Asked Which Side She Is On

She asked her in the car, straight out. Do you think she was right.

He asked her at the gate about three weeks later, in different words, meaning exactly the same thing.

She said something soft to both of them. Neither one liked it. Neither one said so, because they are not that sort of people, and both of them have been a very small amount cooler with her ever since.

Nobody used the words which side are you on. Both of them meant it.

Here is the position she is in now, and it took about eight months to arrive at.

She is on the outside of two houses instead of one.

Before, she was in both. She was the one who could go for tea in either place and be told things. Now there is a slight formality in both kitchens, and neither of them has ever mentioned it, and she is fairly sure neither of them has noticed they are doing it.

And here is what she has never said to a living soul.

She knows things about both of them that would settle it.

She was there for some of it. She has heard both accounts and she has seen things neither of them knows she saw, and if she stood up and said what she actually thinks happened, it would be a considerable event in that family.

She is never going to say it. Not to either of them, not to anybody, not in eleven years.

Which means she will go on looking, from where both of them are standing, like a woman who has not got the courage to say what she thinks.

If you have been asked to choose, come in and sit by the fire. Nobody in this room is going to ask you which side.

The answer nobody expected

There is a moment before a battle where a man asks the most natural question in the world and gets an answer that refuses the whole shape of it.

And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and looked, and, behold, there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand: and Joshua went unto him, and said unto him, Art thou for us, or for our adversaries? And he said, Nay; but as captain of the host of the Lord am I now come.Joshua 5:13-14

Art thou for us, or for our adversaries.

That is a fair question. Joshua is not being unreasonable. There is a sword drawn and a war on and he wants to know where this man stands, and the two options he offers genuinely are the two options available.

And the answer is nay.

Not us. Not them. Nay, which refuses the question rather than answering it, and then gives a different account of where he is standing altogether.

And notice what Joshua does next. He falls on his face and worships. He does not press for a proper answer. He recognizes that a refusal like that is not evasion.

You are standing in a place that is not either of the two sides on offer, and refusing that question has scriptural precedent. Joshua 5:14 records the answer as nay rather than as one of the two options, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that refusal in the record instead of tidying it into a side, which means a woman who cannot answer which side she is on is not a woman with no answer.

What her silence is actually made of

Now the thing she will never say, because it deserves to be seen properly.

She is not silent because she has no view. She has a view, and it is informed, and it would land.

She is silent because saying it would take something from one of them that they would not get back.

That is not cowardice. Cowardice is silence for the sake of the one keeping it. This silence costs her both kitchens, which is the opposite of self protection.

You have been paying for that silence rather than being protected by it, and Scripture calls that kind of covering love. Proverbs 10:12 says hatred stirreth up strifes, but love covereth all sins, and it puts the covering on love's side of the comparison rather than on the side of cowardice, and it is the same Spirit who works that love in a person, which means eight months of being slightly outside two kitchens has been eight months of doing something for both of them.

Being read wrongly by people you love

Here is the part that actually hurts, and it should be said out loud rather than skirted.

Both of them think slightly less of you than they did.

Not much. Not enough to say. Enough that a cup of tea is a fraction more formal than it was, and you can feel it, and you cannot mention it without making it into a thing.

You were misread by people who love you, and being misread is not the same as being in the wrong. 1 Corinthians 4:3 says with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man's judgment, and it is written by somebody being widely misunderstood by his own churches, and it is the same Spirit who bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, which means the account those two kitchens hold of you is not the account that decides anything.