The Only One Still Speaking to Everybody

She does three Christmases. Not by preference. Because that is what it takes for everybody to see her, and because she worked out four years ago that if she did not do it nobody would see anybody.

Her brother does not speak to her sister. Her sister does not speak to their mother, although both of them would put it more carefully than that. Her mother has an account of the whole thing that does not match either of the other two, and she has heard all three accounts perhaps forty times, and she has never once told any of them that the other versions exist.

She is the switchboard. When her brother's boy had the operation, she was the one who told her sister, and she was the one who then rang her brother to say her sister had asked, and she was the one who edited what each of them had actually said into something the other could receive.

That editing takes a particular kind of energy and there is no name for it.

She is not a saint about it. She resents it about twice a month, sharply, usually in a car, and then feels wretched about the resenting because they are her family and somebody has to.

Nobody has ever asked her how she is doing with it. They ask her how the others are.

That is you, and there is nobody upstream of you.

What this page will not do

Three things.

I am not going to tell you what happened in your family or who is right. You have three accounts and I have none, and the people who confidently sort out other people's families are almost always describing their own. Scripture already said it in Colossians 3:14, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

I am not going to promise you that they reconcile. That is not mine to hand out. They are grown people with their own accounts before God and their own roads, and nothing on this page and nothing in any song will be aimed at moving anybody's will, because love does not acquire authority over a person by being love.

And I am not going to tell you to stop. Some people in your position should step back and some should not, and that decision belongs to you and to people who actually know the situation.

What I will do is stay with the person nobody has asked about.

You are seen in this, at the exact point where nobody is looking. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that near enough to lean on in a car in the two minutes before you go back in.

The verse is about what holds, not who tries hardest

There is a line at the end of a list in Colossians that is usually read as an instruction and is more useful read as a description.

And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness.Colossians 3:14

Bond is the word. It is a binding-together word, the thing that holds a structure so it does not come apart.

And notice where Paul puts it. It comes at the end of a list of things to put on, and it is described as the thing that binds all the others, which means love in that sentence is not one virtue among several. It is the material that holds the whole assembly together.

Now here is the question that matters for you, and it is the one nobody has asked.

Whose love is doing the binding?

Because you have been reading that verse, if you have read it at all, as a job description for yourself. Put on charity, be the bond, hold it together. And you have been doing that, at enormous cost, for four years, three Christmases at a time. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Colossians 3:14, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

But the bond in a family is not supposed to be one member of it. That is not what Paul is describing and it is not sustainable and it is not what has happened to you by God's design; it is what happened when everybody else stepped back and you were the last one standing.

You are not the material holding this family together. Scripture says charity is the bond of perfectness, Colossians 3:14, and it never once assigns that structural job to a single person in a family, and the Holy Spirit is the one whose work that is.

The editing

Here is the specific thing that is costing you, and it is not the traveling.

It is the editing.

Every message that goes through you gets adjusted. You take out the barbed clause. You soften the tone. You translate a sentence your mother said into something your sister can hear without the roof coming off, and you do it in about four seconds and you have been doing it for years. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Colossians 3:14, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

That is skilled work and it is well meant and it is also why you cannot rest. A switchboard cannot be off duty. And it has a second cost that nobody talks about: you are the only person in that family who knows what everybody actually said, which means you are carrying the unedited version of all three of them and there is nobody to hand it to.

You are not required to be the translator for this family. Scripture says every man shall bear his own burden, Galatians 6:5, and it sits in the same chapter as the instruction to bear one another's burdens, and the two together mean shared and not transferred, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person put down a job that was never assigned.

Who is carrying you

And this is the question that has not been asked in four years.

Everybody in that family has somebody who asks about them: they have you. You have nobody, because you are the person who asks, and because the role you have taken means you cannot be honest about any of them to any of the others. I have no authority to say that by myself. Scripture carries it in Colossians 3:14, and the Holy Spirit carries it to you.

So there is nowhere in your family for you to be a person rather than a function.

That has to come from outside it. One friend, or one person at a church, who is not connected to any of them, who you can say the true sentence to: I am the only one still speaking to all of them and it is wearing me out.

You are not meant to be doing this without anybody. Scripture says bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, Galatians 6:2, and it assumes a person on the other side of the bearing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves somebody outside a family into a chair beside the person holding it.