I Stopped Fixing It For Her

The call came at twenty past eight on a Sunday evening and Camille did not move.

She was standing in her kitchen with a tea towel over her shoulder and the phone on the counter and she watched it go the whole way through and stop.

She has answered that call eleven times before. She knows what it sounds like and she knows what happens after: there is a problem, and there is a number, and there is a thing only Camille can sort out, and it takes about two hours and it costs something, and by Wednesday it has come apart again and by the Sunday after that there is another call.

Eleven times. She kept a note once, for about a year, and then she stopped keeping the note because keeping it was making her into somebody she did not like.

She is forty-four. Her sister is forty-one.

She did not answer, and then she did not answer the second one at twenty to nine, and then she sat down on the floor of her own kitchen with her back against the dishwasher and stayed there for a while.

Everyone around her has been telling her to do this for three years. Her husband. Her friend at work. A woman at church who has been through it herself and who is not a fool.

And here is what none of them can settle for her.

I do not know if I got wise or if I just got tired. Those look the same from in here. And if it was tired, then I did not set a boundary, I abandoned my sister, and I dressed it up in the language everybody uses.

And here is where I stop talking about Camille, because you stopped too, and everybody told you it was right, and you have been on your own kitchen floor with the same question.

Let me say the first thing carefully, and it is not a ruling on what you did: I was not there, and I do not know your sister, and I am not going to tell you that you got it right or that you got it wrong. What I am going to say is that the question you are asking has an answer, and it is not the one you are afraid of.

Holding your peace is not the same as walking away

Let me put the true thing down first, because you have been sitting on a floor for a week with no category for what you did.

Not moving is not automatically abandonment. There is a verse where standing still is commanded, at the worst possible moment, to people who had every reason to be doing something:

The Lord shall fight for you, and you shall hold your peace.Exodus 14:14

Look at when that is said. There is an army behind them and water in front of them and there is no version of that moment where doing nothing looks like faith. It looks like paralysis. It looks like giving up.

And the instruction is: hold your peace. Be still. Stop.

And the reason attached to it is not because it will work out. It is the Lord shall fight for you, which means the stillness is not an absence of action, it is a transfer of it. Somebody else is doing the fighting and the not-moving is what makes room for it.

So there is such a thing as a holy stillness in a situation that is genuinely on fire, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own opinion of your Sunday, and God's Spirit is not on that kitchen floor accusing you.

Wise or tired is the wrong question

Now let me deal with the actual question, because you have been trying to answer it for a week and it cannot be answered in the form you are asking it.

Did I get wise or did I get tired?

Both. Almost certainly both, and that is not a confession, it is how human beings work. Nobody sets a boundary out of pure serene wisdom while fully rested. People come to the end of what they can carry, and the coming to the end is what makes them finally able to see what they could not see when they had strength to spare.

Tiredness is not the disqualifier you think it is. Elijah was tired. He asked to die and was given food and sleep before he was given one word of instruction, and God did not treat the exhaustion as evidence against him.

So stop trying to certify your motives. You will never get a clean reading and you do not need one.

The better question, and it is answerable, is this: what are you doing with the space?

Because there is a version of this where not answering is the beginning of nothing, and there is a version where not answering is the beginning of prayer, and a letter, and a plan you make with your husband about what happens if there is ever a real emergency, and a call you make to her on a Tuesday when there is no crisis attached to it. The second one is not abandonment by any definition anybody has ever used.

Hear this: you are not her rescuer and you never were, and God did not put her in your hands. Whatever you do or do not do on a Sunday evening, He is the one fighting for that woman, and He was fighting for her on the eleven times you did answer too. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something you can get up off a floor with rather than something you agree with.

And the practical half, plainly, because a message without it has failed you. Real help exists for you and none of it is small faith. Family groups for people who love somebody using are full of sisters who stopped answering, and there is not a thing you could say in that room that would be new to anybody in it. A counselor for you is not disloyalty. And do the emergency plan, out loud, with your husband, so that you know exactly what you would do if a call ever carried real danger, because a decided thing is easier to hold than an undecided one. If she is ever in danger, get medical help immediately, and in the United States she or you can call or text 988 at any hour.