We Only Ever Talk About The Game

You speak to him every week and you could not tell anybody one true thing about his life.

You know his opinion on the manager. You know he thinks the fixture list is a disgrace. You know how much rain they got and what he did about the fence.

You do not know whether he is happy. You do not know whether he is worried about anything. He had a thing at work about two years ago that you heard about from your mother, and you never once raised it.

That is not a failure of love. It is a system, and the system works, and it has kept the two of you talking every week for thirty years without a single difficult minute in it.

What the game is doing

Let me say what the safe subject actually provides, because it is not nothing.

It is a channel. Two men who talk about football every week are two men who are in contact every week, and that is worth a great deal more than two men who wait for something important enough to justify a call.

The system has kept you connected. It has also, over three decades, become the only channel, and a channel that only carries one kind of traffic starts to look like the whole road.

You have been keeping a real connection alive on a narrow channel, and no safe subject has ever once been a substitute for the ones underneath it. Proverbs 27:17 says iron sharpeneth iron, so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend, which is the written word describing contact that changes something, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can widen a channel without either man having to make a speech.

And he is a whole man on the other end. He is not shallow. He almost certainly has the same list you do: things he has never mentioned, a stretch two years ago, something about one of his children.

He may be waiting for the same door to open, and he is right about at least one thing you have never conceded, and neither of you knows how to start.

You are able to open a door two men have both been standing at, and thirty years of not knowing how has never once meant either of you did not want to. The Spirit of God is what puts one real question into a conversation about weather, and it is written in Proverbs 27 that iron sharpens iron.

Iron sharpeneth iron

Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend. (Proverbs 27:17, King James Version)

That verse is quoted constantly and the physical picture in it is almost always skipped.

Iron sharpening iron is contact with friction in it. Two blades against each other, at an angle, with pressure. It is not two pieces of metal sitting near each other in a shed for thirty years.

And what it produces is an edge. Something is different afterward, on both of them, which is the point.

You have been in contact without friction for three decades, and proximity has never once been able to do what an actual question does. It is written in Proverbs 27:17 that iron sharpeneth iron, so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend, which is the written word putting pressure into the design, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies a question that neither man has to be brave enough to invent.

And look at what gets sharpened. The countenance. The face. That is a strange thing to say and it is exact: the face is where a person's state shows, and what a real friend does is bring somebody's actual condition to the surface where it can be seen.

Thirty years of the fixture list has kept both your faces exactly where they were.

You are able to bring a man's actual condition to the surface, and one question with weight in it has never once been an intrusion between brothers. The Spirit of God is the one who does the sharpening while two men stand beside a truck, and Proverbs 27 puts the friction and the friendship in the same sentence.

The one question

Here is the practical thing and it is one sentence.

How are you, actually.

That is it. The word actually is the whole mechanism, because it signals that the ordinary answer is not what is being asked for, and it does that without demanding anything, and it can be declined easily.

He may say fine. That is a legitimate answer and you take it and you move on to the game, and nothing has been lost.

You are able to ask a question that can be safely declined, and one word that opens a door has never once been the same as forcing one. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes two syllables carry more than they should, and it is written that a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.

And there is a rule with it, which is the hard half. Do not fill the pause.

When you ask it, there will be a gap. Three or four seconds, which will be the longest gap in thirty years of these conversations, and everything in you will want to rescue it with a remark about the weekend.

Let it sit. Whatever comes after that gap is the thing you have not heard in three decades.

You are able to hold four seconds of silence with your own brother, and a pause has never once been a thing that needed rescuing. The Spirit of God is what holds a man steady in the quiet, and Proverbs 27:17 assumes contact close enough to leave a mark.