He worked it out in a supermarket, which is where these things happen.
He was standing in front of a shelf, not looking at it, and he was doing the thing he has done for eleven years, which is running a version of a conversation. What he would say. What the answer would be. Where it would go from there.
And a sentence arrived from somewhere and sat down in the middle of it, and the sentence was this: he has never once indicated that he wants any of this.
Eleven years. Every one of them spent working out how to accept an offer, adjust to an offer, meet an offer partway. And in eleven years the other man has never said a word that suggested there was an offer, and has behaved, consistently and without variation, like somebody who is not in a negotiation at all.
He stood in that aisle for a while.
And here is what he has never said out loud to anybody: he has been the only participant in this for over a decade, and finding that out has been worse than any of the eleven years, and he does not yet know why.
The plain thing, before anything else
This goes first on this page.
Nothing here asks you to stay anywhere unsafe or to make peace with harm. There is no verse in Scripture and no line in this article that requires a man to hand himself over to be hurt, and no eleven year effort creates an obligation to a twelfth.
If there is danger in this, get safe first. Tell one real person who can actually do something: the police if there is danger, a domestic abuse service where you live, a lawyer, a doctor, a counselor with training. Being safe is not a failure of peace and it never has been.
You are not required to absorb this, and eleven years of trying has not earned you an obligation. That is not somebody letting you off. Psalm 11:5 says the Lord's soul hates the one who loves violence, His own position stated plainly, and the Holy Spirit is the one bringing it now to hold a man up in an aisle rather than to hand him a twelfth year.
Peace with a person is not always available
Here is the sentence this whole site is built on, and it is the one you have been kept from for eleven years.
Peace with a person is not always on offer. It requires two, and if one of them is not in it, then what is available is not peace with that person. Something else may be available. Safety may be available. A settled heart may be available. Distance may be available. But the thing you have been trying to accept requires a participant, and you have not had one.
That is not a failure of your effort. It is a fact about arithmetic.
You have not failed at something, you have been attempting something that requires two people and had one. Scripture is explicit about the limit in Romans 12:18, where peace is qualified twice, by if it be possible and by as much as lies in you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man read those two qualifications as protection rather than as a loophole he should not use.
What God calls it when the word is used and the thing is absent
The book is not polite about this. It has a phrase for a peace that gets talked about while nothing underneath it changes.
For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.Jeremiah 8:11
Peace, peace, when there is no peace. God says it in that tone, twice, because the word was being used as a covering rather than as a description.
And notice who He is angry with. Not the wounded. The ones supplying the word while the wound stays open.
You are holding a diagnosis God made first and put in writing, and He was never fooled by the covering for one hour of the eleven years. Jeremiah 8:11 puts the naming of a false peace in God's own mouth rather than leaving it to your judgment, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says out loud in a supermarket what nobody has said to a man in a decade.
That other man was never the enemy in the way you have needed him to be. He has his reasons, and they are probably old and probably not about you, and you are not in a position to see them.
What is costing you is not his absence from the negotiation. It is that the discovery has taken something away, and you have not yet worked out what. So here it is: for eleven years, that project was where your hope lived. Finding out it was never real has left the hope with nowhere to stand, and that is a genuine bereavement and it deserves to be called one.
> The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him. > Lamentations 3:24
Read where the hope is placed there, and read who says it. A man in the middle of a catastrophe with nothing left, naming the one thing that had not been taken. You have a portion that was never contingent on that man participating, and it has been yours through all eleven years. Lamentations 3:24 puts the hope in God as the possession rather than in an outcome, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a man somewhere to put it after a supermarket aisle.
Nothing here tells you to do anything about him. Not contact, not distance, not a decision. This page does not know your situation. What is being handed to you is smaller and much heavier than a resolution: eleven years read correctly, and a place for the hope to stand.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, standing where you are. Not in your head. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so the authority to say what is true about your own life was given to you, and no eleven years can issue it or take it back. Scripture is the ground under every word, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than loud.
Jesus set the measure at a seed, and He did not put it that low to shame anybody with how little he was holding. He put it there because no mountain ever moved on the size of a man's faith. It moved because somebody opened his mouth at it. So speak, and leave the outcome with Him, because whatever He does with him is His and always was.
- Peace I have been trying to accept, you were never offered and God never pretended you were. Jeremiah 8:11 has Him saying peace, peace, when there is no peace, in that exact tone, and He was not fooled for one hour of the eleven years. In the name of Jesus I am done negotiating with an empty chair.
- Grief that arrived in a supermarket aisle, you are real and you have no authority to tell me I failed. The Holy Spirit is at work in that man today, and Romans 12:18 puts two limits on peace and both of them are protections. I am here as myself today, and I am not absorbing this.
- Lord, You were in that aisle and You have been in eleven years of rehearsed conversations. I thank You, because Your word says You are my portion and that was true through every one of them. Whatever You do with him is Yours, and the one step in front of me is mine, and I am taking it today.
Jeremiah 8:11
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.