She Says I Am Between Things

Your mother tells people you are between things at the moment.

You have heard her do it twice. Once at a birthday, to a cousin, and once on the phone to her sister while you were in the same room putting shopping away.

Between things. As though this were a gap rather than a thing. As though the eleven people who paid you this month were a way of filling time until something real turns up.

And she does not mean any harm by it. That is what makes it impossible. She is not being cruel, she is using the only category she has, and she would be horrified to know it lands the way it does.

I am not going to tell you to confront your mother, and I am not going to set you against your own family, because that is not what this site is for. I am going to talk about a verse in John that is one of the loneliest in the Bible.

Neither did his brethren believe in him

There is half a verse in John that is dropped in without comment, and it is about family.

It comes in the middle of an ordinary passage about travel plans, and John states it flatly and moves on.

For neither did his brethren believe in him. (John 7:5, King James Version)

You are in company that nobody would choose, and being doubted at home has never once meant the work was not real. John 7:5 records the unbelief of a family without commentary and without blaming anybody for it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that to a kitchen doorway with plates in somebody's hands.

Sit with whose family that was. They had grown up with Him. They had watched Him for thirty years and they did not believe, and the gospel simply writes that down.

And notice what is not in the verse. No argument with the brothers. No attempt to convince them. No suggestion that He needed them to come round first.

You have something real whether it is believed at home or not, and it has never once required their agreement to exist. The Spirit of God is the one who makes half a verse about family unbelief reach a woman standing at the edge of a gathering, and John 7:5 records it as a plain fact rather than as a grievance.

What she is actually doing

Let me say what between things is, because it is not contempt.

Your mother has a set of categories and a job is one of them and this is not in the set. So she reaches for the nearest available word, and the nearest available word for a woman working at home with no employer is between. It is a failure of vocabulary and not a failure of love.

You were never looked down on, and a borrowed word has never once been a judgment. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman what her mother's word actually was, and the written word records a family's unbelief without accusing them in John 7:5.

And here is the part that is genuinely difficult, and I want to be straight about it. She may also be worried. Somewhere underneath between things there may be a woman who cannot see how her daughter is going to be all right, and who does not know how to say that, and who says between instead.

That is not an excuse for the word. It is a truer picture of the person using it, and a truer picture is easier to live beside than a caricature.

You are able to hold a kind picture of her and a true picture of the work at the same time, and you have never once had to choose. His Spirit is the one who lets a woman see her own mother accurately, and John 7:5 leaves a family unconvinced and the work going on regardless.

One sentence, and then the work

So here is the exercise, and it is not a conversation with her.

Say one true sentence about the work out loud, to yourself. Not to her, not at the gathering, not in an argument. To yourself, alone, in a normal voice.

You are able to say a true sentence to yourself, and saying it has never once needed a witness. John 7:5 has the work continue in a family that did not believe in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes one plain sentence possible for a woman who has heard herself described as a gap.

I have eleven people who pay me. This is my work. It is real. Whatever the true sentence is, said flat, once.

Then go and do the work. Today. That is the other half and it is the half that matters, because an argument with a description is won by the existence of the thing, not by the sentence.

You were never required to correct anybody before you could work, and you are not required to now. The Spirit of God carries a woman past the need to be believed at home, and the written word lets a family's unbelief stand unanswered in John 7:5.