She Has Gone Quiet About It

For nine years the first thing she said when he came in on a Sunday was: how did it go?

It was not a formality. She wanted the answer, and she asked follow up questions, and there was a period around the fifth and sixth years where the two of them used to sit at that kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon and talk about the church for an hour, and she saw things he had not seen and said them plainly.

She stopped asking about eighteen months ago.

Not abruptly. There was no last time that either of them would be able to identify. It thinned. First the follow up questions went, and then the question became a shape, said while doing something else, and then at some point it went altogether, and now on a Sunday she says hello and asks whether he wants tea, and they talk about other things, and the other things are real and the conversation is warm.

She is not cold. That is what he cannot make anybody understand, on the rare occasions he has come near mentioning it. Their marriage is not in trouble. She is affectionate and funny and they are fine.

She has simply stopped asking about that one subject, entirely, and he has noticed, and he has not said anything, and the not saying anything is now itself eighteen months old and has become its own object in the room.

Here is why he has not asked.

Because he does not know which answer he is going to get, and two of the possible answers are ones he does not know how to survive on a Sunday afternoon. She might say she got tired of hearing about it. She might say she has been protecting him, which would mean there is something she is not saying. She might say she does not want to add to what he is carrying, which would mean she has been carrying it alone deliberately. Or she might not know, and say something vague, and then it would be a thing between them that had been named and not solved, which is worse than a thing that has not been named.

So he says nothing, on Sundays, at a warm kitchen table, with a silence in the middle of it that both of them are walking around.

The word is a throwing word

There is a sentence in Peter that everybody knows and reads far too gently.

Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.1 Peter 5:7

The word behind casting is not a delicate one. It is the word used when they threw their garments on a colt for Jesus to ride into Jerusalem. It is a throwing verb. Not laying, not offering, not gently placing. Throwing, in one movement, off yourself and onto something else.

And then the reason, and it turns on a repeat that the English almost hides. Cast your care, because He cares. The same root twice. The care you are throwing is not something foreign to Him that He agrees to take on out of politeness. It is already His subject. It is what He is already doing.

So hear this, at a kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon: this is throwable, and it does not have to be understood before it can be thrown. That is not my encouragement; it is what His word does with a verb, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a throwing word and makes a man able to let go of something on a Sunday that he has been holding since spring.

Now let me name what is actually happening, because I think you have been misreading it and the misreading is what has grown teeth.

You have four possible answers in your head and three of them are bad. That is not analysis, that is what a mind does with a silence. Silence is the one thing that will accept absolutely any interpretation you put on it, and a tired mind always fills it with the worst available version, and eighteen months is a very long time to be filling a silence unsupervised.

You do not know why she stopped asking. That is the honest position and it is the only true one available to you tonight.

And here is what is far more likely than any of your three, and it is worth saying, because you would see it immediately in somebody else's marriage. People stop asking about a subject when asking has stopped being useful to the other person. If for a long stretch the answer was always some version of fine, or tired, or a shrug, a loving person eventually concludes that the question is a small weekly weight rather than a kindness, and quietly stops applying it.

That is not withdrawal. That is somebody trying to be gentle with a tired man, which is exactly the kind of thing she would do.

You are not required to diagnose this before God can carry it. Scripture says throw it, in one movement, without a report attached, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to work out what your wife means before He will hold what you are carrying.

And I am not going to tell you to have the conversation. That is between the two of you and it is not a message's business. What I will tell you is that the silence you have been interpreting alone for eighteen months does not have to be interpreted alone tonight.