I Blessed Their Marriage Every Night Since I Was Nineteen

You started in the November of your second year, in a room in a shared house with a broken radiator, and you have never once told a living person.

You were nineteen and you had come home for a weekend and something in that house was wrong in a way you could not name and both of them were being extremely pleasant about it.

So on the Sunday night, back in the shared house, you said a thing out loud in the dark over the pair of them. You did not know what you were doing. You were not even sure you believed it. You had heard something like it at a wedding.

And then you did it again the next night, because it felt worse not to.

Eight years. You have said it in student accommodation, in a hostel in another country, on the night before an exam, on the night your grandmother died, in a hotel room after a night out at about four in the morning when you were in no state to say anything at all.

You never told them. You never told your sister. You did not tell a boyfriend of three years.

They separated in the spring. Both of them told you separately, both of them well, both of them careful, and neither of them is a villain and you have never once wanted them to be.

And now it is a Tuesday in a small flat with a lamp on and you are twenty-seven, and there is a question in you with nowhere to go, because there is nobody you can ask it of without explaining eight years first.

What was I doing?

God drew the line Himself

Sit there a minute. I am not going to tell you it was beautiful that you did it, because that is not what you asked.

Let me put the true thing down first, and Scripture will hold me to it and the Spirit will not have me being warm at you instead of honest: you did not fail. Nothing in this article is going to suggest that a different wording, or more belief, or saying it out loud instead of under your breath, or starting earlier, would have held it together. Anybody who implies that to you is guessing, and what they are actually doing is putting two adults' decision on a nineteen year old, and God has never once done that.

Now come and look at a sentence where God draws a line and puts things on either side of it.

The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.Deuteronomy 29:29

Two territories, named by God, in one sentence.

The secret things: outcomes, the inside of other people, what happens next, what would have happened otherwise. His side. Not withheld out of meanness; simply not yours, and never issued to you.

The revealed things: what He has said and what He has told us to do. Ours. And note the last clause, which is the reason He gives for the division. That we may do. The line exists so that a person can get on with the part that is actually theirs instead of drowning in the part that is not.

You have been standing in the revealed territory for eight years, and the thing you are grading yourself on tonight was never issued to you. That is not me being kind to somebody at twenty-seven. That is what is written, and the division God draws and the reason He gives for it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it on the end of a bed with a lamp on.

Here is what nobody explains about blessing two people you love. When you said those words in the dark, you were not operating a marriage. You were agreeing out loud with what God had already said. Your mouth is a door. God is the one going through it, and He does not overrule what two grown people decide, and neither did you, and neither were you ever meant to.

A blessing is not an input, and a separation is not its readout. Scripture is explicit that every one of us shall give account of himself to God (Romans 14:12), which is God assigning each person their own file, and the Spirit has never once put your parents' file in your hands, whatever you have been carrying since the spring.

What a nineteen year old took on

Now let me name something gently, because it is the part I actually came for.

At nineteen, in a cold room, you did the only thing available to somebody who could feel that a house was wrong and had no power to do anything about it. That is not superstition and it is not a bargain. It is a young woman doing the one thing she could reach.

What is written never asked for secrecy or forbade it, and the Spirit was in every one of those rooms either way. But there is something that happens when a person is the only one who knows they are doing it. It becomes theirs. Nobody else is on the rota. And after eight years of being the only one, you were, in your own private accounting, holding something up.

And when it came down, the only person in the arrangement was you.

That is not arrogance and I will not call it that. It is what secrecy does to responsibility. And what is written never once put that weight on you, and the Spirit has not been keeping a column with your name at the top of it.

God did not ask you to hold your parents' marriage together, and He has never made two adults' choices the grade on a daughter's obedience. It is written that every man shall bear his own burden (Galatians 6:5), a few verses after the instruction to bear one another's burdens, and the two sentences are not a contradiction: there is a load you can help carry and a load that is a person's own, and the Spirit who breathed both lines has never confused the two.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you they will get back together if you keep going, and I am not telling you they will not. That is not mine to hand you and I would not trade it for eight years of your nights. And I am not telling you to tell them, either. If you never say a word of this to either of them for the rest of your life, that is entirely fine.

What I can put in your hands is this: eight years of words did not come back to God empty, and they were never only about a marriage. God's word does not come back to Him void (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and every one of those nights had two people in it who are both still alive and both still yours and are going to need a daughter for a long time yet.