Six People Text Me First

Six people send her the first message.

That is not a boast and she would be uncomfortable if it read as one. It is a fact about her phone. When something goes wrong in six different lives, her name is the one that gets tapped, and she has been aware of the exact number since about February, when she counted.

There is the friend from college whose marriage is in a slow bad place. There is her cousin. There is a woman from work she barely knows socially who told her something enormous in a stairwell two years ago and has been telling her things ever since. There is her brother's ex wife, which is complicated. There is a neighbor. And there is one she does not name even to herself, because that situation is not hers to describe.

She is thirty four and she is good at this. She does not fix. She does not lecture. She reads a message four times before she answers it, which most people do not do.

Here is what she has never said.

Tonight there are six threads open on her phone and there is nothing anywhere on that phone about her. Not one of those six has asked her a question in months, and she does not blame them, because a person in a crisis does not have the bandwidth to ask and she knows that better than anybody.

Her thumb hovers a lot. She composes things and deletes them. There is a version of a message she has written eleven times to one of the six that begins I am not doing very well either and she has never sent it, because sending it would put something on somebody who cannot hold it.

The sentence, unsaid: there is no seventh person and the seventh person is me.

You may know that phone. Six threads and no thread of your own.

The verse is not addressed to one person

There is a line everybody quotes at people like her, and it is quoted wrong almost every time.

Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.Galatians 6:2

Read who it is addressed to. Not an individual. A congregation, in the plural, in a letter written to a whole region. And read the phrase in the middle, which is the part that gets dropped.

One another. Not bear other people's burdens. Not be the one who carries. A reciprocal construction, in which the same people are doing the bearing and being borne, and the whole force of the instruction is that it circulates.

You are inside a verse that was always meant to run in both directions, and Galatians 6:2 uses a reciprocal phrase addressed to a whole body rather than a job description issued to one member, and it is the Spirit of God who takes a line from a letter about freedom and lands it on a woman with six threads open at eleven at night.

What a one way version does

Consider what happens when a reciprocal instruction gets applied in one direction only, because it is not a small distortion.

It produces exactly her. Somebody who does the whole of the verse and receives none of it, and who is then quietly commended for that, which locks it in place. Nobody ever intended this. It assembles itself out of good qualities and real need and the ordinary fact that people go where they are received.

But a system where the load only travels one way is not the arrangement in Galatians. It is that arrangement with half of it missing, and the missing half is not optional decoration. It is the reciprocity that makes the whole thing survivable.

You have been running half of a verse for years, because the written word puts the bearing in a reciprocal construction and addresses it to everybody at once, and the Holy Spirit is what turns that from a grammatical observation into permission to want something back.

And notice the sentence two verses later, which is almost always read as contradicting this one. Every man shall bear his own burden. It is a different Greek word: one is a crushing weight, the other is an ordinary pack. Paul is not being inconsistent. He is distinguishing between the load a person carries and the load nobody can carry alone, and the crushing kind is the one that circulates.

You are carrying the kind of weight that verse says circulates, and Galatians 6 names two different loads with two different words on purpose, and the same Spirit who inspired both lines is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one person

I want to stop and say something plainly, because this site will not praise anybody for absorbing what one person cannot absorb.

Six live crises arriving at one phone, with nothing coming back, is more than one thirty four year old should be holding alone, and saying so is not a criticism of how she is holding it. Tell a doctor plainly what the last year has actually been like, including the thumb hovering and the messages she deletes, rather than waiting to be asked. Ask about a counselor, which is not a betrayal of anybody, and is precisely the arrangement in which a person can say what she cannot put on the six. And ask one friend who is not in crisis, directly, to be somebody she can send that eleven times written message to.

And if the weight has begun going somewhere heavier than tiredness, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful rather than frightening, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Sending that message to the right person is not putting something on somebody. You are held exactly as much on the day you send it as on the year you did not, because Galatians 6:2 makes the bearing reciprocal by construction, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who makes that true in the body rather than only in the grammar.