Asking Looks Like Weakness Where I Am From

Her mother did not ask for anything, ever, and died at ninety one having never once been in anybody's debt.

That is how the family says it, at funerals and at Christmas, in a tone of considerable pride, and every one of them means it as a compliment.

She has thought about that sentence a great deal in the last two years.

Her mother was on her own from fifty two. She did the roof herself, badly. She had a broken wrist for a fortnight before she told anybody and told them then only because she could not open a tin. There is a well known story about a hedge and a borrowed ladder in which the point of the story is that she gave the ladder back within the hour.

Nobody in that family has ever asked anybody for anything, four generations of it, and they are all very proud of it and half of them are quite lonely.

She is seventy four.

She takes people to appointments. She does the rota for the flowers. She sat with a man for three nights in the spring because his daughter was in Canada and could not get back.

She has never asked one person to come with her to any of it.

And in April, at a funeral, standing outside a crematorium in the wind, somebody she likes said: you should have said, I would have come.

And she heard herself say: oh, there was no need.

She went home and thought about it and could not work out, genuinely could not work out, how the other sentence would go. She has no idea what words a person uses. She has watched other people do it her whole life and it has never once gone in.

Two are better than one, and the verse gives a reason

Sit down at the table a minute, because there is a sentence in Ecclesiastes that says the thing your family has spent four generations disproving, and it does not scold anybody, it explains.

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.Ecclesiastes 4:9

Two are better than one, because.

It is an argument, not a rebuke. Nobody in that passage is being told off for being proud. The writer sets out a practical case, in the plainest terms available, about labor and falling and getting up, and the case is that one person is worse off and here is why.

And notice the word woe. It is not aimed at the person who asks. It is aimed at the situation of the one who is alone when he falls, and it is the only tone of pity in the whole paragraph.

Hear this in your own kitchen. You are not stronger for going alone, and the written word is what settles it, not sentiment. Scripture makes a plain practical case that two are better and calls the solitary fall a woe, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been with you at every appointment and on all three of those nights in the spring.

Now let me say something careful about your mother, because I am not going to have her in this article as a warning.

She was formidable. She did the roof. She raised a family from fifty two with nothing and she did not complain, and there is a real virtue in that and half the people reading this could not have done it.

And the sentence the family repeats about her, never once in anybody's debt, is not a description of a virtue. It is a description of a fence, and she built it, and she was probably lonelier inside it than any of you ever knew, and you have inherited the fence rather than the strength.

Hear this too, and let it settle where the wind outside the crematorium is still sitting. You are not becoming weak, and Scripture is what says so. What is written argues the case for two on the grounds of labor and falling, and the Spirit of God has never once counted a request as a debt, and there is no ledger in heaven with your family's name at the top of it.

And now the practical difficulty, which is real and which nobody else in this will name.

You genuinely do not know how the sentence goes. That is not a figure of speech. Seventy four years without one model of it means the words are not available, and being told to ask is like being told to speak a language nobody spoke in the house.

So here is the sentence. It is nine words and you may have it.

Would you come with me on Thursday, about two.

That is all of it. No reason, no apology, no explanation of why you could manage perfectly well alone, because the explanation is where four generations of the fence lives and it will come out of you automatically if you leave room for it.