The One Who Texts

Nia has sent first for twenty-six years.

Not always. There have been stretches. But if you took the whole quarter of a century and counted, it would not be close, and Nia has never counted because she does not want to know the number.

They met at fifteen.

She remembers the dates. Kemi's birthday, obviously, but also the anniversary of her father, and the week that is always bad, and when the results come out for the youngest.

She drives. Kemi lives an hour away and has done for nineteen years and Nia does about eighty per cent of that road.

She has been to everything. Every wedding, both christenings, the hospital twice, the thing in the spring that Kemi was dreading.

Kemi has been to about a third of hers.

And Kemi is not a bad person. This is the part that matters and it is why Nia has never been able to make a clean decision about any of it.

She is overwhelmed. She always has been, since about twenty-three, in a way that is partly circumstance and partly just how she is built, and she says herself, freely and often, that she is rubbish at this. She means it. She is not managing anybody.

When she does turn up, she is completely there. That is the other thing. There is no half-presence in her. Nia has had four or five conversations in her life that changed something, and three of them were with Kemi, in a car, at night.

So it is not exploitation. It is asymmetry, and asymmetry is much harder to hold, because there is nobody to be angry with.

Here is what Nia noticed this year, and it frightened her.

She had a bad month in February. Genuinely bad, work and her mother and something else.

And she did not tell Kemi.

Not because she was punishing her. She thought about it and decided not to, and when she looked honestly at the reason, the reason was this: if she told her, she would find out what happened next, and she did not want to find out.

So she stopped telling her, to protect the thing.

That is twenty-six years arriving somewhere. And she sat with that for a week and could not decide whether it made her wise or a coward.

Then in the summer Kemi's eldest, who is twenty and getting on with her own life, messaged Nia about something practical.

And at the end of it she wrote: Mum says you're the only person who's known her her whole life.

Nia read that about nine times.

Because it means Kemi knows. She has always known. She just cannot do the other half of it and never has been able to.

Now let me ask you when you stopped telling them things.

Because if this is yours there was a moment, and you will be able to date it roughly, and you decided something at that moment that you have never said out loud.

At all times

Proverbs puts two lines side by side and the second one explains the first.

A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.Proverbs 17:17

At all times.

That is not describing intensity. It is describing duration, and it is the load-bearing phrase. A friend who loves when it is warm and available is not being contrasted with a bad friend here: the contrast is with a friend who loves in some seasons and not others.

And notice the grammar of it. The verse describes what a friend does. It does not describe a transaction and it does not say a friend loves at all times, provided the other one does.

That is not because Scripture is naive about people. Proverbs is the least naive book in the Bible about human beings, and four chapters later it will tell you plainly about a companion who is no use at all.

It simply defines the thing from one side. This is what it is to be a friend, and it is a description of a person rather than an arrangement.

So hear this said over you, sitting on your own having read a message nine times. Twenty-six years of being the one who sends first is a description of who you are and not a verdict on your judgment, and Proverbs defines a friend by duration without one word about the other person's tally. That is written in a verse that says at all times, and it is the Holy Spirit who bears the fruit of faithfulness in a believer, and faithfulness is on that list precisely because it costs something to keep.

Now let me be careful, and this matters, because there is a version of this article that would do harm.

I am not telling you to accept whatever anybody gives you.

There are relationships that take and take, and there are people who use loyalty, and if you are in one of those, staying is not obedience, and no verse in Proverbs requires you to be treated badly indefinitely. If that is your situation, this is a real conversation and it is worth having with somebody who knows you both.

That is not what you have described, though. You have described a woman who is overwhelmed, who says so, who is entirely present when she is present, and who has told her daughter that you are the only person who has known her all her life.

That is asymmetry, not exploitation, and the two require completely different things from you.

And I am not going to tell you the asymmetry does not cost you. It does. It has cost you twenty-six years of being the one who initiates, and it costs you again every time you look at the phone and it is not her.

Here is what I actually want to say to you.

You have started protecting the friendship by removing yourself from it.

February. You had a bad month and you kept it back, and your reason was that you did not want to test her, and it sounded like wisdom and it is the beginning of the end.

Because a friendship where one person has stopped bringing anything is not being preserved. It is being converted, quietly, into something you administer.

She may not reach for you well. She has never been able to. But you have been the one who has always brought the real thing, and if you stop bringing it, then there genuinely will be nothing in it, and it will be you who took it out.

The word says a friend loves at all times, and the Spirit of God is the one who produces faithfulness as fruit, which means the twenty-six years were not stubbornness in you. They were something He grew.