{"id":609,"date":"2026-08-14T05:28:26","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T10:28:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/?p=609"},"modified":"2026-08-14T05:28:27","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T10:28:27","slug":"it-does-not-stay-put","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/2026\/08\/14\/it-does-not-stay-put\/","title":{"rendered":"It Does Not Stay Put"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<!-- POST TITLE: It Does Not Stay Put -->\n<style>@import url('https:\/\/fonts.googleapis.com\/css2?family=Oswald:wght@400;500;700&family=Lora:ital,wght@0,400;0,500;1,400&display=swap');\n.psn{--bg:#F6EAD8;--darkest:#2A1512;--mid:#A6321C;--heading:#E2661C;--cool:#5B3A63;--light:#F0A93C;--surface-verse:#EFDCC1;--surface-deep:#F0E2CC;font-family:'Lora',Georgia,serif;color:var(--darkest);background:var(--bg);max-width:720px;margin:2em auto;padding:2.5em 2em;line-height:1.7;font-size:1.05em}\n.psn .eyebrow{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-size:.85em;letter-spacing:.18em;text-transform:uppercase;color:var(--mid);font-weight:500;margin:0 0 .4em}\n.psn h2{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.3em;letter-spacing:.08em;text-transform:uppercase;color:var(--mid);margin:2em 0 .7em;border-bottom:1px solid var(--heading);padding-bottom:.3em}\n.psn .verse{font-family:'Lora',Georgia,serif;font-style:italic;font-size:1.08em;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:normal;background:var(--surface-verse);border-left:4px solid var(--heading);padding:1.1em 1.4em;margin:1.4em 0;color:var(--darkest)}\n.psn .verse-cite{display:block;font-style:normal;font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-size:.82em;letter-spacing:.1em;color:var(--mid);margin-top:.6em;text-transform:uppercase}\n.psn .divider{border:none;border-top:1px solid var(--heading);margin:2em auto;width:80px}\n.psn p{margin:0 0 1.1em}\n.psn .pull{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.15em;letter-spacing:.04em;color:var(--darkest);border-top:1px solid var(--heading);border-bottom:1px solid var(--heading);padding:1em 0;margin:1.6em 0;text-align:center;line-height:1.4}\n.psn .psn-deep{background:var(--surface-deep);border-left:4px solid var(--cool);padding:1.1em 1.4em;margin:1.4em 0}\n@media (max-width:600px){.psn{padding:1.6em 1.2em}}<\/style>\n<div class=\"psn\">\n<p class=\"eyebrow\">Passion \u00b7 Week 2 \u00b7 Friday<\/p>\n<p>Every story this week has had a person in it. A brother. A colleague. A wife. A mother. Someone whose name you could say, who did a thing, who could in principle be forgiven.<\/p>\n<p>Today&#8217;s doesn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>He&#8217;s forty-six. Eight months ago the company restructured, his function was consolidated into a group two states away, and he was let go in a nine-minute call with someone from an HR team he&#8217;d never spoken to before. Twenty-two years. There was no villain. There was a spreadsheet, and a decision made three levels above anybody who had ever met him, and a headcount number that had to come down.<\/p>\n<p>He has been remarkably disciplined about it. He has never once said a bitter word at home. Not one. He has a version he uses at church and at his son&#8217;s games \u2014 <em>things got restructured, we&#8217;re figuring it out<\/em> \u2014 delivered evenly, no edge on it. He is, if he&#8217;s honest, a little proud of how well he&#8217;s carried it.<\/p>\n<p>His wife would tell you he has been impossible for six months.<\/p>\n<p>Not cruel. Never cruel. Just flat, and quick, and never quite in the room. The silence in the truck. The way he goes rigid when someone asks how the search is going. Four seconds of latency on every warm thing anyone offers him.<\/p>\n<div class=\"verse\">See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God, and that no root of bitterness springs up to cause trouble and defile many.<span class=\"verse-cite\">Hebrews 12:15 (BSB)<\/span><\/div>\n<p>The last two words are the ones I&#8217;d underline. <em>Defile many.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The writer isn&#8217;t describing a private condition. He&#8217;s describing something with a distribution problem. A root goes where it wants \u2014 under the fence, under the foundation, into ground you never planted. And the people it comes up in are almost never the people who caused it, because the people who caused it are two states away and were never really available to receive any of this in the first place.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pull\">What you refuse to release, you don&#8217;t keep. You distribute.<\/p>\n<p>The cruelty of it is that his discipline made it worse. Because he never named it, it never got aimed. It didn&#8217;t stay where he put it. It went where the ground was softest, and the softest ground in that house is a twelve-year-old.<\/p>\n<h2>The Flinch<\/h2>\n<p>Saturday morning, the kitchen. The boy asks something ordinary \u2014 can he go to his friend&#8217;s after lunch \u2014 and gets an answer that&#8217;s technically a yes with about eleven months of edge on it.<\/p>\n<p>And the boy flinches. Small. Almost nothing. A little shoulder movement, and he goes quiet, and he goes upstairs.<\/p>\n<p>His father is standing there holding a coffee cup with both options wide open.<\/p>\n<p>He can let it go. That&#8217;s the natural move and it isn&#8217;t even dishonest \u2014 work has been hard, that&#8217;s true, and if he mentions it later he can say <em>sorry bud, long stretch<\/em>, and the boy will absorb it the way he&#8217;s been absorbing it since Christmas.<\/p>\n<p>Or he can go up the stairs. And say the accurate thing, which is much worse to say: <em>That had nothing to do with you. I got let go in February and I have been angry about it every day since and I have been taking it out on this house without telling anybody it was happening. I&#8217;m sorry. It was never yours to carry.<\/em><\/p>\n<div class=\"psn-deep\">\n<p>What that costs him is not obvious until you look at it directly. It isn&#8217;t the apology. It&#8217;s the self-image \u2014 the eight months of proof that he handled it, that he protected them from it, that he was strong about a thing that would have flattened a lesser man. Going up those stairs means saying out loud that the protection was a story he was telling himself, and that his son has been paying the bill the whole time.<\/p>\n<p>He has to trade being strong for being known. Those have never once been the same thing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h2>What To Do Today<\/h2>\n<p>Ask a hard question, and ask someone else, because you will get it wrong on your own: <em>Have I been different for a while?<\/em> Ask your wife, or your kid, or whoever has to live in the weather you make.<\/p>\n<p>Then apologize to the person who didn&#8217;t cause it. And name what did \u2014 not as an excuse for the apology, but after it, so they know the thing they&#8217;ve been living next to has a name and it was never about them.<\/p>\n<p>There may be nobody at the company to forgive. That&#8217;s fine. This was never really about them either. It&#8217;s about whether the thing gets to keep spreading through a house that had nothing to do with it.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Passion \u00b7 Week 2 \u00b7 Friday Every story this week has had a person in it. A brother. A colleague. A wife. A mother. Someone whose name you could say, who did a thing, who could in principle be forgiven&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":610,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-passion"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/20260814_BLOG.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=609"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":611,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609\/revisions\/611"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}