The Sayings I Repeat Without Thinking

Same words at the top of every page on this site. This is not medicine. I am not a doctor or a nurse, nothing on this page is treatment, and nothing here ever stands in for a clinic or a pharmacist. If somebody in that house is unwell, ring somebody qualified today, and do that before anything on this page about what got handed down.

Now. Somebody was unwell in your house this week and you said a sentence.

And halfway through it you heard whose it was.

It came out in his rhythm. It had his pause in the middle of it. It might even have had a word in it that nobody your age uses any more. And the odd thing about that moment is that you were not deciding anything. The sentence arrived fully formed and went out of your mouth without passing through anywhere.

That happens to every man eventually. What almost never happens is the next step, which is to stop and ask whether the sentence is true.

The instruction is to hear it, and hearing is not swallowing

There is a line at the start of Proverbs four that people quote as a command to obey, and I think it is quieter and better than that.

Hear, ye children, the instruction of a father, and attend to know understanding. (Proverbs 4:1, King James Version)

Hear the instruction. And then, in the same sentence, attend to know understanding.

Those are two different verbs and the second one is doing real work. It is not repeat. It is not carry forward unchanged. It is attend, which means give your attention to it, and know understanding, which means come out the other side knowing why.

You are asked to understand what you were handed rather than only to carry it. Proverbs 4:1 puts hearing and understanding in one sentence rather than treating repetition as the whole duty, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man examine his father's words without dishonoring the man.

And that is the permission most of us never got. In a lot of houses, hearing and agreeing were treated as the same act, and a boy who asked why was a boy being difficult.

You have never once been forbidden to ask why. The Spirit of God is the one who gives a grown man permission to think about what he was taught, and it is written that the attending and the knowing come after the hearing, in that order, in the same line.

Which sentences to look at, and what you will find

Let me be practical, because a man can sit with this for years and do nothing.

The sentences to look at are the ones about being unwell, because those are the ones this page is about and they are the ones that do harm.

You will know them when you hear them. There is no point making a fuss. Nobody ever died of a cold. It is mind over matter. Push through it. Do not go in there, you will only worry them. Men in this family do not go to doctors.

Some of those are harmless and some of them have a body count.

You are carrying sentences that were never once examined by the man who gave them to you either. Proverbs 4:1 asks for understanding to be added rather than assumed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody look at a familiar sentence as if it were new.

And what you will find, mostly, is not malice. You will find a frightened man from a hard time who said a thing to get through a week, and it got repeated until it was a rule, and nobody along the way ever asked it a question.

You were handed a coping sentence and it has never once been a commandment. The Spirit of God is the one who tells the difference between a father's fear and a father's love in the same set of words, and what is written asks a son to attend and to understand rather than only to repeat.

The plain routing, which is one of the sentences to replace

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort, and on this article it is directly connected to the subject.

If somebody in that house is in trouble right now, that is 911, and no inherited saying is part of that answer. If the heavy thing today is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a real person picks up. And if there is any sentence in your family that has been keeping somebody away from a doctor, that stops this week: you ring a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist, or you drive somebody to one.

You are permitted to be the one who breaks that particular saying, and breaking it has never once been disrespect. Proverbs 4:1 asks for understanding rather than for the unchanged repetition of a father's rule, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man be the first in a line to make a call.

The sentence men in this family do not go to doctors has ended lives. I am not dressing that up. If that one is in your house, it is the one to say out loud and then contradict with your own body.

You have the standing to end a saying, and no man in that line has ever once been dishonored by his son going to be seen. The Spirit of God is the one who is present with somebody doing the opposite of what he was taught, and what is written puts the understanding beside the hearing and expects both.