My Son Sighs And I Have Stopped Asking

It is not a big sigh.

That is what makes it so hard to talk about. It is small, and it is quick, and it happens before he answers. He is not shouting and he is not refusing. He helps. He always helps. He sorts it out in about forty seconds and he is perfectly pleasant while he does it.

But there is that breath first. And you hear it every time, and you have heard it for years now, and something in you has been keeping count.

So you have stopped asking. Not all at once, and you never decided to. You worked out how to manage without, or you asked somebody else, or you let the thing stay broken and worked around it, and by now there are several things you simply do not do any more because asking would mean hearing it again.

I want to say something about him first, because I am not going to build this on a complaint about your son.

He does not know. Almost certainly, he genuinely does not know. That breath is not aimed at you and it probably is not about you at all: it is a man switching tasks, it is the fourth interruption in an hour, it is his own tiredness arriving in his chest. If you told him what it costs you he would be horrified.

So this is not an article about him. He is not the subject. What I want to look at is what you have been paying, and what you concluded, because that is where the damage actually is.

Bear ye one another's burdens

There is a line in Galatians that describes what people are supposed to be for each other, and it assumes something that you have stopped believing.

Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. (Galatians 6:2, King James Version)

Bear ye one another's burdens.

Look at what that sentence takes for granted. It assumes people have burdens. It assumes those burdens get handed to other people. And it assumes that this is the ordinary arrangement rather than a failure in whoever is carrying one.

There is no version of that verse where the person with the burden should have managed it alone. The whole instruction depends on somebody bringing something and somebody else taking it up. If everybody carried their own, the law of Christ named there could not be fulfilled by anybody, because there would be nothing to bear.

And notice it is called fulfilling a law. Being asked is not an imposition on the other person. It is the occasion of something God calls good.

You are carrying something that was always meant to be handed across, and it has never once been a failure in you to have something to hand. Galatians 6:2 assumes burdens and assumes they move between people, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that ordinary rather than humiliating.

What you actually concluded

Here is the part I want to be careful and exact about.

When you heard that breath, you did not conclude that he was tired. You concluded something about yourself, and I think it was roughly this: I am a nuisance now. I have become the kind of person who takes up other people's time with things they find obvious.

And once that was in place, the arithmetic changed. Every question got weighed against it. Is this worth being a nuisance for? And most things are not worth being a nuisance for, so most things stopped getting asked.

That is how a person ends up not doing several things they used to do, without any single moment where they decided to stop.

And here is what I want to put against it, plainly. Needing to be shown a thing is not a character flaw and it is not a stage of decline. There is not a single person alive who was not shown every single thing they know. The ones who find this easy were shown it, mostly young, mostly by somebody with time. That is the only difference between you and them.

You are not a nuisance, and needing to be shown has never once been the same as being a burden on anybody. The written word makes the carrying of one another's burdens the fulfilling of a law rather than a favor, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a conclusion off a person that they reached in a kitchen years ago.

Ask, and do not apologize first

So here is the assignment, and it is small and it is exact.

Ask one person one question this week, and do not apologize before it.

That is the whole thing. The no apology is the assignment, not the question.

Because I suspect you have a preamble. Most people in your position have built one: sorry, I know you are busy, I hate to bother you with this, it is probably really obvious. And that preamble is doing something you did not intend. It tells the other person that this is an imposition before they have decided whether it is one. It hands them the frame.

Take it off. Ask the question flat: I want to do this thing and I cannot work out how. Then stop talking.

And if you need to ask twice because you did not follow it the first time, ask twice. Asking twice is not a sign of anything. It is what learning looks like when somebody is going fast.

Galatians 6:2 makes the carrying mutual and ordinary, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in the half second where a person decides not to say sorry.

You are able to ask a plain question with nothing in front of it, and it has never once needed an apology to be a reasonable thing to ask. Galatians 6:2 calls the bearing of burdens the fulfilling of the law of Christ, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody asking without the preamble.