Her Family Sounds Easy

She tells you a story about her mother and you laugh in the right place, and then you drive home.

And somewhere on the road, without deciding to, you start doing the arithmetic. Her mother calls to ask how she is. Her brother came over to fix the fence. They all went to the lake in July and there is a photograph of it and everybody in the photograph looks like they wanted to be there.

You would never say any of this out loud. It sounds like envy and it is not exactly envy. It is closer to a verdict, and the verdict is about you.

If your family were more like hers, that would say something. And since it is not, that says something too.

The kitchen nobody has actually been in

Start with a fact so plain it feels rude to say.

Nobody has been inside her family. What you went inside was her stories about her family, which is a completely different building.

Stories are edited. Not dishonestly, just naturally, the way anybody edits. She tells you about the fence because the fence is a good story. She does not tell you about the eleven minutes of silence on the phone last Thursday, because eleven minutes of silence is not a story, it is just a Thursday.

You have been comparing your uncut footage to somebody else's edit, and losing that comparison has never once meant anything about your family. Galatians 6:4 says let every man prove his own work, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can take a ruler out of a woman's hand without shaming her for having picked it up.

And here is the part that will sting slightly. Somebody is doing this to you.

Somewhere there is a woman driving home from coffee with you, doing the same arithmetic in reverse. You told her the good story. You told her about your father at the hospital, the thing he said, the way he showed up. You did not tell her about the message you left on Sunday that nobody answered.

You have been the easy family in somebody else's car, and not one person on earth has ever once seen the whole of another household. The Spirit of God is the one who makes that ordinary and freeing rather than cynical, and it is written in Galatians 6 that a person proves their own work rather than measuring another's.

Prove your own work

Here is the verse, and it is doing something more surgical than it looks.

But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. (Galatians 6:4, King James Version)

Prove your own work. Not compare it. Prove it, in the old sense, the way you prove metal, by testing the actual thing in front of you to find out what it actually is.

And then a clause almost nobody quotes. And then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. Paul is saying that joy which comes from comparison is not joy. It is a scoreboard, and a scoreboard has to keep running, and a person on a scoreboard is never once finished.

You were made for rejoicing rather than for scoring, and a household has never once been something God intended to be ranked. It is written in Galatians 6:4 that a person proves their own work, which is the whole instruction, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns an examination into a rest.

Your friend's mother is a real woman with a real interior life that your friend has not told you about, because your friend does not know all of it either. Her mother is right about some things and wrong about others, the same as yours. She has her own reasons for the way she does what she does, and nobody ever sat her down and offered her a different way either.

The easy family does not exist. What exists is a family you know the inside of, and a family you know the outside of, and you have been comparing an inside to an outside for years.

You have been given one household to actually know, and God has never once asked anybody to be responsible for a family they have only heard about. The Spirit of God is what makes a woman able to look at her own table without flinching, and Galatians 6:4 puts the proving squarely on a person's own work and nowhere else.

What you cannot see from the doorway

There is a specific thing comparison does to a person that is worth naming, because it will keep happening otherwise.

It makes you stop noticing.

While a comparison is running, every interaction with your family gets processed as evidence, and evidence is not the same as experience. Your sister calls, and one part of you is listening and one part of you is filing. Does this count. Is this the sort of call her sister makes.

And the actual call goes by unlived. You cannot receive something you are busy grading.

You are able to have a whole conversation with your own sister without filing any of it, and being present with somebody has never once required them to be impressive. The Holy Spirit is the one who unhooks a person from the scoreboard mid sentence, and it is written that a man proves his own work and then has rejoicing in himself alone.

Here is what I would like you to consider. Your family has things in it that her family does not have. You cannot see them, because you have been looking through a lens ground for finding what is missing.

Somebody in your family stays. Somebody in your family remembers a specific thing about you that nobody else on earth remembers. Somebody in your family shows up in a particular kind of trouble without being asked, even if they are impossible in every other kind.

Those are not consolation prizes. Those are the actual family, unedited, going past uncounted for years while the fences got counted.