It Was an Ordinary Tuesday

The bag of frozen peas is still on the counter and it is going soft.

He has been on the kitchen floor for about forty minutes, with his back against the cupboard door and his legs straight out in front of him like a child, and he can see the bag from there, sweating onto the wood, and he cannot make himself get up and put it away.

Twenty past three on a Tuesday.

He had been carrying the shopping in. Two trips, because he never does three, and the second bag had split a little at the corner, and he was thinking about the tape on the tin opener drawer and whether the bin men had been. That was what was in his head. Tape. Bin men. That was the whole content of his mind at the moment the phone went.

He does not remember all of the call. He remembers that he said the word what, twice, and that his voice came out completely normal both times, which he thinks about now with a kind of horror. He remembers pulling the chair out from the table, because that is what people do, and then not sitting in it, and then sitting down on the floor instead.

His brother. Forty four years old. On a road he has driven himself two hundred times.

And outside the window the school run is starting, and there is a woman with a pram, and somebody's radio, and a plane going over, and every single one of those things is behaving as if this were an ordinary Tuesday afternoon in the middle of the week.

The chair is still pulled out. Nobody has sat in it. Later on, somebody will come and be very kind and will put the shopping away, and he will not be able to tell you who.

I am going to stop saying he now.

Because you have a room like that. You know which floor. You know what was in your hands when the phone went or the door went or the doctor came out into the corridor with a face that had already told you.

Maybe it was your mother, and the two of you had spoken on the Sunday about nothing. Maybe it was your son. Maybe it was a Wednesday, or a Friday, or a morning so early it was still dark, and the ordinariness is the part that keeps coming back for you. There was no warning. Nothing in the sky. The kettle had just boiled. It was a completely unremarkable day and it was the last one of the life you had.

And people keep saying they cannot imagine it, and they are right, they cannot.

Nobody warns you on a Tuesday

I am not going to hurry you out of that kitchen. I am going to sit down on the floor with my back against the other cupboard, and we can be there a while, because that is where you actually are and I am not interested in talking to a version of you that has moved on.

Here is the truth, and I want it said plainly, without a lift attached to it.

That day took your life apart. Not a chapter of it. Not a season. The whole arrangement. There was a life where that person was alive and you were living in it, and there is this one, and the join between them is a bag of peas on a counter at twenty past three.

Grief is not an emotion you are having. It is a country you were deported to without your consent, and you did not pack, and you do not speak the language, and everyone you meet there tells you that they went home eventually, as though that were the same as telling you the way. And you are not standing in that country without a native speaker. Romans 8:26 says the Spirit makes intercession with groanings that cannot be uttered, which is God putting words to the exact thing you cannot pronounce yet.

And it comes in waves, which is the part nobody prepares you for. Not a slope, downward, gently. Waves. Six good hours and then the sound of a door. A song in a shop. Somebody else's car with the same rattle. It knocks you flat in a car park and you get up and pay for the parking.

Here is what the Word does with that. Not a rebuke. Not a tidy answer.

Deep calls to deep at the sound of Your waterfalls; all Your waves and Your billows have swept over me.Psalm 42:7

Read it again and notice what God has permitted to stand inside His own book. A man drowning, saying so, out loud, and not apologizing for it. All Your waves. He does not say some. He is not managing it. He is under the water and he is telling the truth about being under the water, and the Holy Spirit saw fit to keep that sentence for three thousand years so that you could find it on the floor of your kitchen.

You are not failing at faith by being flattened. There is no version of the Christian life where a person who has lost their brother is expected to be upright by Thursday. What is written there is a drowning man's own sentence, kept by the Spirit exactly as he said it and tidied up by nobody since.

And I am not going to hand you a reason for it. I do not have one and neither does anybody else who is honest, and every neat explanation offered to a grieving person is really an attempt to make the other person feel less helpless. If somebody has said one of those things to you this week, they meant well and they were wrong, and you may put it down.

Now read the very next line of that psalm, because the man who wrote it did not stop at the waves.

By day the LORD commands His steadfast love, and by night His song is with me.

By night. That is when this comes for you, and He knew that, and the song is put there specifically for the hours when nobody is awake to sit with you.

That is what I have to give you. Not a reason. A Person, in the room, at three in the morning, who is not put off by the state of you and is not waiting for you to be further along than you are. Psalm 42:8 promises His song for the night specifically. In a kitchen at three in the morning where the only other sound is the fridge, that singing is the Spirit's.

The shortest sentence in the whole of the Scriptures is about a graveside, and it is two words: Jesus wept. He was standing outside the tomb of a friend and He knew exactly what He was about to do next, and He cried anyway. God has stood in that kitchen. He has been on that floor. He did not send an instruction to it. He came into it, and He has not left.