Morning Comes, and It Does Not Owe You a Date

The first fortnight, the house was full. People came with food nobody could eat and stood in the kitchen in coats and said the kind things people say, and somebody washed up without being asked, and there was always a car outside.

By the sixth week it had gone quiet. Not unkindly. Everybody went back to their own lives, which is what lives do, and the messages thinned out, and then there was a Thursday evening when she realized nobody had asked her how she was doing in eleven days. Not once. She had become a person it was awkward to ask.

So she sat in the front room with the lamps on and the television off, in the chair she has taken to sitting in because it is not the other chair, and she did the thing she does now, which is nothing. Not reading. Not thinking, particularly. Just sitting in a room that is the right temperature and the right brightness and the wrong shape forever.

And underneath it, running all the time like something left on in another part of the house, is a sentence she cannot get to stop. People keep telling her it gets better. Everybody says it. Nobody says when.

I am not going to describe her any further, because I suspect the chair I am describing is yours, and you do not need a stranger narrating your own front room back to you.

So I will just come and sit down, and I am not going to say any of the things they say.

Nobody is going to hurry you out of this

Let me start by saying the thing nobody has said, and then let me stay in it with you rather than moving on.

It has not got better. You are further from the day it happened and you are not further from the loss, and those turned out to be two entirely different measurements, and nobody warned you.

The early part had a shape. There were arrangements to make and people to telephone and a service to get through, and the work carried you the way work does. Then the work ran out and everybody went home and the actual thing arrived, in an ordinary week, with no ceremony attached to it, and that is when it got heaviest, and that is exactly when the support ended. God did not leave when the cars did. Revelation 21:4 was written for the ordinary week and not for the fortnight of casseroles. His Spirit has been in that front room every evening since the last of them went home.

You have learned to say fine. You have learned which people can take a real answer and which people go quiet and start looking for their keys. You have caught yourself performing recovery to make somebody else comfortable, and then felt something close to shame about it afterwards, as if you had betrayed the person you lost by being convincing.

Some days you forget for forty minutes and then remember, and the remembering is like the first hour again. Some days you are furious and you cannot even tell me at whom. Some days you cannot cry at all and that frightens you more than crying did.

And there is a specific loneliness in this that I want to name properly, because it is the worst of it. It is not that people do not care. It is that the world has moved on to the next thing and you cannot, and so you are standing still in a moving crowd, and standing still in a moving crowd is exhausting in a way nobody sees. It is seen. That is not a consolation I am inventing, it is written, and the Holy Spirit is why being seen is something happening in that room tonight rather than something true in general.

I am not going to tell you where you should be by now. There is no schedule. Anyone who hands you one has not been where you are.

I know something about a thing that could not be repaired. Not this thing. I will not insult you by putting my loss beside yours and calling them the same weight, because they are not. But I know the particular silence of standing in front of something you cannot fix, and knowing that no amount of competence, effort or faith is going to put it back, and I promise you I am not going to try to fix you now.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.Revelation 21:4

That is the morning. It is real, it is promised, and it is God Himself doing the wiping, personally, with His own hand, which is a strange and tender detail that I do not think John put in by accident. The Spirit who moved him to write it down is in the room with you while the promise is still unkept, and He has never once found the waiting embarrassing.

And I have to tell you the truth about it, because you have been handed enough comfortable sentences. It has no date on it. Nobody on this earth can tell you when, and everybody who has tried to tell you when has been guessing, and their guess has cost you something every time it did not come true.

Which brings me to the sentence I actually want to leave with you.

God does not owe you a date, and He has never once left you in the dark waiting for one.

Look at what He does in the meantime, because the meantime is where you live. Scripture says He is near to the brokenhearted, and it does not say near to the recovered. It says our tears are kept and counted and written in His book, which means the crying you did last night on the stairs was not a waste and was not unwitnessed. And when Jesus stood outside the tomb of a friend, He wept, and He wept knowing exactly what He was about to do. He did not skip the grief because He knew the ending. He stood in it, out loud, in front of everybody.

That is your God at the graveside. Not impatient. Not waiting for you to get on with it. Weeping with people who are weeping and in no hurry whatsoever.

So no, I am not going to promise you that it lifts by Christmas. I am going to promise you something smaller and steadier, and it happens to be the only thing that has ever helped anybody in this room.

You are not doing this on your own. Not tonight, not at three in the morning, not on the anniversary that is coming and that you are already dreading in the back of your mind. That is not my company being offered. The Spirit of God is why near means that chair and not a general sentiment about grief. It is written that He is near to the brokenhearted.