What The Going Cost Them

Kimo went, and it was probably right, and his daughter was eleven and it cost her a school and three friends and about two years of being new.

That is the sentence he has never said out loud in that order.

He has said parts of it. He has said the going was right, many times, to many people, and he believes it. He has said that children are resilient, which is a true thing and also a thing people say when they need it to be true. He has described the whole period as a hard season and moved the conversation on, and the moving on is so practiced now that nobody notices it happening, including him.

What he has not said, in nineteen years, is the middle clause. It cost her.

He thought about it at the end of a long day on the sand, watching a game in the shallows, with two of his own grandchildren leaning on him. His daughter is thirty now. She is well. She is, by every measure available, fine, and she is warm with him and rings on Sundays and there is nothing broken between them.

And he does not know, and has never asked, what that two years actually was for her.

Now let me stay here rather than hurrying, because a message that rushes past this does damage.

There is a particular weight that sits on a person who went somewhere and took other people with them who did not choose it. It is not guilt exactly, because guilt implies you did wrong and Kimo may well not have. It is closer to an unpaid account: a cost that was real, that was borne by somebody else, and that has never been named in their hearing or his.

And the reason it never gets named is not callousness. It is that naming it seems to imply the going was wrong, and he does not believe the going was wrong, so he has never found a sentence that holds both.

If that is you, I am not going to hurry you off it, and I am not going to tell you it was fine.

You have your own version. You went, or you stayed, or you took a thing on, and somebody who did not get a vote paid part of the price, and you have never once put it into words in their hearing.

What was around Paul when he went

There is a half-verse at the end of the argument in Acts 15 that is easy to read past, and it is the only detail I want from that chapter.

And Paul chose Silas, and departed, being recommended by the brethren unto the grace of God.Acts 15:40

Being recommended by the brethren.

That is the second time in a few chapters that this phrase attaches to a going, and it is doing something. A sending in that book is almost never a solitary act. It has a room around it. There are people who know, who agree, who are on the hook for it in some way, and who will be there when the person comes back.

That is not a rule about paperwork. It is a description of what a sending tends to look like, and it is worth having for a man on a beach, because it names a resource he may not have had.

And a going that was surrounded is a different thing from a bolt. That is not my construction: the written word puts the commending of the brethren into the sentence alongside the departing, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in somebody nineteen years downstream, wondering what his was.

And you are not being asked to grade it now. The word says judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, and before the time covers a great deal of what a man does to himself at the end of a long day, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a genuine release rather than a delay.

The cost was real, and naming it is not a verdict

Here is the thing that has kept Kimo silent for nineteen years, and it is worth taking apart.

He believes that saying it cost her is the same as saying I was wrong. That is why he has never said the middle clause: because he does not believe the second thing and he assumes the first drags it in.

It does not. Those are two entirely separate statements and a great deal of peace lives in the gap between them.

A sending can cost people. In fact, in Scripture, it almost always does, and the text does not pretend otherwise or tidy it up. Paul's goings cost the churches he left, cost the people who housed him, and cost Mark an argument so sharp it split a partnership in the verses immediately before this one.

Nothing in that chapter suggests the cost proves the going was false. And nothing in it suggests the cost was nothing, either.

And you are permitted to hold both. The word says a man's heart deviseth his way, but the Lord directeth his steps, which is a sentence that leaves genuine human decision and genuine divine direction in the same breath without resolving the tension, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person live in that rather than needing it flattened.

And your daughter's two years have not been lost track of. The word says He putteth my tears into His bottle, and it is said about the person weeping rather than about the person who caused it, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a comfort about somebody else rather than only about oneself.

The thing that is actually available

I am not going to tell you to go and have a conversation. I do not know your family, I do not know what nineteen years has settled or unsettled, and a stranger who sends somebody into a hard conversation at the wrong hour has done real damage and will never see it.

But there is a thing available tonight that is not a conversation, and it is this.

You can say the middle clause out loud, on your own, to God, without it being a confession of error.

It cost her. Three words. Said once, honestly, without the sentence about resilience attached to the end of it and without the defense of the going attached to the front.

That is not an admission. It is an acknowledgement, and there is a very large difference, and nineteen years of not being able to find a sentence that holds both has been nineteen years of carrying something with no handle.

And you are not going to be accused for saying it. The word says there is now no condemnation for them which are in Christ Jesus, and it is the Spirit who makes that true in a body, so a man can name a real cost out loud without bracing for what comes next.