I Go to Both Christmases

He leaves the first one at twenty past two and everybody knows it and nobody says anything.

Seven years ago there was one gathering. There had been one gathering since before Manu was born, in the same house, with the same thirty-odd people, and something happened at it that Manu was not in the room for and that has never been discussed with him in full.

Now there are two.

They are on the same day. They are eleven minutes apart by car. Neither of them acknowledges the existence of the other, and both of them ask after people who are at the other one, using a form of words that Manu could reproduce for you exactly.

And he goes to both.

He is the only one who does. Everybody else settled, in the way people do, over about eighteen months, and now there is a first family and a second family and nobody uses those words and everybody knows.

He is forty-eight.

He does the drive, and it is eleven minutes, and he has come to dread those eleven minutes more than any other part of the year, because they are the only part of the day where he is not being anything for anybody and the whole shape of it is in the car with him.

And what he cannot say to either half, and has not said to his wife in seven years, is that he does not go to both out of strength.

He goes because if he settled, that would be it. Two families, permanently, with nobody left who is in both rooms, and the last thread would be gone and it would be gone because he let go of it.

So he holds it. And he is tired in a way that neither half has any idea about, because to each of them he is simply somebody who comes.

And you may know that drive. Yours may be shorter or longer, and you may be the only one still doing it, and nobody may have thanked you once.

The psalm calls it good and pleasant, which means it knows the alternative

Let me take something off you before anything else, because you have carried it seven years and it was never yours.

You are not the last thread. You never were. Scripture calls people dwelling together good and pleasant, and does not make one person responsible for arranging it, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your driving, who joins a family. Set that down here at the rail. It is heavy and it has been in the car with you every December.

Now hear the line, and hear that it is an exclamation rather than an instruction.

How good and pleasant it is when God's people live together in unity!Psalm 133:1

How good and pleasant.

There is no command in that sentence. Nobody is being told to arrange anything. It is a man looking at something and saying out loud how good it is, the way you would about weather or a harvest.

Which tells you two things at once.

It tells you that the thing you want is genuinely good, and that your wanting it is not sentimentality or weakness, and that Scripture is on the same side of it as you are, and His Spirit is the one who put the wanting in you.

And it tells you, by the way it is written, that it is the kind of thing a person exclaims about rather than the kind a person manufactures. The psalm goes on to compare it to oil running down and dew coming down on the mountains, and both of those are things that arrive from above and neither is something anybody arranges from below.

That is written, and His Spirit is the one who brings it down, and He has never once put a family on one man with a car.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch on this side and I have no intention of putting you in it.

Nothing here says you should stop going to both. Do not decide that off a page. Those eleven minutes may be the best thing anybody in that family does all year, and God is entirely capable of using a man who keeps turning up in both rooms.

And nothing here says the ones who settled were wrong or weak. They were not. People settle because holding two things is not survivable for most people and they were honest about their own limits, and Scripture does not need them to be villains.

The point is only about who is carrying what, and Scripture puts the unity in the category of things that come down, and His Spirit is the one who brings it.

Here is the plain part, and I will say it straight because you are a straight man. You are not going to be thanked.

Not because they do not love you. Because to each half you are simply somebody who comes, and a man who is in both rooms is invisible in both, and seven years of that is genuinely tiring and you have been right to be tired. His word never made notice the measure and His Spirit has seen every drive.