it.

It is not. A promise was made and God joined it, and neither of those is affected in the slightest by what your sister in law thinks after a dinner.

You are not holding this together with a story, and no verse has ever once made public opinion part of a covenant. Isaiah 46:4 puts the bearing in God's hands from the making to the gray hair, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a woman the fact is not maintained by an audience.

You were joined by God and that is a fact rather than a reputation, and it has never once needed defending at a dinner table. It is written that He has made and He will bear, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets somebody stop guarding a thing that was never under threat.

Say it, and put it down for one evening

Here is the assignment, and there is a subtraction in it, and the subtraction is the whole thing.

Say out loud, alone: God joined this. He did it once and it holds.

Then, the next time people come, do not rehearse. Not one story chosen in advance. Not one subject steered away from. If somebody asks how things are, say fine, which is the ordinary answer and is nobody's business anyway.

Do not perform being a couple. Just be two people in a room with visitors in it.

You are able to let a fact sit there unattended, and it has never once needed you to present it well. Isaiah 46:4 keeps the bearing on God's side from beginning to end, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a house where somebody has stopped rehearsing.

And notice afterward how tired you are. That is the measurement worth taking.