We Gave The Noise A Name

The noise is called Hector.

It got named in March by Rafael's youngest, who was nine at the time, and who said, from the back seat, "Hector's talking again," and the whole car fell apart, and it stuck the way these things stick when the whole car falls apart.

That was six months ago and the name has done extremely well for itself.

Hector gets mentioned at dinner. Hector has moods. When the family is going somewhere and the car starts on the first turn of the key, somebody says Hector is in a good mood today. When it is cold and the noise is worse, Hector is grumpy. Rafael's wife once said, in a store, to a friend, "We've got Hector in the car, I can't be long," and the friend laughed, and neither of them thought about it again.

There is a birthday card somewhere in that house with a drawing of a car on it labeled Hector.

Now here is what I want to say about that name, and I want to say it warmly, because I love this family and I would sit at that table any Sunday.

The name is not the problem. The name is delightful. A household that names things is a household with life in it.

The problem is what the name has been asked to do.

Because a joke is a container. It holds a thing and makes it carryable. And a thing that is carryable does not get carried anywhere, it just gets carried, indefinitely, by everyone, cheerfully.

Six months ago there was a noise in a car that somebody would have had to deal with. Today there is a family member. And you do not take a family member to a shop. You make room for him.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is a good deal cleverer than avoidance usually manages. Nothing got hidden. Nothing got denied. Everybody talks about it constantly. It has simply been moved, by common consent and with genuine affection, out of the category of things that require action and into the category of things that are funny.

Rafael's brother in law rode with them in August and said, "What is that?"

And three people said "Hector" at once, and laughed.

And the brother in law laughed too, and then said, "No, but seriously, what is it?"

And there was a small pause in that car, about two seconds long, that Rafael has thought about more than once since.

What a joke is actually for

Let me put down what I am not doing, so nothing has to brace.

I am not going to guess what that sound is. I have not been in the car and it would help nobody, and a man at a distance offering a diagnosis is doing harm in a friendly voice. And if that car ever does anything on the road that feels wrong under anyone's hands, this whole message stands aside and it goes to somebody qualified this week.

What I want to look at is the two second pause in August.

Now, there is a line in Proverbs about laughter that is easy to misread as gloom, and it is not gloom at all. It is one of the most observant sentences in the book.

Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; and the end of that mirth is heaviness.Proverbs 14:13

That is not saying laughter is wrong. Proverbs is full of a good table and a merry heart and it likes both.

It is saying something much more precise: that laughter and a weight can occupy the same room at the same time, and that the laughter does not remove the weight, and that when the laughing is over the weight is exactly where it was.

Which is the two second pause, described three thousand years early.

You are not a family that hides things, and Scripture never once calls a household's laughter a fault. It is written that even in laughter the heart may be sorrowful, which puts the two side by side rather than one against the other, and His Spirit is the one who makes that an observation you can receive without any shame in it.

You have been carrying a thing cheerfully, and the passage says plainly that cheerfully carried is still carried. Proverbs 14 puts the heaviness at the end of the mirth rather than instead of it, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient sentence land on a car full of people laughing at a name.

The name did a real job

Here is the part I want to say with respect, because I do not think this family did anything wrong.

That name kept four people from being frightened in a car for six months.

Think about what the alternative would have looked like. A sound that nobody can explain, in the only vehicle a household has, with a nine year old in the back seat noticing that his parents go quiet when it happens. That is a real cost and it would have been paid by children.

Rafael's daughter took a frightening thing and made it a character, and everybody in that car has been lighter for it ever since. That is not avoidance. On a good day that is genius.

But a container is for carrying something to somewhere.

And what has happened over six months, without anybody deciding, is that the container became the destination. Hector is where the noise lives now. There is nowhere else for it to go, because everywhere else would require somebody to break the joke, and breaking a family joke feels like taking something away from everybody at the table.

You were never required to choose between a light household and a fixed car, and no verse anywhere puts those two in opposition. Proverbs 14 sets the laughter and the heaviness together as a fact rather than as a choice, and the Spirit of God is what makes them both able to be true in the same kitchen.

And here is the tender thing, and it is why the pause was two seconds long.

Everybody in that car already knows. The nine year old knows. That is what a family joke is: an agreement about a thing everybody can see. And the person carrying the most weight of it is the one in the driver's seat, who has been laughing along at a name for six months while quietly running an arithmetic nobody else at that table is running.

You have not been protecting them from the truth, and the written word puts the load on the one who carries rather than on the ones being carried. It is written that a merry heart doeth good like a medicine, which is Proverbs 17 giving real value to what your daughter did, and His Spirit is what lets a man honor the joke and end it in the same breath.