The Cousin Who Looks at Me Different Now

They were born eleven weeks apart and they were in the same class and they have the same middle name because their mothers could not be talked out of it, and for thirty one years Renée and Danita were one unit.

They were also, from about seventeen, a drinking pair. Not a dramatic one. A pair. It was how they got ready to go out, and how they came back in, and how they talked about anything hard, and how they saw in every New Year they have ever had.

Renée stopped a year and a half ago. She has not made a speech about it. She has just, quietly, not.

And the thing that happened, which she did not expect and has no way to describe to anybody, is that Danita looks at her differently now. Not coldly. Not angrily. She looks at her the way you look at somebody you are being careful around. There is a small hesitation before she says anything, a checking, and it is there every single time, and it was never there before in thirty one years.

At Aunt Ceecee's on Sunday there were about twenty people in the front room and Renée looked up and caught it across the whole room: her cousin looking at her, and then not looking, and the half second in the middle.

She would give anything for that half second not to be there.

You know that look. It might be a cousin, a sister, a best friend of twenty years. Nobody said anything. There is nothing you could point to. But something has come into the room between you that was not there before, and you cannot name it out loud without sounding like you are asking somebody to feel guilty.

You are able to choose your people out loud, and you were never being asked to choose between loving her and staying where you are standing. Ruth said thy people shall be my people, and that was a spoken decision rather than a feeling that arrived; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that kind of choosing available across a front room at Aunt Ceecee's.

Whither thou goest

Let me name it exactly, because the wrong name gets used for this all the time.

What is between you is not disapproval and it is not rejection. It is grief on both sides, and hers has never been spoken either. Something the two of you did together for fourteen years is now something only one of you does, and every time you are in a room she is holding the same loss you are holding, from the other end, and neither of you has a word for it. The half second is not judgement. It is two people who used to know exactly how to be together, working it out from scratch, in public.

So here is Ruth, standing on a road with her mother in law telling her to go home.

And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.Ruth 1:16

That is a decision, said out loud, at a specific moment, on a specific road. It is not a feeling report. Naomi has just given her every reason to leave, all of them practical and all of them true, and Ruth answers with a sentence rather than an emotion.

You are able to say a thing out loud that settles it, and you were never obliged to wait until the feeling was tidy first. That is what stands written in Ruth 1, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a spoken choice as load bearing today as it was on a road out of Moab.

And notice what Ruth is not doing. She is not asking Naomi to change. She is not negotiating terms. She is not requiring the older woman to be less bitter, and Naomi is extremely bitter in that chapter and says so twice. Ruth's loyalty is not conditional on Naomi being easier to love.

You are able to stay close to somebody without requiring them to be different first, and you were never given the job of managing how she looks at you. Scripture has Ruth committing to a woman who is not being pleasant, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates loving a person from fixing them.

And here is the part that matters most for a front room at Aunt Ceecee's. Ruth's commitment was to the road ahead, not to the road behind. She could not go back to what she and Naomi had in Moab; that country was over. What she chose was where they were going. And what came out of it, in that book, is a whole new set of people around a table neither of them could have pictured on that road.

You are choosing a road forward rather than trying to recover one behind, and you were never able to get back into a country that has closed. The written word has her choosing whither thou goest and not where we have been, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a person's face toward the part that is still available.

And the plain things, said the way we say them here. Danita is not a villain, and if you make her one to make this easier you will lose thirty one years to save eighteen months of discomfort. She is your cousin. What is between you is not settled by talking about the drinking, and you do not owe her that conversation and she does not owe you one. What it is settled by is time in daylight, doing something specific. And if the friend, the counselor, the group that meets on a weeknight is what carries you while it takes as long as it takes, use it, because that is God's kindness with a face on it.