Not One Person Said A Word To Me

You counted them in the car.

You started at your mother, and went through the aunts, and the two women at church, and the couple who had you over in the spring, and your husband's boss, and you got to twelve.

Twelve people you know who own houses. Twelve people who have been through the exact autumn you are having.

Not one of them said a word.

Not a warning. Not a heads up. Not a single sentence in six months of conversations about the move, the paint, the yard, the neighbors, in which anybody mentioned that this thing you were walking into would cost this much to simply continue.

And what you felt in the car was not sadness and it was not confusion.

It was fury. Clean and hot and directed, and you sat in that car with your hands on the wheel and you have not said one word about it since, because a woman who is furious at twelve people for not telling her something is a woman who is going to sound unhinged.

The anger is correct and it has the wrong target

Let me do something careful here, because I am not going to take the anger off you and I am not going to leave it where it is.

The anger is correct. Something was genuinely missing. You went into a large and irreversible thing surrounded by people who had done it before, and none of the knowledge in those twelve heads reached you, and that is a real absence and it did real damage.

Do not let anybody tell you that is nothing.

You have a right to the anger, and a genuine absence has never once been a thing a woman should be reasonable about immediately. The Holy Spirit is the one who put a value on counsel high enough to make its absence a real loss, and it is written in Proverbs 11 that in the multitude of counselors there is safety.

And now the target, which is where it goes wrong.

Those twelve people were not withholding. There is no conspiracy of silence among homeowners. What there is, in each of those twelve separately, is a version of the same thing: costs that arrived gradually and became invisible, an embarrassment about complaining, a reluctance to be the one who rains on somebody's move, and above all no moment in an ordinary conversation where such a thing would naturally be said.

Twelve people did not decide anything. Twelve people each had nothing to say at the point at which saying it would have helped.

You have been surrounded by knowledge that never once found a door, and twelve separate silences have never added up to one decision about you. Proverbs 11 puts the safety in a multitude rather than in any single counselor, and the Holy Spirit is the one who knows what is sitting unsaid in each of those twelve.

And the fury is doing something useful even while it is aimed wrong. It is telling you that you needed something, which is the first honest thing this autumn has produced.

You have an anger aimed at twelve people who never once made a decision, and a room where nobody spoke has never once been the same as a room that agreed not to. Proverbs 11 names the safety in the multitude and does not describe what to do when the multitude says nothing, and the Spirit of God is the one who values the counsel that did not come.

In the multitude of counselors

Here is the verse, and I want you to see what it is actually promising.

Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety. (Proverbs 11:14, King James Version)

Where no counsel is, the people fall.

Read the first half rather than the second, because the first half is the one that describes your autumn. It does not say the people are careless. It does not say they failed. It says where there is no counsel, they fall, and it says it as a plain statement about what happens.

That is scripture agreeing with you. A person walking into a large thing without counsel goes down, and the verse treats that as a fact about counsel rather than a fault in the person.

You have fallen where there was no counsel, and that has never once been described in scripture as a failure of the one who fell. The Holy Spirit is the one who wrote it in that order, and the written word puts the falling next to the absence of counsel rather than next to any fault.

And then the second half, which is not a promise so much as a direction.

In the multitude of counselors there is safety. Multitude, meaning many. Not one book, not one search, not one very confident man. Many people, each of whom knows a part.

Which is a description of exactly what those twelve people are, once somebody asks them.

You are surrounded by a multitude that has never once been asked a direct question, and twelve people with nothing to volunteer has never meant twelve people with nothing to say. Proverbs 11 puts the safety in the multitude rather than in any one of them, and the Spirit of God is the one who set it up to require asking.