Nobody Did Anything

There was never a row. That is the first thing you say when it comes up, which is rarely, and it is the thing that makes it impossible to explain.

Nobody said anything. Nobody did anything. There is no incident, not one, not even a small one you could point at and say it started there.

You were close. Genuinely: shared a room until you were fourteen, and there was a period in your twenties when you spoke most days.

And now you send a card at Christmas and she sends one back, and if you saw each other at a family thing you would both be perfectly warm about it, and neither of you has rung the other about nothing in about six years.

It did not happen at a moment. It happened at a rate.

And so there is nothing to look up. You have tried, in the way people do, and every page assumes a cause: a falling-out, a betrayal, a thing said at a funeral, a family split over money. Those have shapes. There is advice for those.

Yours has no shape. There is nothing to forgive, which sounds like it should be a relief and is not, because forgiveness is at least a road and you do not have one.

What this page will not do

I am not going to find you a cause. This is the part of the site where causes are refused, and in this case supplying one would be worse than useless: you would go and test it against six years and it would fail, and you would be back here with an extra theory.

I am not going to tell you to ring her. That is what everybody says. You have thought about it about four hundred times, and the reason you do not is not cowardice, it is that there is nothing to say, because a call about nothing is exactly the thing that has been missing and you cannot manufacture one on purpose. Scripture holds that ground in Psalm 55:6, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

I am not going to tell you what she is thinking. I do not know and neither do you, and it is entirely possible that she has a version of this page in her own head.

And I am not going to tell you it is normal at your age, or that families drift, because those are sentences people use to close a subject.

You are not overreacting to a nothing. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it does not require an incident before the break is recognized, and the Holy Spirit is on that step with somebody who has lost a sister without anybody doing a thing.

The verse is a wish, and it is left in

There is a line in Psalm 55 that people quote as though it were poetry and which is much stranger than that.

And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest.Psalm 55:6

That is a man saying he wishes he could leave.

Not that he will. Not that he should. He records the wish, and the psalm is about a betrayal by somebody close to him, and this is the sentence in the middle of it.

Notice what is not done with it. Nobody corrects him. There is no verse afterwards where he takes it back or explains that he did not mean it. It stands, in Scripture, as a thing a person said in the middle of losing somebody they were close to.

That is what is available to you tonight, and it is not much and it is real: there is language in the Bible for wanting to be out of a situation you cannot fix, and it was not tidied before it went in.

You are not required to have a constructive response. Scripture says oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest, Psalm 55:6, and it stands uncorrected rather than resolved, and the Holy Spirit is not asking anybody for a better attitude to a thing that has no handle on it.

Why there is nothing to do

Because there is no mechanism.

An estrangement with a cause has one: somebody did something, and the road back runs through that thing, and however hard it is at least it is a road.

Yours was produced by the absence of a great many small things over six years. Nobody stopped ringing; there was just no particular reason to ring on any given Tuesday, four hundred Tuesdays in a row.

You cannot reverse that by an act. There is no single call that undoes four hundred, and both of you would feel the strangeness of it, and that is precisely why neither of you has made it.

That is not a counsel of despair. It is an accurate description, and having it accurately is better than having four hundred failed attempts at a theory.

You are not failing to fix something fixable. Scripture says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men, Romans 12:18, and as much as lieth in you is an explicit limit written into the instruction, and the Holy Spirit is not holding you responsible for a thing that has no lever.

What is available

Not a plan. One thing.

Say her name out loud to God. Once. With no explanation attached, and no request, because you do not know what to ask for.

Not bring us back together, if that is not what you can honestly say. Not bless her, if that is a way of tidying it.

Just her name, said out loud, by somebody who used to share a room with her.

It sounds like almost nothing. It is the only thing on this page that is honest, and it will be the first time in six years that the loss has been put anywhere.

And then let it be unresolved. That is the hard instruction and it is the true one. It may stay like this. Some things do, and the Bible has a man wishing for wings and not getting them and the psalm continues anyway.

You are not required to resolve it in order to bring it. Scripture says pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us, Psalm 62:8, and pouring out requires no plan and no analysis, and the Holy Spirit is at work in a name said out loud on a doorstep.