The Strong One

The phone went at ten past four, which is the time it usually goes, because that is when people finish thinking about a thing and decide to call somebody about it.

Her niece this time. Forty minutes. A real problem, and she was genuinely glad to be called, and the girl was in better shape at the end than at the beginning, and that is not nothing.

She has been doing this since she was about nineteen.

Her mother called her about her father. Her brother has called about every job he ever had. Her sister-in-law called from a parking lot once and talked two hours. Her own children call, which is normal and right. A woman from church who is not really a friend calls, and she takes those too.

She is sixty-four. If you drew the family as a diagram, every line would come into her, and not one would go out.

And she is sitting at her own kitchen table with the phone face down in front of her and the tea gone cold, and what she has just understood, and could not have said out loud a year ago, is this: nobody gave her that job. Nobody decided it. It was assigned, at some point around nineteen, by a process nobody was running, and she accepted it before she knew she was accepting anything, and every single person in that family would be genuinely astonished to hear it described as an arrangement.

They think that is who she is.

And so does she, mostly. That is the part that has taken a year. She has believed it about herself for forty-five years, and she is good at it, and there is real satisfaction in being the one who can be called, and she would not swap it for being the one nobody rings.

But she has never once been on the other end of that call.

Not once. Not through her husband's illness. Not through the year with her youngest. She has been called about all of it, by people wanting to know how she was managing, and she has managed, and she has told them so.

And you know that table. You would rather be looked at than known, and being the strong one is the most respectable version of that available, and it has been running so long that it now looks like a personality.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not the family's structure and it will not come down without you. Psalm 55:22 says cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee, and sustain is a word about holding somebody up rather than about them holding, and the Holy Spirit is at this table with you.

Both halves in one breath

There is a verse in Nahum, which is not a book anybody reads for comfort, and it sits in the middle of some of the harshest material in the prophets, and it says two things in one breath that belong together.

The LORD is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him.Nahum 1:7

A stronghold, and He knows them.

Those are two entirely different offers and most people only ever hear the first. A stronghold is a fortress, a place to get behind, protection, structure, something that holds. That is the half a woman like you has been supplying to nine people for forty-five years, and it is the half you understand.

And the verse does not stop there. And he knoweth them that trust in him.

Not: He protects them. Not: He is impressed by them. He knows them. Which is a completely different thing from sheltering somebody, and it is put in the same sentence, without a break, as though the writer could not imagine offering one without the other.

That is the whole matter for a woman who has been a stronghold since she was nineteen. You have been supplying half of that verse to your entire family, at considerable cost, for four and a half decades. And the half you have never once received is the second one, and it is the one that verse insists comes with it.

You are known by the One who is the fortress, and the two arrive together. The written word puts the stronghold and the knowing in a single sentence with no interval between them, which means being strong for people was never supposed to be a substitute for being known by somebody; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a kitchen at ten to five.

And notice where it sits. Nahum is a book about a city being taken apart. That verse is a single line of light in the middle of it, which tells you something about when it is for.

Nobody assigned it and nobody can lift it

I want to be exact about the arrangement, because you got most of the way there and stopped at the part that matters.

You worked out that nobody gave you the job. That is right and it took a year. What you have not yet worked out is the consequence, which is that nobody can take it off you either.

There is no committee. There is no person in that family who could ring you up and say: you are relieved. Your brother could not do it. Your children could not. It was not conferred, so it cannot be revoked, and if you sit at that table waiting for somebody to notice and release you, you will sit there for another twenty years, because everybody involved believes they are describing your character rather than occupying a position.

Which means, and this is the hard part, that nothing about this changes unless you change it, and the change is not that you stop taking calls.

You were not assigned it by anybody who could lift it, and waiting for that is a wait with no end in it. Isaiah 46:4 says even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and deliver you, and the verse says carry four separate times about somebody who is now old; His Spirit is the one doing that carrying, and He is not counting your forty-five years.

And here is the second half, and I want to be careful because this is the last category on this whole site and the temptation here would be to tell you what to say and who to say it to.

I am not going to. Nothing on this page will tell you to unburden yourself to your sister, or to your children, or to the woman from church. You know that family better than any page could, and the choosing of the person and the thing is yours entirely and it stays yours.

You are choosing both the what and the whom, and no page and no family gets a vote. Ecclesiastes 4:10 says woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up, and it is a plain observation about how people are built rather than an instruction about who; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who has been at this table for every one of those calls.

The other end of the call

Here is the practical thing, and it is smaller than what you are picturing.

You are picturing a large disclosure. A conversation in which the strong one comes apart and somebody has to catch her, and the whole family has to reorganize around a new fact, and frankly you have no appetite for it and you never will.

That is not what is needed and it is not what this asks.

What is missing from your life is not a collapse. It is one person, chosen by you in advance, who knows one true thing about how you actually are. Not the family. Not a summit. One person, one thing, said out loud.

And it can be quite an ordinary thing. It only has to be true and about you and current, and said to somebody who has not been in the habit of ringing you for help.

You are one sentence and one chosen person away, and it is not the collapse you have been declining for forty-five years. Scripture says the Lord is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble, and he knoweth them that trust in him, and the knowing is offered to the one behind the wall as well as to everybody sheltering there; the Holy Spirit is the one who has been the fortress behind the fortress the whole time.

So the table is not a place where a strong woman sits alone. It is a scrubbed table and a phone face down and cold tea, and a woman who has held nine people up for forty-five years, and Somebody in the room who has been holding her up while she did it and would like her to know it.

And one plain thing. If what you are holding is heavier than a page can carry, find a real person this week. If it has gone darker than tired, call or text 988.