They sit two chairs apart at every family thing, and they always ask after each other's work, and they always mean it.
That is not sarcasm. He does mean it. He wants that man to do well and always has. His brother in law was the closest friend he ever had, from the year they were nineteen, and there were about eleven years in there when they spoke on the phone most days and would have said, either of them, that they were brothers rather than in laws.
Then something real happened to him, and something in the other man could not go where he had gone, and neither of them ever said a hard word about it.
That is the part that has made it impossible to deal with. There was no fight. There has never been a version of this he could take to anybody, because every account of it comes out sounding like nothing: we get on fine, we see each other at every occasion, he is perfectly decent to me and I am perfectly decent to him.
Twelve years. Two chairs apart. And in twelve years they have not had one conversation that either of them would remember afterwards.
If you still see the person you lost, come and sit at the end of the table. Neither of you is going on trial here.
Politeness is what the loss is wearing
Let us name what those twelve years actually are, because he has been reading them as evidence that nothing happened.
The pleasantness is real. It is also, and at the same time, the exact shape the loss took. Two men who used to speak every day now have a fixed repertoire of about four topics, delivered warmly, twice a year, and both of them keep to it without ever having agreed to.
That is not a friendship in a quiet phase. It is a friendship that ended and kept attending, and the fact that it ended courteously has stopped him from ever calling it what it is.
You have lost something. Nothing about how well the two of you behave has ever meant that nothing was taken. I am not saying it to stir anything up. Scripture says there is a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away (Ecclesiastes 3:6), which names losing as a season of a real life rather than as a failure inside it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a man two chairs down at Christmas.
Losing is named without a culprit
Here is what turned this for me, and it does not put one thing on your brother in law.
Read what the verse does and does not supply, because the omission is the whole point.
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away.Ecclesiastes 3:6
A time to lose. There is no explanation attached and no blame assigned. The chapter runs through fourteen of these pairs and not one of them tells you whose fault the second half was.
That is not evasion. It is the book saying, plainly, that losing occurs in a life under God without requiring somebody to be the villain of it, and a man may name his loss without having to name a defendant first.
You may grieve this without building a case, and Scripture names losing without ever supplying a culprit. That is written into the structure of the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a man who has been polite for twelve years.
Neither of you is being judged here
Something has to be said very plainly, and it is the load-bearing sentence on this page.
He is not the villain. What he could not follow you into, he could not follow you into honestly, and there are people who love God as much as you do who would have done the same, and he has never once run you down for it in front of the family. And you did not do wrong by going where you went either.
This was real and it cost you. You can hold both without deciding which of you was wrong. Scripture says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men (Romans 12:18), where the qualifier admits that peace is not entirely inside any one man's control, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a settled account of who moved first, who lets you keep him and keep the truth.
And if these twelve years have cost more than the people at that table know, if sleep has gone, if the family occasions have started to weigh on you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not going around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.
So here is the turn, and it is not a promise that the phone starts ringing again.
This was real and it cost you. You can hold both without deciding which of you was wrong. Scripture says there is a time to lose (Ecclesiastes 3:6), where the losing is named without a defendant attached, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a reckoning between two men, who lets you carry the friendship and the truth in the same pair of hands.
I cannot tell you whether the two of you ever have a real conversation again, and I am not going to guess. Nobody honest would. What I can tell you is that twelve years of good manners have not been twelve years of nothing having happened, and that you are allowed to miss a man you will see again in April.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the standing under these words is His rather than your own. You speak under His will and not yours, and what God does next, and when, is His to decide, however He answers.
- Twelve years of being pleasant across a table, you are the shape the loss took and you are not proof that nothing was lost. Ecclesiastes 3 names a time to lose and attaches no explanation and no blame to it, so I can grieve without building a case, and the Holy Spirit has been with me at every one of those tables. In the name of Jesus I stop reading you as evidence.
- Rule that a loss needs a falling out to count, you are not what God says about me and you are not sitting at that table in April. Romans 12 says live peaceably as much as lieth in you, which admits that peace was never entirely in my hands, and His Spirit keeps me steady with no verdict handed down. I am naming what went.
- Father, there is a time to get and a time to lose, and Ecclesiastes 3 supplies no culprit anywhere in the whole list. I thank You that he is still mine to sit near and that what came to me was still real, and Your Spirit was present in the room when it thinned. This was real and it cost me, and I can hold both without deciding which of us was wrong.
Ecclesiastes 3:6
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