Comfort That Is Not a Fix

The dishes are still by the door.

Seven of them, washed, dried, stacked in the order they arrived, each one belonging to somebody who stood on that step in the first two weeks holding food and not knowing what to say. A casserole dish with a lid that does not match. A blue bowl. A roasting tin somebody wrote their surname on in marker pen underneath, years ago, for exactly this kind of occasion.

Nobody has come back for them. That is not a complaint, and she would be mortified if anyone thought it was. People are busy, and life closes over a thing, and it is nobody's fault. But the stack by the door has become the most accurate object in her house. It is the shape of a season that happened and then stopped happening. For fourteen days her doorbell went constantly. On the fifteenth it did not, and it has not since, and she still hears it sometimes when the heating comes on.

What she has learned since is which sentences to expect. He is in a better place. At least it was quick. God needed him. Everything happens for a reason. Every one of them offered by good people who loved her and were frightened of the silence, and every one of them a small door closing, because each sentence was an answer, and she did not have a question. She had a hole in her life the exact size and shape of a person.

And now, at eleven weeks, the thing nobody warned her about: everyone has stopped asking how she is doing, and she has started saying she is doing well, and both of those are almost a relief, and both of them make her feel like she is losing him a second time.

You know that stack by the door. Maybe yours is a phone that used to ring on Sundays, or a chair, or the name still in your favorites list that you cannot bring yourself to remove. And you have been given the sentences too. And you have learned to say you are doing well, and you have got very good at it.

The friends who were right for seven days

I am not going to explain this to you.

I want to say that as plainly as I can, at the top, before anything else, because you have been braced for it since the first line. You have been handed so many explanations that you now read anything about grief with your shoulders up, waiting for the turn, waiting for the but, waiting for the paragraph where somebody makes your loss make sense so that they can be finished with it.

There is no turn coming. What you have lost is a genuine loss. It should not have to be justified, and it is not made smaller by being given a purpose. I am not going to tell you why, and I am not going to hand you a lesson, and I am not going to rush you toward the part where you are better. That is not simply my manner with people. Romans 12:15 puts weeping alongside weeping and never once asks for a reason, and the Spirit who carried that line into the letter is in your room tonight and is not building toward a but.

Here is the pit, said honestly. It is not only that they are gone. It is that the world absorbed it. The world had a fortnight of casseroles and then it went back to normal, and you cannot, and there is nowhere to put that. It is the specific loneliness of grieving in a room where everyone has moved on, and being expected to have moved with them, and doing a small performance of being fine because the truth costs other people too much. That is a second grief laid on top of the first one, and hardly anybody names it, and you have been carrying both.

Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.Romans 12:15

Look at what that verse does not do. It does not say explain to those who weep. It does not say comfort them with reasons, or help them see the good in it. Weep with them. That is the whole instruction, and it is the hardest one in the letter, because it asks a person to stay in something they cannot fix.

Job's friends did it right for seven days. That is worth remembering. When they came and saw him they tore their clothes and sat down with him on the ground, seven days and seven nights, and nobody said a word, because they saw that his suffering was very great. Seven days of the best comfort in the whole book. And then they opened their mouths and began to explain, and everything they said from that point on made it worse, and at the end of the book God tells them so directly.

The silence was the ministry. The theology was the injury.

So if you have been thinking that God is like the sentences people handed you on your doorstep, hear this: he is not. Those came from frightened love, not from him. He is the One who did not explain. When his friend Lazarus died, Jesus came to the tomb knowing exactly what he was about to do, holding the outcome in his own hands, and he still wept. He did not skip the grief because he had the answer. He stood at the grave of a man he loved, with the sisters weeping, and his own eyes ran. John 11 keeps that verse two words long so that nobody could ever tidy it away, and the Spirit who preserved it for you has never asked a grieving person to be further along than they are.

Nothing in the universe made him do that. He wept because he loved them and because it was terrible. That is God, in a body, at a graveside, refusing to hurry.

And this is not a story about how he used to be. The Father of mercies is called the God of all comfort in the present tense, the One who comforts us in all our affliction, and that comfort has never once been described in Scripture as an explanation. It is described as a Person coming close. He is near to the brokenhearted. Near. That is a location, not an argument.

There is something else I want you to know about the book you have been handed so many bad sentences from. God kept the unresolved grief in it. Psalm 88 is in there, and it does not get better. It is a song, written to be sung by a whole congregation, and it goes down and down and ends in the dark with no lift at the end and no lesson attached. Nobody edited it. Nobody added a hopeful final verse to make it usable. It sits in the songbook exactly as it was cried, because the God who put it there did not need your grief to be tidy before it was allowed in his presence. Psalm 88 is in Scripture on purpose, and it is the Spirit who kept it unedited all this way, so that somebody in your exact week could find it and be told they are not doing this wrong.

If you have been feeling that you are doing this wrong, that a person of faith should be further along by now, look at Psalm 88 and be at peace. There is a place in the house of God for a song with no resolution, and you are standing in it, and you have not been asked to leave.

Which brings me to the only thing I actually want you to receive tonight, and it is not a reason, and it is not a fix.

It is that you are not sitting in that room by yourself.

Not in the general sense that God is everywhere. In the particular sense that the God who wept at Lazarus's grave is in your house tonight, near the stack of dishes by the door, and he is not there to move you along, and he is not waiting for you to be better company. He came to sit on the ground with you, and he can stay for as long as this takes, and he is not counting the weeks. That is not a sentiment I am handing you. 2 Corinthians 1 gives Him the title God of all comfort in the present tense, and His Spirit is how that title arrives in an actual room, on an actual Tuesday, with the dishes still standing by the door.