Everything Goes Through Me

Your aunt tells you something about your uncle. Your uncle tells you something about your aunt. Neither of them has said a word directly to the other since about March.

And you carry it. You soften it on the way, because the raw version would do damage, and you deliver a cleaner version to each of them, and the family stays roughly level.

This is called being the peacemaker in your family. Everybody says so. It is said kindly, and it has been said about you since you were about nineteen.

What nobody has noticed, including you, is that you are not making peace. You are preventing a conversation. Those two people have not had to face each other in seven months because there has been a working alternative, and the working alternative is you.

If any of what is passing through you is not difficulty but harm, if somebody in that family frightens or hurts another person, then this is not a relay problem and this article is not the first thing you need. Getting help from somebody qualified where you live comes first.

What a switchboard actually does

Let me be precise about the mechanism, because the intention behind it is genuinely good.

A switchboard exists to connect two parties who cannot reach each other directly. It is a piece of infrastructure. And infrastructure, once it works, removes any reason to build the direct line, because why would anybody go to that trouble when there is a perfectly good operator.

So the longer you do it, the less likely it becomes that they ever speak. Your competence is the obstacle.

You have been keeping a family functional and a relationship frozen at the same time, and doing something well has never once meant it was the right thing to do. Matthew 5:9 calls the peacemakers blessed and children of God, which is the written word naming the actual office, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can tell the difference between making peace and holding a gap open.

And both of them are real people. Your aunt has her own reasons for not calling, and some of them are older than this and nothing to do with your uncle. Your uncle is right about one thing in this that nobody has conceded to him.

They are not children. They are two adults who have found a comfortable arrangement, and it is comfortable because somebody else is paying for it.

You are able to see them as two capable adults, and letting people manage their own silence has never once been the same as abandoning them. The Spirit of God is what makes a person able to stop without contempt, and it is written in Matthew 5 that the peacemakers are called the children of God.

Blessed are the peacemakers

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. (Matthew 5:9, King James Version)

Peacemakers. Not peacekeepers. That distinction is not a word game and it is the whole of this article.

A peacekeeper stands between two parties and absorbs the pressure so that nothing happens. The arrangement holds for exactly as long as the keeper is standing there, and it costs the keeper everything, and the parties are unchanged.

A peacemaker does something different. A peacemaker works toward the two of them being in the same room without a body in between.

You were called to make peace rather than to hold a line, and standing in the middle of two people has never once been what that word meant. It is written in Matthew 5:9 that the peacemakers shall be called the children of God, which is the written word naming a maker and not a barrier, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the making while a person steps back.

Look at what the verse promises, too. They shall be called the children of God. That is an identity, given to the person, not a job description that has to be re-earned every week by carrying messages.

You have been treating the blessing as a shift.

You have been given a name and have been performing a duty, and no title from God has ever once come with a rota attached to it. The Spirit of God is the one who separates who a person is from what they do all week, and Matthew 5 puts the blessing on the maker rather than on the traffic.

The one thing you cannot do

Here is where I want to be careful, because there is an obvious wrong turn.

Stopping does not mean forcing them together. It does not mean arranging a meeting, or telling either of them what the other actually said, or announcing that from now on they can call each other themselves. All of those are just a different kind of managing, with more drama in it.

And this site is not going to tell you to make anybody speak to anybody. Nobody here knows why those two stopped, and it is entirely possible one of them has a reason you have never been told.

You are permitted to stop relaying without engineering anything, and stepping out of the middle has never once required a plan for what the other two do next. The Holy Spirit is the one who works in a silence nobody is filling, and it is written that the peacemakers are blessed and shall be called the children of God.

What stopping actually looks like is much quieter. Your aunt says something about your uncle. And you say: you should tell him that.

Then nothing. You do not deliver it. You do not explain the policy. You do not repeat it three times or make it a stand.

She may say it to him. She may not. That part was never yours and it has felt like yours for seven years.

You are able to let a sentence stop with you, and a message you do not carry has never once been a betrayal of anybody. The Spirit of God is what holds a person steady in the week after they stop, and Matthew 5:9 puts the whole blessing on making peace rather than on maintaining a truce.