She Said It at the Salon

Renée has done her hair since the eleventh grade and she now drives forty minutes to a woman in Rosedale that she does not even like.

She lost the baby at fourteen weeks in February. They had told her mother and Renée and nobody else, which is why almost nobody in her life knows there was anything to lose.

Renée knew. Renée had been the one who screamed in the chair when she found out, in a good way, in that salon, in December, and had already decided about the christening outfit.

And in March, three weeks after, with her under the dryer and Renée sweeping around the chair, Renée said, in a soft voice, the voice you use for something you have been working up to: baby, it was probably for the best. Something must have been wrong.

Twelve words.

They have known each other since the sixth grade. Renée sat with her the entire night her father died in 2011. Renée has never once, in twenty two years, let her pay for a wash.

And she cannot sit in that chair.

She has told Renée she has been busy. Twice. And the second time Renée said okay in a way that meant she knew that was not true, and she has not asked again, and now there is a thing between them that has never been between them, and it is doing damage to two people at once.

What she cannot say, and would not say to save her life, is what those twelve words actually did.

They made her baby a mistake being corrected. Something must have been wrong. Not somebody who died. A defect that got caught.

If that is a chair anybody is driving forty minutes to avoid, sit down here. Proverbs says something about the tongue that most people quote and almost nobody applies to a kind woman with a broom.

Death and life, and no villain anywhere

Here it is. Everybody knows the first half.

Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.Proverbs 18:21

Death and life. Not harm and help. Not encouragement and discouragement. Death and life, which is the strongest possible pair, and the proverb puts both of them in the same instrument.

Notice what it does not say. It does not say death is in the power of the wicked tongue. It says the tongue, all of it, everybody's, including the tongue of a woman who has never let you pay for a wash in twenty two years.

That is the whole difficulty of this and Scripture states it without flinching. The same mouth that has been life to you since the sixth grade said twelve words in March that did something else entirely, and both of those are the same mouth.

You are dealing with a real weight rather than an imagined one, and you were never oversensitive for feeling twelve words land like that. Proverbs 18:21 puts death and life in the same instrument without assigning a villain, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that pairing into a book of wisdom exactly this bluntly.

And here is the reason it is in there. If the proverb had said that only cruel words do damage, then every wounded person in the world would have to establish cruelty before they were allowed to be hurt, and almost nobody could. So it does not say that. It says the tongue has that power, full stop.

You have not had to prove anything about her heart in order to be honest about the sentence, and you were never required to file a charge before you were allowed to feel it. Proverbs 18:21 makes no ruling on intent at all, and the Spirit of God is not asking a woman to indict a friend of twenty two years.

What the twelve words did

Now the exact injury, and it needs stating precisely because a vague ache cannot be put down.

Something must have been wrong is a sentence about a defect. It moves what happened out of the category of a death and into the category of a correction.

And that does two things at once. It takes away the person, and then it takes away the grief, because a corrected defect is not something anybody is permitted to mourn. You cannot hold a service for a mistake that got caught.

That is why the sentence has cost more than it looks like it should. It did not only hurt. It disqualified.

And here is where Scripture is unambiguous, and it is not a stretch or a proof text. The psalm says that God saw an unformed substance and that the days were written in a book when as yet there were none of them. That is a person, seen, counted, and written down, at a stage of development nobody else could even observe.

There is no defect language anywhere in that psalm. There is a book with days written in it.

You are the mother of somebody God had already written down, and you were never grieving a correction. Psalm 139:16 puts an unformed substance and a written book in the same verse, and the Holy Spirit is the one who inspired a passage that specific about a person nobody else had seen.

Renée, and the chair

Now let me protect that woman, because she is going to be in that chair at nine tomorrow morning either way and I want you both out of this.

Understand what she was holding. She screamed in that salon in December. She had already decided about the christening outfit. That woman was carrying real joy about this and it was not performance.

So in March she was holding her own loss on top of yours and had no place to put it, and she had three weeks to think of something to say, and she reached for the only sentence that made the world survivable for her, which is the one about a reason.

It was not aimed at your baby. It was a woman trying to keep the floor under her own feet.

And here is what has happened since, and it is costing you both. She knows something is wrong. She is not stupid and she has known you since the sixth grade. She has probably worked out that it was something she said, and she has probably been going over that day, and she is very likely carrying it.

Neither of you is going to get out of this by pretending. But you also do not have to accept twelve words in order to sit in that chair again.

Right now, as you read this, you are free to keep her and to leave the sentence on the floor of that salon, and you were never handed a choice between the two. Proverbs 18:21 assigns the power without assigning the blame, and His Spirit is not asking anybody to give up a friendship of twenty two years to be honest.