What You Have Been Pretending to Catch

Two o'clock on a Friday, and nobody has cleared the table.

Plates pushed back. A bowl of olives that everyone has stopped reaching for. Three glasses of tea going cold beside the sugar, and seven conversations running at once, braided together into one warm noise that goes all the way up to the ceiling. This is the best hour of the week in that house. It always has been.

He sits at the end of the table, where he has always sat.

His daughter says something down at the far end, and the whole table breaks up laughing, and he laughs half a second after them. It is a very good half second. He has been working on it for about two years now. The trick, he found early, is to watch shoulders. Shoulders move before the laugh comes out, so if you keep one eye on the shoulders you are never the last one, and nobody looks over at you with that soft face he cannot stand.

He has other systems. He sits with the window behind him so faces are lit. He asks questions he already knows the answers to, because a question buys you thirty seconds where you are not required to have caught the last thing. He says of course, of course a lot, warmly, and it fits almost anywhere. He turned the television up to forty one this week and turned it back to thirty four before anyone came in.

And on Tuesday his grandson stood right next to his chair and said something about a lemon, or a lesson, or leaving, and looked up at him waiting, and he said of course, of course, and the boy's face fell for a second before he ran off. That is the one he keeps replaying at night. Not the volume. Not the doctor's letter he has not opened. That small face, falling.

You know this table. You have your own version of it.

You have a chair you prefer and a side you turn and a set of phrases that cover almost anything, and you have got so good at it that the people who love you have no idea, and that is the part you are proudest of and the part that is killing you. Because here is what nobody says out loud about this. It is not the sound going. It is the exhaustion. It is doing simultaneous translation for four hours at your own family's table and going out to the kitchen to stand by the sink for a minute where nothing is required of you. It is being the only person in a full room who is working.

And it is the shrinking. First the restaurants, because restaurants are impossible. Then the phone, because the phone is worse. Then the one friend who mumbles, and then the group, and then the church row you moved back three seats because you could not bear asking anyone to repeat it a third time.

Nobody threw you out of any of it. You went quiet and stepped back, one small step at a time, and everyone assumed you wanted to.

He took the man away from the crowd first

I want to name the weight before I go anywhere near comfort, because comfort handed to somebody who does not feel understood just slides off them.

Here is the weight. You are lonely inside a room full of people who love you, and you cannot say so, because saying so would mean admitting the thing, and admitting the thing feels like the first sentence of a story about becoming old, or becoming a burden, or becoming someone people manage instead of someone people talk to. So you carry it alone and you carry it well, and the carrying costs you more every year, and there is nobody to hand it to because you have not told anyone there is anything to hand.

I am not going to pretend I can fix your ears. I would not do that to you. What I can hand you is not my sympathy. It is Mark 7:34, and His Spirit carries it as far as the end of your own table. So I want you to see something in the way Jesus handled a man in your exact position, because it is the tenderest piece of craft in the whole book, and almost nobody notices it.

They brought him a man who could not hear, and who could barely make himself understood when he spoke. A crowd brought him. A crowd, pressing in, watching. And the first thing Jesus did was take him away from all of them, off to one side, where it was just the two of them.

Think about what that means. The one person in that crowd who could not follow what was being said about him got taken out of the noise before anything else happened. He was not made a demonstration. He was not put on display for a crowd he could not hear. He was given a quiet place and a face he could see and a pair of hands that told him what was about to happen, because Jesus touched his ears and touched his tongue, which is exactly what you do for a man who cannot hear you explain it.

And then:

And looking up to heaven, he sighed, and said to him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.Mark 7:34

He sighed.

Do not walk past that. The Son of God stood there with a man who had been shut out of every conversation in his village, and before he said a word, he sighed. That is not technique. That is a chest doing what a chest does when it is holding something heavy on behalf of somebody else. He felt it. He felt the years of it. The half seconds, the nodding, the standing by the sink.

Whatever else is true about your ears, this is true first: your isolation is not invisible to God, and it is not boring to him, and it does not make him sigh with impatience. It makes him sigh the other way. That sigh was written down rather than summarized, and the Holy Spirit kept it on the record for the person at the end of the table who is working harder than anybody there and telling nobody.

And let me say one plain thing here, because a message like this one can be misheard and I will not risk it. Going to your appointments is not a lack of faith. Getting the test, opening the letter, wearing what you have been given and using what has been prescribed is not a lack of faith. It never was. Not once, anywhere, has God treated care as competition.