By Name · Week 2 · Wednesday · BULLIES
He is in his fifties, and for as long as he can remember, his older brother has made him the family joke. The haircut in sixth grade. The car he bought at twenty-two. The way he cried at their grandfather’s funeral. Everybody laughs, and it is always just teasing.
In August he got laid off after nineteen years.
Last week his brother posted a picture of a couch in the family group text. The caption said, retirement looks good on you. His sister sent a laughing face. So did his brother-in-law. So did his mom.
It was worse because of who it was
For it is not an enemy who insults me; that I could endure. It is not a foe who rises against me; from him I could hide.Psalm 55:12 (BSB)
But it is you, a man like myself, my companion and close friend.Psalm 55:13 (BSB)
That psalm gets it exactly. A stranger he could shrug off. This was his brother, in front of his mother, about the worst year of his working life.
He typed four replies. The first was a joke back. The second was a little meaner. By the fourth he was bringing up things from 1987. Every one of them would have started the thing that always starts, where it goes back and forth all afternoon and everyone takes a side.
Nehemiah would not come down
When the wall was almost finished, Nehemiah’s enemies tried a different approach. They asked him to come talk.
Sanballat and Geshem sent me this message: “Come, let us meet together in one of the villages on the plain of Ono.” But they were planning to harm me.Nehemiah 6:2 (BSB)
So I sent messengers to them, saying, “I am doing a great work and cannot come down. Why should the work stop while I leave it to go down to you?”Nehemiah 6:3 (BSB)
Four times they sent me the same message, and each time I gave the same reply.Nehemiah 6:4 (BSB)
Four times. The same answer every time. He did not owe them a meeting just because they kept asking, and he did not owe them a new argument each time they changed the wording.
So he deleted all four replies. He stopped answering in the group.
And then he did the one thing that was actually his to do.
If your brother sins against you, go and confront him privately. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over.Matthew 18:15 (BSB)
He called his brother. Privately. Once. He said, when you do that, it lands, and I need you to stop.
His brother laughed and said, you always were sensitive.
What it cost: he is quieter in the family now, and people have noticed. His mom called and asked why he was being so distant. His sister thinks he is sulking. Thanksgiving is a month away, and he is going to sit across the table from his brother and not take the bait, and he already knows how long that meal will feel.
He is still on the wall. He just quit coming down to argue.
I do not think that is the end of it. But it is the first year he has not spent the whole holiday answering.
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