What the Aunt Said in the Kitchen

Tia Marisol's kitchen is the room she has been happiest in in her entire life, and she has not been able to walk into it since March.

Her father died in February. Sixty seven. He had been sick for four months and she took the leave and she was there for all of it, including the last night, and she was the one who called everybody afterward because her mother could not.

Marisol is her father's sister. She is the one who taught her to cook. She is the one who came to the hospital every second day for four months with actual food because the cafeteria food is what it is. She is the one who paid for the flowers and would not discuss it.

And in March, in that kitchen, with her hands in a bowl and her back half turned, Marisol said: you have to be strong for your mother now.

It was six seconds. It was said with love. In Marisol's world it is the highest thing you can say to a woman, because it means: I see you, I know what you are made of, I am putting you where the weight goes.

And it landed on her like a beam.

Because here is what she had been doing at that exact point in March. She had been getting up, going to work, coming back, cooking at her mother's house four nights a week, dealing with the insurance company, and then driving home and sitting in her car outside her own apartment for thirty five minutes before she could go in.

And in that kitchen she was handed a job.

Not comfort. A job. And she took it, because that is what you do when Marisol says something, and she has been doing it since March, and she cannot go into that kitchen now because when she does she can feel it being handed to her again.

She would rather die than say a word of this to Marisol. That woman came to the hospital sixty times.

If that is a kitchen anybody is avoiding, sit down here. There is a verse in Proverbs about this, and there is something Jesus does that is going to matter more.

In the multitude of words

Here is the verse, and it is short and it is not about wickedness.

In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin: but he that refraineth his lips is wise.Proverbs 10:19

Notice what it does not say. It does not say the talker is a sinner. It says that where there is a great deal of talking, something will go wrong somewhere, and that the wisdom is in the restraint.

That is an observation about volume, not about character. Anybody who talks enough will eventually hand somebody the wrong thing, and it will not be because they meant harm, and Proverbs states that as a fact of life rather than as a charge against a person.

Marisol talks. She talks constantly, and she has been talking to you since you were four, and almost all of it has been good, and one sentence out of about nine million landed wrong.

You are permitted to name a sentence without indicting a life, and you were never given a choice between a woman and the truth. Proverbs 10:19 puts the trouble in the volume rather than in the heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that distinction into a book of wisdom so it would be available in a kitchen.

And here is the second half of the verse, and it is worth having for a different reason. He that refraineth his lips is wise. That is not a rule you are being handed. It is a description of what would have helped, which means the gap you felt in that kitchen was a real gap and not an ingratitude on your part.

You have been missing a real thing, and you were never wrong to want silence from somebody who loves you. Proverbs 10:19 names restraint as the wisdom, and the Spirit of God does not think less of a woman for needing it.

The job you were handed is not yours

Now the beam itself, because the sentence is not the weight. The assignment is the weight.

Be strong for your mother now. Read what that does. It moves you from the list of people who lost a father onto the list of people managing the people who lost a father. It is a promotion out of your own grief.

And that is not a thing anybody has the authority to do, however much they love you.

Scripture never does it. Look at what actually happens at the graveside in Bethany. Martha comes out first and speaks to Jesus and says her piece. Then Mary comes and says almost the same thing. And He does not turn to Martha and tell her to be strong for Mary. He does not organize them. He does not appoint anybody. He weeps, with both of them, and neither one is put in charge of the other.

There is no rank in that garden. There is a family with a dead brother and a Lord who cried with all of them.

Right now, as you read this, you are one of the people who lost a father, and you were never promoted out of that. John 11:33 has Him going down into it with both sisters and appointing neither, and His Spirit is not standing at a stove handing out assignments.

Your mother lost a husband. You lost a father. Those are two griefs, and the second one does not become a job because the first one exists.

What Marisol was actually doing

Now let me stand up for her, because you are going to eat at that table again and I will not have you carrying anything into it.

Consider what she was holding in March. That was her brother. Sixty seven years old. She had been to that hospital sixty times and had watched him go, and she is the eldest and there is nobody above her in that family to hand anything to.

So she was standing at a bowl, with her hands in it and her back half turned, holding her own brother's death, and she did the thing a person does when it is too much to hold facing forward: she reached for the family's oldest instrument, which is the assignment. Somebody has to be strong. That is how her mother did it and how her grandmother did it and it is the entire toolkit she was given.

She was not putting a weight on you. She was passing on the only thing she has ever been handed at a moment like that.

Keep her. Keep every one of those sixty hospital visits. And hand the assignment back, silently, without a conversation, because it was never yours and she does not need to know you set it down.

You are able to keep your aunt and put down the job at the same time, and you were never asked to trade one for the other. Proverbs 10:19 refuses to convict the speaker, and the Holy Spirit is not asking anybody to hold anything against a woman who brought food sixty times.