They Think I Am The Problem

It was not announced. Nobody sat you down.

You worked it out from small things over about four years. The way a sister changes the subject. The way your mother says his name, warmly, with a small pause afterward. A cousin who said something at a christening that you have replayed about two hundred times since.

And somewhere in there the family reached a settled view, without a hearing, that whatever is difficult in that house is coming from you.

So now you are keeping a promise on your own, and you are doing it in front of an audience that has already decided.

Before we go anywhere else, one thing that comes first on this row and never gets softened.

If the person you live with frightens you, controls you, hurts you, or has made you smaller and more afraid than you used to be, then none of what follows applies to you and I am not going to dress it up in the language of promises. That is not a marriage kept alone, and nobody who cares about you would tell you to keep absorbing it. Talk to somebody qualified where you live, this week, and if there is danger in that house, contact an emergency service or a domestic violence line today.

For everybody else, this is about the particular loneliness of being outvoted by the people who are supposed to be on your side.

When father and mother forsake

There is a line in Psalm 27 that names something most people would rather not have named out loud.

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up (Psalm 27:10, King James Version)

Read the first half without flinching. It does not say if. It says when.

The psalm assumes that the people closest to a person can, in fact, let them go. It does not treat that as unthinkable or as a rare disaster. It states it as a thing that happens and then says what happens next.

You are inside a situation the word has already accounted for, and Psalm 27 has never once pretended that families do not do this. Psalm 27:10 names the forsaking plainly and then names the taking up, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an honest verse into company for a woman at a family table.

And then the second half. The LORD will take me up. Take up is what somebody does with a child who has been left standing.

You have been taken up by somebody who did not need the family's account of you, and He has never once consulted them about it. The passage puts the taking up immediately after the forsaking with nothing in between, and the Spirit of God is the one who does that in a kitchen at Christmas.

What a family verdict actually is

Let me be plain about the mechanics, because the mechanics take most of the sting out.

Your family has almost no data. They see him at gatherings, where he is at his best, because most people are at their best at gatherings. They see the woman who arranged the gathering, tired and managing, and they draw from that.

They are not being cruel. They are drawing a reasonable conclusion from a sample that is entirely misleading, and every one of them would draw a different conclusion if they had lived in that house for a week.

And there is something else. A verdict about a marriage is often a family telling itself a story it needs. It is easier to think one person is difficult than to sit with the fact that a marriage two people love is going through something hard.

You have been convicted on a sample rather than on the truth, and no verse has ever once made a family's impression the account that stands. Psalm 27:10 puts the taking up in God's hands regardless of what the parents did, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates an opinion from a fact for a woman who has been carrying one as the other.

You were promised to and you promised, and a cousin at a christening has never once had standing to rule on it. It is written that when father and mother forsake, the LORD takes up, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present at a table where somebody is quietly outnumbered.

Tell one person, and choose from outside

Here is the assignment and there is a specific instruction inside it that matters for you more than for most readers.

Tell one person the truth about how alone this has been.

And choose somebody outside the family. That is not a rule for everybody, but for you it is, because the family has already deliberated and a person inside a verdict cannot hear a new fact without weighing it against the verdict.

You are entitled to a hearing from somebody with no seat at that table, and Psalm 27 has never once made a family the court of record. Psalm 27:10 has the taking up done by the one who was not part of the forsaking, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a woman is finally heard by an outsider.

A friend of long standing. A pastor, if that is a safe person in your case. A counselor. Somebody with no seat at that table.

One sentence, not the four years: I am on my own in this and my family thinks the trouble is me, and I have not said that to anybody.

You are able to be heard by somebody with no stake in the story, and it has never once been disloyal to go outside a family for that. Psalm 27:10 has the taking up done by somebody who was not part of the forsaking, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a woman tells the truth to a person who was not in the room when it was decided.