It Is Okay to Not Be Okay

She sits in the car for a few minutes before she goes in, and she practices.

Not out loud. Just in her head, the way you rehearse a line you have to deliver convincingly. Doing all right, thanks. Taking it a day at a time. Some days are better than others. That last one is the good one, because it sounds honest and it ends the conversation, and both of those things matter when you have fourteen minutes of small talk ahead of you and no capacity left.

On the back seat there is a casserole dish. It has been washed and dried and sitting on that seat for four months, because handing it back means standing in a kitchen doorway while a kind woman looks at her carefully and asks how she is really doing, and she does not have that in her today. So the dish rides around town. It has been to the shops and the dentist and twice to the coast.

Fourteen months. In the first six weeks everyone was extraordinary. There were people in the house and food in the refrigerator and someone answering the phone for her. Then it thinned, the way it always does, and now it is a hand on the shoulder on the way past and a warm smile, and nobody asks the question anymore because everyone assumes she is through the worst of it, and she has let them assume it because correcting them would be worse.

I want to say something to you now, because that car is your car. It is not that you are pretending to be fine. It is that somewhere in the last year you picked up a schedule you never agreed to, and now you are quietly certain that you are behind on it, and grief has been joined by a second thing that is just as heavy: the pressure to be further along than you are.

Nobody in the Bible was on a schedule

Let me name the pit first, and I am not going to hurry out of it, because hurrying out of it is exactly what has been done to you.

You are lonely in a specific way that people who have not lost someone do not understand. The world went back to normal and you are still living in a house where nothing is normal. You have caught yourself reaching for the phone to tell them something. You have a drawer you cannot open yet, a jumper you cannot wash because of how it still smells, and a whole category of songs you skip. You are tired of being brave in public and coming apart in the car afterwards. And somewhere in the middle of all this you have started to feel like a burden, like a person who is taking too long, like the grief itself is now a social problem you are supposed to manage on everybody else's behalf.

Hear this. There is no schedule. There never was one. The schedule was invented by people who love you and do not know what to say, and it has no authority over you whatsoever. It is not written anywhere in Scripture, and the Spirit has never once checked a calendar before coming to sit with somebody.

Look at how Scripture actually handles this. Israel mourned Moses for thirty days out on the plains and nobody moved the nation on. Jacob, told his son was dead, refused to be comforted, and the text simply reports it without a word of correction. David went on the ground and would not eat. There is an entire book in the Bible that is nothing but weeping over a ruined city, and God put it in there on purpose, and He did not attach a note to the front telling anybody to look on the bright side.

And then there is the shortest verse in the book, and it is the one I want in your hands today. Jesus stood outside the tomb of His friend Lazarus. He knew exactly what He was about to do. He knew the outcome, He knew it was minutes away, and He wept anyway.

Sit with that. Knowing did not cancel the tears. The most competent person who ever walked the earth stood at a grave and cried, and it was not a failure of faith, and nobody has ever suggested it was.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.Matthew 5:4

Notice where the blessing lands. Not on the ones who have finished. Not on the ones who are handling it well. On the ones who are mourning, right now, in the middle of it, with nothing resolved. The word is present tense. He is not blessing the recovery. He is blessing the wound, and He is promising that comfort comes to people who are still in it.

That is not a small thing and I do not want it to slide past you. God did not say get through it and then I will meet you on the other side. He put the comfort inside the mourning. Which means the very state you have been apologizing for is the exact place where He has promised to come. Matthew 5:4 says it in the present tense, and His Spirit is already in the car with you and the casserole dish, four months into a journey nobody knows you are making.

And I want to say something about the people around you, because I do not think you should walk out of here carrying resentment on top of everything else. The ones who stopped asking are not cruel. Most of them are frightened. They do not know what to say, they are terrified of saying the wrong thing and making it worse, and so they say nothing and hope you understand. Some of them are waiting for you to raise it first, and you are waiting for them, and both of you are being kind in the least useful way possible.

You are allowed to go first. Not because you owe anybody an update, but because the silence has been costing you more than it has been costing them. One person, one sentence, one honest answer. That is enough to start. The written word never asks a mourner to be further along before speaking, and the Spirit will be in the sentence with you the first time you say the true thing out loud in fourteen months.

I am not going to tell you what your loss was for. I do not know, and anybody who says they do is selling something they do not have. I am not going to tell you it was a blessing in disguise or that you will understand it later. Some things are simply terrible and this one was terrible.

What I will tell you is that God comes. He still walks into ordinary rooms, in this decade, and lifts things off people that no human being could lift, and He does it in the middle of the mess rather than after it has been tidied. Not to explain your loss. To sit with you in it. And if the dark ever gets heavier than the grief, tell a human being tonight and let them stay with you, because that is not weakness and it never was.