The Yellow Tin

Ren Doyle had been adding four minutes to her grocery trip every Thursday for nine months, and she had never once let herself notice that she was doing it.

Here is the route. In through the far doors, produce, dairy, then a hard left into frozen, all the way down past the pizzas and the peas, around the back wall by the meat counter, up past the pharmacy, and into bread from the other end.

Here is the route everybody else takes. Straight up aisle seven.

Aisle seven is where the tea is. And on the second shelf of aisle seven, at about eye level, there is a yellow tin of a loose black tea that nobody in Ren's family drinks except her sister Marta, who has drunk it every day since she was twenty two, and who thinks coffee is a personality disorder, and who said something across a table at Easter that Ren has not been able to put down since.

Ren is not going to tell you what was said. It does not matter for this. What matters is that Ren believes what she believes, still, entirely, without one inch of movement, and that the something that was said was not small, and that nine months have gone by.

She had a phrase for the distance. She used it on herself about once a week: we are just giving it some space. It sounded reasonable. It sounded almost generous.

Then a Thursday in January, and frozen was closed. Two pallets, a guy with a jack, half the aisle in shrink wrap, a cheerful sign about the inconvenience.

Ren stood there with her cart for slightly too long, the way a person does when a small obstacle turns out to be a large one, and then she turned around and went up aisle seven, because there was nowhere else to go.

Second shelf. Eye level. Four yellow tins in a row.

And Ren Doyle stood in front of them for the better part of a minute with both hands on the cart handle, and the thing that came up in her was not grief and was not anger. It was something plainer and much worse.

She had not been giving it space. She had been walking around it. Nine months of engineering a grocery store so she would not have to stand in front of a tin of tea.

So she picked one up.

Not to send it. Not to photograph it and text it with three dots and let it do the work a sentence should do. She just held it, and read the back of it, which was ordinary, and put it in the cart.

She paid for it and drove home and put it in her own cupboard, next to her own coffee.

She drinks it now. It is a terrible tea. It tastes like a hedge. She has a cup of it on Thursdays, and every Thursday she walks up aisle seven and buys another tin when she needs one, and she has not moved one inch on the thing that was said, and she has not called, and Marta has no idea any of this is happening.

That is not the point of the tea.

Forbearing is a carrying word

There is a word sitting in the middle of a sentence in Colossians that most people read straight past, and it is the one doing all the work.

Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye.Colossians 3:13

Forbearing. Not agreeing. Not conceding. Not deciding it was fine, or small, or a misunderstanding, or that you had it coming.

It is a word about weight. It means to bear with, to hold up under, to carry. And nobody carries a thing they have arranged never to stand in front of.

That is the part that took nine months to see. Ren had not stopped loving her sister. Nobody stops loving a sister over a Sunday afternoon. What she had stopped doing was carrying her, and she had let the stopping wear the word peace, because the stopping felt so much better than the carrying did.

And here is the first thing to take off you, because you have been carrying the wrong weight entirely. You are not required to be persuaded. Not one line of this asks you to move on what you believe. That is not me being diplomatic with you. Colossians says forbearing, and forbearing is what a person does with someone they still disagree with, and the Holy Spirit is not in the business of talking anybody out of their own conscience.

Look at the standard the verse actually sets. Even as Christ forgave you.

Not once you were sorry enough. Not once the matter was cleared up and the facts agreed and the apology worded correctly. Christ forgave while the whole thing was still open, from a cross, with the entire record still standing exactly as it was.

So the thing you have been waiting for was never a requirement. You are free to carry her now, at this stage, unresolved, with nothing settled and nothing taken back. The written word set that pattern in Christ Himself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies the strength to do it, which is why it has felt impossible on your own. It was.

Now let me name what has actually been sitting under the nine months, because it is not stubbornness, and calling it stubbornness has done nobody any good.

You have been afraid that carrying her again is the same thing as conceding. That the moment you buy the tea, you have agreed with what was said across that table, and everybody will know it, including you.

That fear has no ground under it at all. Scripture holds forbearing and disagreement in the same sentence without the slightest embarrassment, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a believer to hand over their convictions as the entry fee for loving somebody.

There is an old and expensive lesson in this family of churches, learned by people who had every reason to learn the opposite. Men who were certain, who had been jailed for being certain, argued for liberty for the very people they were most sure were wrong. Not because they had gone soft. Because they had noticed that a conscience is not a thing one person gets to hold for another, and that includes the consciences of people who are wrong.

You keep your conviction at full weight. That is not the thing being asked of you here.

What is being handed back to you is your own front door. The written word says forbear, and the Holy Spirit is the one who unlatches a door a person has been leaning against for nine months, and He is not asking you to open it, or to walk through it, or to invite anybody. He is asking to have the weight of your shoulder off it.