They Always Said It About My Sister

In my family everybody had a job before they could walk.

One was the clever one. One was the funny one. One was the one who would look after everybody, which is a heavy thing to hand a child of six, and she carried it for fifty years and it was mostly true.

Nobody sat down and issued those. They emerged, from a hundred remarks at a hundred tables, and by the time anybody was old enough to object, the list had already been in force for years.

You had one. And your sister had one, and hers was about her face, and yours was something else, and everybody in that house knew both without anybody ever saying it out loud.

Here is the part I want to be honest about at the start.

Your sister did not do anything.

She was a child too. She was handed a role, exactly as you were, and hers came with its own weight, which you have probably never once considered because you have been standing on the other side of it.

A girl who is the pretty one is also a girl who is being watched, and measured, and who learns early that a great deal depends on something she did not choose and cannot keep.

That is not a soft job. It is a different hard one.

A list nobody has looked at since

Here is what I want you to notice about that list.

Nobody has consulted it in forty years.

The aunts who compiled it are gone or elderly. Your mother, if you asked her, would probably deny it and be genuinely upset at the suggestion. Nobody at any family gathering in the last two decades has arrived with the roles in mind, because everybody there is dealing with mortgages and knees and their own children.

The list is not in force anywhere on earth. It is being maintained in exactly one place, and it is being maintained faithfully, by the person it was applied to.

You are the sole keeper of a list that no living person has consulted in forty years, and it has never once been re-issued by anybody. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman where a thing is actually being kept, and Romans 12 has an instruction about what to do when somebody else is doing well.

And here is what it has cost, and this is the part that gets me.

It has cost you your sister.

Not entirely, and not visibly. But there is a small thing that happens when she is praised, or when she looks well, or when somebody says something about her at a wedding. It is not big. It is enough that you cannot be plainly glad, and being plainly glad about a sister is one of the good things a life contains.

You are separated from somebody by a list that nobody else keeps, and she has never once known there was anything between you. Scripture in Romans 12 says rejoice with them that do rejoice, and the Spirit of God is the one who gives a woman her sister back.

Rejoice with them that do rejoice

Paul gives an instruction that is two clauses long and one of the hardest things in the letters.

Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep. (Romans 12:15, King James Version)

Notice that both halves are hard, but not equally.

Weeping with somebody who weeps is difficult and everybody understands why. It costs time, and it is uncomfortable, and most people manage it because the need is visible.

You are being asked for the harder half rather than the easy one, and rejoicing with somebody has never once come as naturally as grieving with them. Romans 12 says rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep, and the Spirit of God is what makes the first half possible in a woman who was overlooked.

Rejoicing with somebody who rejoices is quietly much harder, and almost nobody says so. It requires that their good thing costs nothing, and where there is a ranking, their good thing always costs something, automatically, before anybody has had a chance to decide.

Which is why the instruction is there. Paul is not telling people to do the easy half.

You are given an instruction that assumes the difficulty rather than pretending it away, and Scripture has never once asked anybody to rejoice easily. It is written in Romans 12 that we rejoice with them that do rejoice, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes possible a gladness that a ranking has been blocking for forty years.

And notice what the verse does not ask.

It does not ask you to conclude that the list was wrong. It does not require a resolution about who was prettier, or an admission, or a conversation with anybody.

It asks for one action, in the present tense, toward a person. Rejoice with her. That is all, and it is a thing you do rather than a thing you feel, which means it is available tonight regardless of what forty years put in you.

You are asked for an action rather than a feeling, and no instruction in that verse has ever once required a settled heart first. The Spirit of God is what makes an action possible before the feeling has caught up, and the written word says rejoice with them that do rejoice.

One warm true thing, about her

So here is the assignment.

Say one warm true thing to or about your sister this week that has nothing to do with faces.

To her if you speak. About her, to somebody else, if you do not.

And keep it away from appearance entirely, in both directions. Not that she is lovely, which keeps her in the role, and not that she has aged, which is the ranking wearing a different coat.

She is the reason our mother had anybody in that last year. She is funnier than anybody in this family and nobody says so. She has held a hard marriage together and I have never once told her I noticed.

Here is why it works. The list requires her to be a face. One true sentence about anything else takes her out of the category the list needs, and a list cannot rank a whole person.

You are able to take your sister out of a role by naming one thing that is actually true of her, and no ranking anywhere has ever once survived a whole person. The written word in Romans 12 asks for an act toward somebody rather than a resolution about them, and the Holy Spirit is what turns one sentence into care rather than into an effort.