One Side Honored, The Other Side Hurt

There is one slot.

That is the whole of the problem and it is worth stating that plainly before anything else, because a man in this position often thinks he is failing at diplomacy when he is actually running into arithmetic.

Two families. Two grandfathers, or two grandmothers, or a name on each side that has been quietly hoped for since about the second month. And one first name, which cannot be halved.

And he has been trying, for weeks, to find a way of choosing that will not be read as a ranking.

There is no such way. Not on that scale. And that is why the weeks have not produced anything.

Now let me name the wound underneath, because it is not really about either grandparent.

This man is the seam between two families. He always has been. Every gathering, every holiday, every decision about where to go and how long to stay has run across him, and he has spent years keeping both sides from feeling like the second choice.

And he is tired in a way he has never said out loud to anybody, and now he is being asked to make the largest and most public version of that same call, once, permanently, in writing.

That is what has been going on since the spring, and it deserves to be named before any of it is answered.

As much as lieth in you, live peaceably

There is a sentence in Romans about keeping the peace, and the two qualifications on the front of it are the whole gift.

If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men. (Romans 12:18, King James Version)

You are given two limits in that verse before the instruction even starts, and Romans 12:18 has never once made a man responsible for a peace he cannot reach. The written word says if it be possible, and as much as lieth in you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes those two clauses land on somebody who has been carrying the whole thing.

Read them again, because most people quote the second half of that verse and drop the front of it entirely.

If it be possible. Which admits, in Scripture, in writing, that sometimes it is not.

As much as lieth in you. Which limits the responsibility to what is actually inside one person's reach, and no further.

You have been carrying a peace beyond your own portion, and the written word draws a boundary around it in advance. The Spirit of God is what lets a man stop at the edge of his own part, and Romans 12 sets the limit before it gives the instruction.

What can and cannot be distributed

Now let me be practical, because there is something here that genuinely can be shared and something that genuinely cannot, and the two have been muddled for months.

The first name cannot be distributed. It is one word. It goes one way. There is no arrangement, no compound, no clever hyphenation that does not read to everybody as a compromise, and everybody would see it.

What can be distributed is everything else, and that turns out to be most of it.

The middle name. The second child, if there is one. What the boy is told about each side and how often. Which stories he grows up knowing. Which photographs are on which wall. Who taught him to fish and whose recipe he makes. Every one of those is a place a family lives on in a child, and a first name is only the loudest of them.

You are able to give both sides something real, and no verse anywhere made a first name the only door into a child's life. Romans 12:18 asks for what lies in a man and no more, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man how much is actually in his hands.

And here is the thing that matters most about the reading of it.

Whether it lands as a ranking depends almost entirely on what gets said in the six weeks afterward, and hardly at all on which word gets chosen.

A family who is told, warmly and specifically, that the boy carries a first name from one side and a story and a middle name and a face from the other, does not experience a ranking. A family who is told nothing, and left to work out what it means, will build the worst version, because that is what silence produces.

You are the one who sets how it is read, and Scripture puts the peaceable living inside a man's own conduct. Romans 12 says as much as lieth in you, and the Spirit of God is what turns six weeks of warmth into the thing the family remembers.

Both names, on paper and out loud

So here is the assignment, and it has two halves.

Write down one name from each side, side by side, once. And then say both out loud.

The paper first, because at the moment neither of them is a name. Each one is a family, a history, a hope, and an imagined face at a table. On a page they get to be two words.

You are able to see them as words rather than as sides, and Romans 12:18 has never once asked a man to weigh two families against each other. The Holy Spirit is present at a table where somebody stops trying to be fair to everybody at once, and the written word limits the peacekeeping to what lies in him.

And then out loud, both, one after the other, because a name is a sound and neither of these has ever been heard as a sound. They have only been considered as positions.

Very often one of them simply sounds like the boy, and the other one sounds like a person a man is fond of, and that difference is audible in about four seconds and is invisible on any list.

You are permitted to choose on sound instead of on diplomacy, and Scripture never once made a man the referee between two houses. Romans 12 sets a limit in advance, and the Holy Spirit is with a man saying two names out loud on a warm evening.