Nothing Said Since the Funeral

The coat has been on the back of the door for over a year and she is finally putting it in the bag for the charity shop, and there is something in the inside pocket.

She knows what it is before her hand closes on it. Folded in four, gone soft at the creases, the good paper they use. The order of service. His photograph on the front, the one from the caravan holiday, the one they all agreed on in about ninety seconds because for once nobody argued.

She sits down on the back step with it. Half seven in the evening in early spring, still light, the blackbird going in the hedge the way it does at that hour. She does not open it. She holds it flat on her knee with two fingers on it, the way you hold a thing down in the wind.

Fourteen months.

She can tell you the exact place in the car park. She can tell you where the hearse had been standing and where her brother's car was, and she can tell you what he said and she can tell you what she said back, and the terrible thing is that neither sentence was even about anything. It was about the house. It was about who had rung who. It was two people with nothing left in the tank saying the wrong thing at the wrong volume on the worst day of their lives, and then two car doors, and then fourteen months.

His number is still in her phone. She has never taken it out. She has scrolled past it deliberately more times than she could count.

And I am going to stop saying she now.

Because you know the car park. You know exactly what was said, and you have rewritten your half of it about four hundred times, and in every rewrite you come off better, and none of the rewrites help.

And you have lost two people, not one. That is the part nobody has ever said to you. You lost your mother or your father, and the whole world knew about that one, and there were cards and casseroles and a hundred people in a room. And in the same week you lost your brother, and there was nothing for that. No service. No cards. No one has asked you once in fourteen months how you are doing about him.

You are grieving in a way that has no name and no ceremony, and you are doing it on a back step with a folded piece of paper on your knee and a blackbird going in the hedge.

Your half of this has an edge, and the edge is a mercy

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this message that turns your brother into the villain, and he is not, and you would not thank me for it. You know things about that week that nobody else knows, including what it did to him.

And there is another version that puts the whole weight on you, tells you to be the bigger person, and hands you a job nobody could do. I am not doing that either.

Here is what I want you to see, and it is one line, and it has two limits built into it on purpose. Paul is writing to people in a city where families were split, and he had been thrown out of more towns than most of us have visited, so he was not a man with a tidy view of how these things go.

If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live in peace with all people.Romans 12:18

Read the two safety catches he put in before the instruction.

If it is possible. He allows, in writing, in Scripture, that sometimes it is not. He does not promise you an outcome and he does not scold you for not having one yet. Some doors are shut from the other side, and the man who wrote that sentence had stood outside a few of them.

As far as it depends on you. There it is. Your part has an edge. There is a line where your responsibility genuinely, actually stops, and Paul draws it deliberately, because he knows what people like you do. People like you will try to carry both halves. You will lie awake being responsible for a decision that is being made in somebody else's kitchen by somebody else's heart, and it is impossible work, and it never ends, and it has been quietly eating you for over a year. Hear the release in that edge. You are not the one holding his half and you never were, because Romans 12:18 drew that line long before either of you stood in a car park, and the Spirit keeps drawing it on the evenings when your chest wants to take the whole thing back.

You cannot make him ring. You may not make him ring. His will is his own and it belongs to God and not to you, and any version of peace that requires you to reach into another adult and turn something is not peace, it is management.

So what is left, if you cannot promise the outcome?

What is left is your half, and it is not small. Your half is where the bitterness lives. Your half is the four hundred rewrites of the car park. Your half is whether his name is spoken with love in this house or spoken with a flat little edge to it. Your half is whether the door is open, standing there, unlocked, whatever he does or does not do with it.

That is a real work and it is the work God is actually asking of you tonight. Not reconciliation on a schedule. Peace, on your side of the line, held steady, for as long as it takes, whether or not it is ever met. And you are already able for it. Not because you feel strong on a back step in early spring with a blackbird going in the hedge, but because Scripture measured your part to the size of your own reach, and the Holy Spirit is the strength inside the reaching.

And here is the tenderness in it. God is not standing over this waiting to see which of you cracks first. He is holding both of you, separately, in two different houses on the same evening, and He knows what that week did to each of you, and He is not taking sides in a car park conversation between two people who had just watched a coffin go past.