I Think He Is Making a Mistake

He is going to do it. That much is settled and everybody can see it, including the people who have not said anything.

It is not illegal and it is not immoral. It is a decision about money and a person and a direction, and it has a shape to it that anybody who has been around a bit recognizes, and his brother has watched the same shape before and knows roughly how it ends.

He said something once. In August, carefully, over about four minutes, having rehearsed it in a car.

It did not go badly. That is almost worse. His brother listened, and nodded, and said he understood the concern, and then said the thing people say, which is that this one is different.

Since August they have spoken four times and none of it has been mentioned again by either of them.

And here is the position he is now in, which has no good options in it.

If he says it again, he becomes the brother who does not support him. That is a role, and once you are in it you stay in it, and the phone calls get shorter, and when the thing goes wrong, if it goes wrong, he is the last person on earth who will get rung.

If he says nothing, he watches. And there is a specific quality to watching something happen to somebody you love with your mouth shut that costs a great deal more than people think.

He is awake at two thinking about a decision that is not his, about a life that is not his, with no authority over any of it.

That is you, and there was never a version of this where you were the one who prevented it.

Three things I am not going to give you

I am not going to give you a way to change his mind. There isn't one, and any page that offers you techniques for moving another adult's will is selling something that does not exist and would be wrong if it did.

I am not going to tell you whether you are right about the decision. You may be. You have seen the shape before. Being right, in this situation, is worth considerably less than it feels like it should be. Scripture holds that ground in Psalm 32:8, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

And I am not going to promise you the outcome, either way. He is a grown man with his own account before God, and nothing on this page and nothing in any song is aimed at his will, because that was never ours to aim at.

You are not failing him by being unable to stop this. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it is nearness offered to the one who is watching as much as to the one being watched, and the Holy Spirit is present at two in the morning with a man who has no authority over any of it.

The verse is about who does the guiding

There is a line in Psalm 32 that is easy to read as a promise about your own life and worth reading here as a promise about his.

I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye.Psalm 32:8

I will guide thee with mine eye. It is an unusual image. Not a hand on the shoulder, not a rope, not a barrier. An eye: a look that directs somebody who is watching for it.

Read the two things that tells you.

The first is that guidance is God's job and He has claimed it in the first person, four times in one verse. Not yours. You have been trying to do a thing that has an owner, and the owner is better at it and has access you do not. This rests on Scripture in Psalm 32:8, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

The second is quieter and harder. Guidance by eye requires the person to be looking. It is not coercive. God Himself, in this verse, describes a method that a person can miss by not turning round, which tells you something about how He deals with grown adults and how He is going to deal with your brother.

I cannot promise you He will steer him away from it. What the verse gives you is that the steering is being done by somebody who is present in rooms you will never be in.

You are not the only one at work on your brother's decision. Scripture says I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go, Psalm 32:8, and the verbs are God's throughout, and the Holy Spirit is at work in a man in the weeks before he does a thing his brother is awake about.

What saying it twice actually costs

Let me be practical about the arithmetic, because you have been going round it for months without ever putting it plainly. Scripture already said it in Psalm 32:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

You have already said it. Clearly, kindly, once, in August. He heard you. Whatever you think about his response, he is not unaware of your view. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Psalm 32:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

Saying it a second time does not add information. It adds pressure, and pressure produces one reliable effect in a person who has already decided: it makes them defend the decision, which makes them more committed to it, not less.

And it costs you the position you will actually need. Because if this goes the way you fear, the thing he will need is somebody he can ring who will not say I told you. That person cannot be somebody who spent six months telling him.

So the silence you are keeping is not cowardice. It is the price of remaining reachable, and it is the most valuable thing you have to offer.

You are not obliged to keep making the case. Scripture says a word spoken in due season, how good is it, Proverbs 15:23, and due season means there is such a thing as the wrong moment for a true thing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who knows which season this is and it is not this one.

The part that is about you

There is something underneath this that is worth looking at, and I say it gently.

Some of what is keeping you awake is love. Some of it is that you cannot bear to be a person who watched.

There is a version of the older brother, or the steadier one, or the one who has always been the sensible one, whose sense of himself is bound up with preventing things. Being unable to prevent this is not only painful because of him. It is painful because of what it makes you: powerless, and a spectator, in a family where you have always been the one who sorts things out. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Psalm 32:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

That is not a criticism. It is the thing that is making two in the morning unbearable, and separating it from your concern for him will lighten the load considerably, because one half of it is a real grief and the other half is a role you can put down.

You are not required to be the one who prevents things. Scripture says cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee, Psalm 55:22, and the casting is a thing you do with a weight that is not yours to hold, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a job back off a man who was never actually given it.