Her Brothers Are Still Home

Charmaine sends money on the twenty-eighth of every month and she has done it since 2014.

It goes to her mother and it is understood by everybody that a portion of it goes to her two brothers, and it has been understood for eleven years, and nobody has ever said a word about it out loud on either side of the ocean.

She came over in 2013. She got out of the same arrangement her brothers are in now, and she got out because of a job that came up at exactly the right moment, and she is entirely clear that it was not because she was cleverer or braver than either of them.

Devon is thirty-nine. Marlon is thirty-four. They are inside it. Devon has been inside it in one form or another since he was nineteen.

Here is what Charmaine can do.

She can send money. She does. She can call, and she does, on Sundays, and they talk about the football and about their mother's knees and about somebody's daughter's wedding.

Here is what she cannot do.

She cannot send a way out. There is no arrangement of money that produces one. She has thought about this at some length, in the way a person does at three in the morning, and there is not one.

Here is the day it caught.

Her friend at work, who is from somewhere else and has her own version of this, said, "How much do you send?"

And Charmaine told her.

And her friend, who was not being unkind, said, "And what does that fix?"

And Charmaine said, "Nothing," and then sat with the fact that she had answered that instantly and without thinking, which meant she had known it for years.

You know that. You send what you can send, faithfully, monthly, for years, and you know exactly what it does and does not do, and somebody asked you plainly and the answer came out of you before you could dress it up.

Both verbs are His

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you to stop sending money. I am not going to tell you to send more. I do not know that family or that arrangement and I am not going to reach across an ocean from behind a screen. And I am not going to tell you that Devon and Marlon will come out, because I do not know that, and telling a sister that about her own brothers would be a cruel thing to do with a page.

What I will do is read you one verse in a psalm and look at who is doing what in it.

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land.Psalm 68:6

Two actions in the first two clauses, and God is the subject of both.

He setteth. He bringeth out.

Not: He helps them out. Not: He assists those who are working on getting out. He brings out. It is a transitive verb with God on one end of it and a bound person on the other, and there is nobody standing in between doing the arranging.

You are looking at a verse where the bringing out belongs entirely to God, and there is no third party in the sentence. Psalm 68:6 puts both verbs in His hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a kitchen on the twenty-eighth of the month.

And notice the first clause, because it is doing something for you specifically. God setteth the solitary in families. That is a verse about a person on their own being given people.

You are, in this arrangement, the solitary one. You came over. You are six thousand miles from everybody. And the first thing that verse does is put a person like you into a family by God's own action.

You have not been left out of that sentence because you are the one who got away, and the first clause is about somebody exactly in your position. It is written that God sets the solitary in families, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient placing a present belonging.

Sending is not nothing

Now let me be careful here, because this is where somebody gets hurt.

What does that fix? Nothing.

That exchange was honest and it was accurate about one thing and badly wrong about another, and I want to separate them.

It is accurate that the money does not produce an exit. Charmaine is right about that and she has been right about it for eleven years and nobody should tell her otherwise.

It is wrong that it therefore does nothing. Eleven years of the twenty-eighth is not nothing. It is a woman who has never once let a month go by without her family being able to feel that she is still theirs, across an ocean, at cost, for over a decade.

You have been doing something real that was never going to be the thing that fixes it, and those two facts sit together without contradiction. Psalm 68:6 has God doing the bringing out precisely so that the people who love the bound do not have to be the ones producing it, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a faithful act from being measured against a job it was never given.

And here is what I actually want to take off you, because it has been growing quietly for a decade.

The reason the answer came out instantly is that some part of Charmaine has been marking the money as a failure every month for eleven years. Not consciously. But every twenty-eighth there is a transaction that is also, in her chest, a small accounting of what she still cannot do.

That is a lot of small failures to log about a genuinely good thing.

You have not been failing every twenty-eighth, and the bringing out was never assigned to the person doing the sending. Psalm 68:6 gives that verb to God and never once to a sister, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a wrongly-filed act out of the failure column.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the eleven years have gone somewhere heavier than sad, or if the three in the morning arithmetic has become most nights, do not carry that alone. Tell somebody this week. Your friend at work, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. And if you ever believe your brothers are in real danger, then the ordinary thing is to reach the people who can actually reach them rather than carry it alone. That is me refusing to leave you at that table by yourself.