The Joke They Always Tell

There is a joke about your work and it gets told at every gathering, and you have laughed at it for six years.

You know the version. Somebody does an impression of you with the labels and the tape. Somebody says the thing about how the kitchen has not been a kitchen since the Olympics. Your uncle does the bit about how you are going to be on a magazine cover one day, and everybody laughs, and you laugh too, every single time.

It is affectionate. That is the thing that makes it impossible to object to. They are not mocking you, they are doing what families do with the thing that makes a person particular, which is turn it into a bit.

And you laugh because not laughing would make it a scene, and because the joke is quite funny, and because you are not going to be the person who cannot take it.

I am not going to tell you to confront your family at a table, and I am not going to make them villains. I am going to show you a line in the psalms about being a stranger at home.

I am become a stranger unto my brethren

There is a line in Psalm 69 that is one of the most exposed things in the whole book, and it is about family.

David is describing what has happened to his standing, and the specific place he names is not among enemies.

I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother's children. (Psalm 69:8, King James Version)

You are not alone in this, and feeling like a stranger at your own family table has never once meant you were being difficult. Psalm 69:8 records the experience of being a stranger among your own without softening it or explaining it away, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that to a long table with plates and glasses on it.

Notice that it is said twice, two ways. A stranger to my brethren, an alien to my mother's children. He says it again in the same breath, which is what people do with a thing they need somebody to hear properly.

And Scripture does not tidy it. It does not add that he should have been more cheerful about it, or that they probably meant well.

You have something that Scripture takes seriously, and it has never once been too small to name. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a psalmist's exposed sentence reach a woman looking at her own plate at a family meal, and Psalm 69:8 says the word stranger twice and leaves it standing.

What the laughing costs

Let me say what your laugh is doing, because it is not politeness.

It is a permission, renewed every year. Every time you laugh, you tell the room that the bit is fine, and the bit gets told again next year with a bit more detail, and the version of you inside it gets slightly smaller each time.

You were the one renewing it, and your own laugh has never once been required of you. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman what her own laughter has been granting, and the written word names the experience of being a stranger at home in Psalm 69:8.

And here is what six years of it has built. Your nieces and nephews have grown up with that joke. To the younger ones it is not a joke, it is information. They do not know there is a business, they know there is a funny thing their aunt does with labels.

That is not anybody's malice. It is just what happens when a story gets told at a table for six years and nothing else ever gets said.

You are able to say one other thing at that table, and saying it has never once been making a scene. His Spirit is the one who puts a plain sentence in a woman's mouth in a room that is laughing, and Psalm 69:8 lets the loneliness of it be said out loud without embarrassment.

Do not laugh. Say one thing.

So here is the exercise, and it is not a confrontation and it is not an announcement.

The next time the joke is told, do not laugh. Not a stony face, not a sigh, not a look at your husband. Just do not laugh, and then say one plain sentence.

You are able to hold a laugh back, and holding it has never once been an accusation. Psalm 69:8 says the hard thing plainly and does not apologize for the saying, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes one quiet moment possible for a woman who has laughed for six years.

The sentence is ordinary. It is eleven orders a week now and it pays for the car. Said lightly, without heat, and then pass something to somebody.

Somebody will say oh, is it, and the subject will move on, and nothing will happen. That is the whole thing. You are not winning an argument, you are putting one fact on a table that has only ever had a joke on it.

You were never required to be the one who can take it, and you are not required to now. The Spirit of God carries one plain fact past the pressure of a laughing room, and the written word lets a man say twice that he is a stranger to his own brethren in Psalm 69:8.