Hatred stirs up conflict, but love covers over all wrongs.
Proverbs 10:12 (NIV)
Where the Wrong Stops
The bellows lie open across the bench, folded out like a road map, and the man working on them doesn’t play anymore. He fixes them. There’s a pot of hide glue on a hot plate, a bone folder worn down on one corner, and a roll of cloth tape the color of an old suitcase. The split runs along a fold where the cardboard has gone soft, and he lays the tape over it and presses it down with his thumb until the air stops finding a way out.
Hatred stirs up conflict, but love covers over all wrongs. Stirring keeps a thing moving, brings the wrong back around, and finds a fresh reason to be right about it this week. Covering brings the same thing to a stop, and the wrong travels no further than the person it was done to.
I’ve been slower to get over the covering than over anything else in this proverb.
The tape costs a dollar. He can lay it down, press it flat, and be finished with the split, because a split never chose anything and won’t do it again tomorrow. The people he replays on the drive home can. Covering one of them would cost him the answer he’s kept ready since it happened.
Nothing in this proverb asks someone in danger to keep quiet. A wrong that’s still being done needs a door and a phone number, and covering isn’t what it needs at all. The covering here is the daily size: the slight that could be brought back at dinner, the old story with one more telling left in it.
He pulls the bellows closed and opens them once, slowly, to test the seal. The shop, silent all afternoon, is full of one long chord that nobody asked for. Then he folds it down and the last of the air goes out of it.
A Prayer to Remember
The thing I’m sore about came back around while I was reading this. I want to tell one more person about it, and you know what that would do to them and to me. Let it stop here with me, and if somebody is still being hurt, make me the one who says it to the people who can stop it.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
