I Have The Argument Ready

You know the exact sentence you are going to open with.

You have been working on it since the spring. It is accurate, it is short, and it cannot be misread. You have tested it in the car. There is a follow up prepared for the two most likely responses, and a third one for the thing he does where he laughs.

And I want to say at the start that I am not going to tell you the grievance is small, because I do not know what it is and it may well be enormous. Something happened. It was not nothing.

What I want to ask about is the plan.

Because the plan is to open something at a dinner table, in front of other people, on a day when everybody is already tired, and I think you already know how that goes.

What the case is actually for

Let me look at the thing being hoped for here, because it is not what an argument delivers.

You want him to know. You want, specifically, for him to understand what it was like from your side, and to say something that shows he understands, and for that to be witnessed by the people who were there when it happened.

That is a real and human thing to want and there is nothing wrong with wanting it.

You have been reaching for something an argument has never once been able to deliver, and no case well made has ever produced an understanding in somebody who was not ready to have one. Proverbs 17:14 says the beginning of strife is as when one letteth out water, which is the written word describing what happens the instant it opens, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can hold a man's mouth shut without making him a coward.

And he is a whole person on the other side of this. He almost certainly has a version of that event which is not the same as yours, and in his version he had reasons, and one or two of those reasons are probably legitimate.

That does not make you wrong. Two people can both be carrying something real about the same afternoon.

You are able to be right and still not open it at that table, and holding a true thing has never once obliged you to deploy it. The Spirit of God is what keeps a man from confusing being right with being ready, and it is written in Proverbs 17 that strife begins the way water begins to come through.

As when one letteth out water

The beginning of strife is as when one letteth out water: therefore leave off contention, before it be meddled with. (Proverbs 17:14, King James Version)

That image is agricultural and precise, and it is worth seeing properly.

An irrigation channel has a small barrier holding water back. Somebody makes an opening in it, expecting a controlled flow. And what happens is that the water widens the gap as it goes, and the gap widens the flow, and within a minute the whole bank is gone and the field is under water and nobody is in charge of it any more.

That is what Solomon says an argument is. Not a conversation with a risk attached. A structural failure that accelerates.

You have been planning a controlled opening in a bank, and no argument in the history of families has ever once stayed the size it started. It is written in Proverbs 17:14 that the beginning of strife is as when one letteth out water, which is the written word describing the physics rather than the morals, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a man the sense to leave the bank alone on a Thursday.

And look at the instruction. Leave off contention before it be meddled with. Before. The window is not in the middle of the argument. There is no steering it once it is running.

The only place with any real control in it is the moment before you start, which is where you are standing right now, reading this.

You are standing in the only moment where any of this is still in your hands, and the whole of that choice has never once been available once the first sentence is out. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a man able to stop at exactly the point where stopping is possible, and Proverbs 17 puts the instruction before the meddling and not after.

What to do with it instead

Now, this site is not going to tell you to swallow it, and it is not going to tell you to forgive on a schedule either. Nobody here knows your family and neither of those is anybody else's call.

What I will say is that a dinner table with eleven people at it is not a place where a grievance can be heard. It is a place where a grievance becomes a scene, and a scene has an audience, and an audience turns two people into positions.

If this is going to be said at all, it gets said to one person, in a room, with nobody watching, on a day chosen for it.

You are able to hold this until there is a room for it, and waiting for a place where somebody can actually hear you has never once been the same as backing down. The Holy Spirit is the one who provides the room and the hour, and it is written that a man is to leave off contention before it is meddled with.

And there is the other possibility, which I will not decide for you. Some things get carried to God and never said to the person at all. Not because they did not matter, but because the person is not able to receive it and never will be, and saying it would cost you more than the silence does.

That is a legitimate ending. It is not defeat and it is not denial. It is a man deciding where to put something down.

You are permitted to hand this to God rather than to him, and choosing where to set a thing down has never once been the same as pretending it never happened. The Spirit of God is what makes an unspoken thing bearable, and Proverbs 17:14 leaves the whole question of the flood in the hands of the man standing at the bank.