The Answer Was Neither

There are six people ahead of him at the timber counter and the man at the front is arguing about the length of a batten. Somebody has propped the door open with a bag of sand. The yard smells of sawdust and diesel and the sort of cold that gets into a Saturday morning before nine.

His phone goes in his coat pocket. He does not need to look, because he already knows the shape of it, but he looks anyway. It is the first message, and it says: I just need to know you understand what she did.

Then, before he has thought of a single word to put back, it goes again. The second one. Different name at the top, same sentence underneath it in different clothes: you have heard his version, I take it.

The line moves up one. He puts the phone face down against his leg and stares at a rack of roofing battens and thinks, with a clarity that surprises him, that he would genuinely rather be anywhere on this earth than at either end of this conversation. Not because he does not love them. Because he loves both of them, and there is no reply in the English language that says that.

And you have stood exactly where he is standing. Maybe not in a timber yard. But you have had two people you would take a hit for, both waiting on one word from you, and the word they want is a side.

He was asked the same question and He refused it

Before we go a step further, something that outranks the whole article. There is a difference between a family at war and a family that is not safe, and this page cannot see which one is yours. If somebody in it is hurting you or anybody else, peacemaking is not what is being asked of you and no verse on this page is a reason to stay near harm. Speak to one safe person today, and where there is immediate danger, contact your local emergency service. Nothing below this paragraph is more important than that sentence.

Now. There is a scene near the front of Joshua that almost nobody preaches, and it is the exact ground under your feet this morning.

Joshua is outside Jericho, on the night before the biggest fight of his life. He looks up and there is a man in front of him with a sword already drawn. So Joshua asks the only question a commander would ask, and it is the same question that came into your pocket twice before nine o'clock.

And he said to him, "Are you for us, or for our adversaries?" And he said, "No; but I am the commander of the army of the Lord. Now I have come."Joshua 5:13 to 14

Read that answer again, because it is astonishing. Joshua offers two boxes and the Lord's own commander declines both of them. Neither. Not your side. Not theirs. And then, having refused to be recruited, He does not walk off. He stays, and He tells Joshua the ground he is standing on is holy, and He is the one who gives him the next instruction.

That is the whole thing. He would not take a side and He would not leave.

You are standing on the same ground this morning, and it is not neutral ground, it is holy ground. This is not encouragement dressed up as a fact. It is what is written about how God comes into a conflict: not as a recruit, and not as a referee, but as the One who was already there before anybody drew up sides. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that real to a man with a phone face down against his leg, because a fact on a page will not hold a person up in that line and a living God will.

Now hear the pit, because it needs naming before anything gets lifted. What is exhausting about this is not the argument. It is the arithmetic. Every message has to be weighed. Every visit has to be balanced by another visit. You find yourself editing a sentence about the weather in case it sounds like an alignment. And underneath that there is a low, constant dread that whatever you do, you are going to lose somebody, and that when it happens everyone will agree it was the thing you said in the timber yard on a Saturday.

That dread is doing something to you that the argument itself never could. It is turning a son or a daughter or a sister into a diplomat, and a diplomat cannot love anybody, because everything they say is a position.

You were given a place to stand, and it is not in the middle and it is not on a wing. Scripture says the peacemakers are blessed and are called the children of God, and it never once says the peacemakers are the ones who fix the peace (Matthew 5:9). Making is not the same as fixing. A person can make peace in a room they do not control, on a day nothing gets resolved, and the word over that person is child of God. The Holy Spirit is what turns that from a nice sentence into an actual floor under your feet.

Look at what the commander did not do outside Jericho. He did not adjudicate. He did not produce a summary of who had wronged whom. He gave Joshua one instruction about the next thing, and it was not an instruction about the enemy at all. Take off your sandals. In other words: before you do anything about them, know where you are and know who is with you.

You have that same instruction available to you before you type a single word back. It is written that God is not the author of confusion but of peace, and the Spirit He gives is not a spirit of fear (2 Timothy 1:7). The reason you cannot think of a reply is not that you are weak at this. It is that you have been trying to answer a question that has no true answer in it, and the way out of a false question was never a better answer. It is a different footing.

So the practical thing is smaller than you expect. It is not a speech. It is not a family meeting. It is not the phone call where you finally explain yourself to everybody at once, which, honestly, is a fantasy most of us have rehearsed in the car and none of us has ever survived.

It is one unaligned kindness. One small, undramatic, unannounced act of ordinary care toward the person you are currently expected to withhold it from, done today, said nothing about to anybody. Not because it will solve the split. It will not, and it is not yours to solve. Because it is a flag planted in ground that refuses to become a side.

You have the freedom to be kind to somebody without that kindness being counted as a vote, and no relative of yours gets to overrule it. The word says to be at peace with everyone so far as it depends on you, and the whole weight of that promise sits in the last four words (Romans 12:18). So far as it depends on you. The Spirit will hold you to your part and He will not hold you to theirs.