I Am Afraid Of What They Might Say

You have been busy on Thursdays for about two months.

Not dishonestly. There has always been something, and you have always found it, and it has always been true, and none of it has been an accident.

Because Thursday is when she is around and there is time, and time is the thing that lets a long walk happen, and a long walk is where she would tell you.

And there is a sentence you think she might say. You have a fairly specific idea of what it is. And it has been sitting in you for two months, and every Thursday something comes up.

I want to look at the sentence rather than at your Thursdays, because I think the sentence is doing all the work and nobody has ever asked you to say it out loud.

Perfect love casteth out fear

There is a line in John that gets used for a great many things and is worth reading exactly as it stands.

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love. (1 John 4:18, King James Version)

Because fear hath torment.

Read the reason given. Not because fear is a sin. Not because fear is unfaithful. Because it hurts, and the letter treats that as sufficient grounds for it to go.

You are not being told your fear is faithless, and it was never a moral fault that this verse identified. 1 John 4:18 gives torment as the reason rather than wickedness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as compassion rather than as a rebuke of a frightened mother.

And notice what casts it out. Not resolve. Not information. Love does it, and love is not a thing you generate by trying, which means the going of the fear is not a job that has been assigned to you.

You have something else doing the casting out, and it was never your own effort that had to shift this. The written word puts the work on love rather than on the frightened person, and the Spirit of God is what takes the removal of a fear off a woman's own shoulders.

Not knowing is not safety

Now the thing I actually came to say, and it is not comfortable.

The Thursdays have not made you safer. They have made you less informed.

If the sentence is true, it is true today, and it was true last Thursday, and it will be true whether or not the walk happens. Avoiding the walk does not change anything about your daughter's life. It changes what you know about it.

And there is a cost to that which is easy to miss. She is carrying it either way. And a person carrying a thing alone, in a house where the parent has been busy on Thursdays for two months, draws a conclusion about that. The fear is about a sentence and not about a daughter, and going out is not the same as demanding that anything be said.

You are not protecting her by being busy, and it was never information that made anything true. 1 John 4 names the torment as the problem with fear, which is exactly why the Spirit of God goes at the fear and not at the woman carrying it.

And I want to say the other half, because the article would be dishonest without it. She may say it. It may be exactly what you think it is. That is a real possibility and I am not going to talk you out of it.

What is not true is that Thursday is the thing that makes it happen.

Go, and do not steer

So the practical part, and it is a going and a not doing.

Go out for twenty minutes with her and do not steer the conversation away from anything.

You are able to go out without requiring anything to be said, and it has never once been the same as asking for it. The passage puts the casting out on love rather than on the frightened person, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman putting her coat on on a Thursday.

Not steering is the whole of the task, and it is harder than it sounds, because steering is mostly invisible. It is the small change of subject. The slightly too quick response. The remark that moves things somewhere lighter just as something was getting close.

It has been running for two months, out on walks as well as by not going on them, and she can feel it.

And if it comes up, it comes up, and you will not be ready, and that is fine, because nobody is ready and the readiness was never the point.

You are able to hear something without having prepared for it, and it has never once been necessary to be ready in order to be present. 1 John 4:18 puts the whole removal of fear on love and asks nothing of the one who is afraid, and the Spirit of God is the one who is out on a street with a mother who is not steering.