The Choice That Was Never Mine

It is two in the morning and you have two paths open in two windows, and you are comparing them line by line as though the comparison were yours to finish.

You have read the trial summaries. You have read the patient information for both, and then the fuller versions written for clinicians, and you have looked up eleven words. You have found a forum where people describe the second one and you have read forty of their accounts and you now know which side effect appears most often at week three.

You have a page of notes. It is genuinely good work.

And in the morning your mother will sit in a room with a consultant, and the two of them will decide, and you will be in a chair by the window with your notes on your knee.

That is the shape of it and it has not changed since Thursday.

You are not researching in order to advise. You know she has not asked you to advise. You are researching because being informed is the only thing available to you, and doing nothing at two in the morning while your mother is ill is a thing your body will not permit.

So you read. And at some point in the last week the reading changed. It stopped being preparation for a conversation and started being a rehearsal for a decision you are not going to be making.

That is what has been costing you, and it is not the information.

What this page is not going to do

I am not going to tell you which path. I have not seen her notes, I am not qualified, and a page on the internet that leans on a treatment decision has no business existing.

I am not going to tell you to stop reading. Go to the appointment. Take your questions. Being the daughter who has read carefully is a real gift to a woman who is frightened and tired and cannot hold everything she is told in a room.

And I am not going to tell you that faith would have you calmer. Faith is not a sedative and the people who present it as one have not sat up at two in the morning with a page of notes about their mother.

What I am going to do is give you back something you have been carrying that was never handed to you.

You are not required to be the one who knows enough. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and nearness is not offered on condition of composure, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is on that step at two in the morning with a woman and a laptop.

The verse is about where the waiting is pointed

There is a line in Psalm 62 written by somebody in the middle of something that had not resolved.

My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him.Psalm 62:5

Look at two words in it.

Only. He is not saying he has no other sources. He had counselors, he had messengers, he had people bringing him information all day. He is saying that the waiting itself, the thing his soul does while it does not know, is pointed at one place.

And expectation. It is a leaning-forward word. It is what a person is holding out for, and every human being in an unresolved week is holding out for something.

The question the verse asks you is not whether you should read. It is what you are holding out for while you read. Scripture holds that ground in Psalm 62:5, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

Because you have been holding your expectation out toward the information. You have been waiting, at two in the morning, for a paragraph to arrive that settles which path is right, and the paragraph is not coming, and the waiting has been pointed at a place that cannot answer.

You are not waiting on a source that has nothing to give. Scripture says my soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him, Psalm 62:5, and the waiting is redirected rather than ended, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a person's expectation around at an hour when nothing else can.

Informed is not the same as in charge

This is the distinction to take to bed tonight, and it will cost you less than everything else you have tried. This rests on Scripture in Psalm 62:5, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

Being informed is good and you already are. Being in charge is not yours and has never been yours, and somewhere in the last week your reading stopped serving the first and started attempting the second.

Notice how you can tell. Preparation asks: what should I understand so that I can help her hold this? Rehearsal asks: which one is right? The first has a stopping point, because there is a finite set of things worth understanding. The second does not, because you are not the one deciding, so no amount of understanding ever completes it. Scripture already said it in Psalm 62:5, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

That is why the notes have grown and the relief has not.

And there is something underneath it that is worth naming plainly. If you decide, in some private part of yourself, which path is correct, then you have also assigned yourself the blame if the other one is chosen and goes badly. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Psalm 62:5, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

You have been quietly taking on a responsibility that nobody gave you, in a situation where there is more than enough to carry already.

You are not the one who has to get this right. Scripture says every man shall bear his own burden, Galatians 6:5, and it hands each person their own rather than piling the household's onto whoever cannot sleep, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody put down a job they were never assigned.

What is actually yours

Here is the part that will help in the morning, and it is smaller and much better than the thing you have been attempting. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Psalm 62:5, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

You are not the decider. You are the one who remembers. I have no authority to say that by myself. Scripture carries it in Psalm 62:5, and the Holy Spirit carries it to you.

In that room your mother will be told several things and will retain about a third of them, because that is what happens to everybody in a consulting room, including doctors when they are the patient. What she needs is somebody in the chair by the window who writes it down, who asks the question she is too polite to ask, and who can repeat it all back to her on Thursday when she cannot remember whether he said six weeks or eight.

That is a real job. It is yours. It is the reason the reading has been worth doing.

And it does not require you to have an opinion about which path is correct.

You are not without a place in this. Scripture says bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, Galatians 6:2, and bearing is described as coming alongside rather than taking over, and the Holy Spirit is at work in a daughter sitting quietly in a chair with a pen.