I Have To Be In A Room With Them

There is a person who will be there.

You have known that since the arrangements were made, and it is sitting underneath the whole thing. Not loudly. It is the reason a small part of you is bracing, and the reason the day is not a day you can look forward to cleanly.

And I want to be careful, because I do not know what happened between you. It might be one enormous thing. It might be twenty years of small ones. It might be something nobody in that family has ever named out loud, that everybody knows about.

So I am not going to tell you what to do about the relationship, and I am not going to give you a route to a better one.

Here is what this article will not ask of you, and I want it said early because you have probably been braced for all three.

It will not ask you to forgive them today. It will not ask you to be reconciled. And it will not ask you to feel warmly toward them, or to work on feeling warmly, or to pray until the feeling changes.

You have been told all of that, most likely by somebody who has not been in a room with them. And it has probably made things worse, because it added failing at forgiveness to the original injury, and now you carry two things into that room instead of one.

The aim here is smaller and it is entirely yours: to get through the room without losing yourself in it.

As much as lieth in you

There is a sentence in Romans about living at peace, and the qualifications inside it are the whole thing.

If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men. (Romans 12:18, King James Version)

If it be possible, as much as lieth in you.

Two qualifications, in one short sentence, before the instruction arrives.

If it be possible. Which admits, in the text itself, that sometimes it is not. That is not a loophole somebody found later. It is written into the verse, by Paul, who knew exactly what he was writing to.

And then: as much as lieth in you. Your part. The portion that is actually yours. Not the outcome, not their behavior, not whether the relationship comes right, and not how the day ends up going.

That is a boundary drawn by God around your responsibility, and most people who quote this verse quote only the last four words, which turns a carefully limited instruction into an unlimited demand.

You are answerable for your part. You have never been answerable for theirs.

You are responsible for what lies in you and no further, and heaven has never once made you answerable for how they behave. Romans 12:18 puts two limits on the instruction before it gives it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands a person back the boundary that other people have quoted away.

Civility is not surrender

Here is the thing I want to give you for the room itself.

You can be polite to somebody without giving them anything.

I think that has got confused. Somewhere it started to feel like being civil to a person who hurt you is a kind of agreement, a signal that it was not that bad, or that you have let it go. So the choice looks like being cold, which costs you the day and makes you the difficult one, or being warm, which feels like lying.

There is a third thing and it is what most adults do in most hard rooms. Ordinary courtesy, held deliberately, with nothing behind it.

Passing the salt is not absolution. Asking about somebody's journey is not a statement about the past. You can say hello, and mean nothing more by it than hello, and that is not hypocrisy: it is a decision to conduct yourself the way you want to conduct yourself, in a room, on a day, in front of people you love.

The point of that is not their comfort. It is that you get to leave that room as somebody you recognize.

You are able to be courteous without conceding anything, and it has never once been the same as saying it was all right. The written word limits the instruction to your own part and to what is possible, and the Spirit of God is the one who holds a person steady in a room they did not choose.

One sentence you will say, one you will not

So here is the assignment, and it is done before the day.

Decide in advance one sentence you will say, and one you will not.

The one you will say is your opening. Something plain and short that you have already chosen: hello, good to see you, how was the drive. Having it decided means you are not composing under pressure in a hallway, which is where people either freeze or say something they have been holding for a year.

The one you will not say is the important half. You know what it is. It is the sentence that starts as a small remark and is actually the whole thing, and every year some version of it comes out, and afterwards you feel worse and nothing is better.

Decide now that you are not saying it. Not because they do not deserve it, and not because you are being the bigger person. Because saying it has never once worked, and because you would rather come away with the day intact than with that sentence delivered.

Romans 12:18 limits your responsibility to your own part before it asks anything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a hallway when a person keeps a decision they made in advance.

You are able to decide both sentences before you arrive, and it has never once been possible to choose them well in the moment. Romans 12:18 says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody keeping their own line in a hard room.