Three Words For Everybody

I can't complain, honey.

Three words and a honey on the end, and she has been handing them out for about six years without once thinking about it.

The receptionist at the doctor's gets it. The woman at the counter gets it. Her son, on the phone on a Sunday, gets it, and then they talk about his car. She said it last month to a young nurse who had actually sat down on the end of the bed with the notes on her lap, which is a thing you should never waste, and she wasted it.

Here is what has been bothering her since. She cannot remember choosing that phrase. She did not sit down one day and decide on a policy. It arrived at some point, probably in the year after the fall, and it has been on duty ever since like a dog nobody trained.

And it is doing more than she asked it to. It was supposed to be a way of getting past a question in a corridor. It is now the whole of what her son knows about how she is, and he lives two hundred miles away, and he is a good boy, and he takes it at face value because she has never given him anything else to take.

You have three words. Or four. Something that arrived unasked and now answers on your behalf.

Count what the three words have cost

Nobody has, and it is worth doing properly.

They have cost her the nurse, who would have written something useful down. They cost her a Thursday in February when a neighbor asked and got the phrase and went home, and she then had a bad night on her own that a phone call would have shortened.

And they have cost her her son. Not his love. His accuracy. He believes she is fine because she has told him so several hundred times, and when she does eventually need him he is going to be very confused and very quick to blame himself, and none of that will be his fault.

You have been running on a phrase you never chose, and God has never once been answered by it. Psalm 139:2 says He understands your thought from far off, and the same Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it at a kitchen table with the radio on. Six years of that phrase has never once reached Him and He has never once asked for anything better.

Do not lie to one another, and who it is actually protecting

There is one line built for a woman with a phrase on duty.

Lie not one to another, seeing that you have put off the old man with his deeds.Colossians 3:9

Now, let the Holy Spirit slow you down over that. Three words in a corridor is not lying and I am not going to pretend it is, and if anybody has used this verse to make an old woman feel wicked about being private, they were wrong. But look at the reason attached to it, because the reason is the useful part: seeing that you have put off the old man. It is not a rule with a threat behind it. It is a description of somebody who no longer needs the armor they used to need.

The phrase is armor. It went on for a good reason in the year after the fall. And the verse is not telling her off; it is asking whether she still needs it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a gentle question rather than a charge.

You have already put off the thing that made the phrase necessary, and it was taken off you rather than worked off by you. That is not a soft reading of a blunt verse. The written word gives the reason as a change already made, and the Spirit is the one who makes not needing armor feel like relief rather than exposure.

And I want to be plain. Saying a true sentence is not a duty and it is not an improvement program. If I can't complain comes out at the counter tomorrow, nothing has failed and nobody is disappointed.

What the true sentence sounds like on a Sunday phone call

The constraints are small and the same as ever. True. Short. And it must not put her on display or hand her son something he cannot do anything about from two hundred miles away.

That rules out I can't complain, which fails the first. It rules out telling him about February, which fails the third and which she would not do and should not have to.

What is left is something like: I am all right, honey, and it has been a hard week, and I did not want to say so. Or shorter: not my best week. I am glad you rang.

You are allowed to hand your son one true thing without handing him a worry, and the two are not the same. Colossians 3:9 gives the reason as a change already made in you, and it is His Spirit who makes four honest seconds possible in a phone call about a car.

One plain sentence before we go on. If there are nights like February happening more often, or if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line first, before your son. That is not grumbling. That is what a true sentence is for, arriving properly, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.