You Do Not Have to Be Finished Grieving

Level four of the multi story, the far corner past the pillar, where the spaces are always empty because nobody wants the walk. That is where she does it. Ten minutes, sometimes fifteen, engine off, hands still on the wheel. Then the packet of tissues in the glovebox, then the mirror, then the shopping.

She did not plan this. Nobody sits down and decides to schedule their grief into a car park. It assembled itself over about a year, the way these arrangements do, out of small pieces of information she was quietly collecting. That the third time she mentioned him at the school gate, the conversation moved along a little faster. That her brother's voice does a particular thing now when she says the name, a sort of gentle bracing, as though he is preparing to manage something. That somebody she loves very much, who meant it with total kindness, said the sentence out loud one evening and she has never been able to unhear it. It has been eighteen months. Do you not think it might be time.

So now she is fine at the school gate. She is fine in the meeting. She is fine at the family dinner and fine on the phone and fine right up until level four, where she is not fine at all, and where she has ten minutes to be honest before she has to go in and buy bread.

You have your own version of the car park. The shower. The drive home with the radio off. The half hour after the house has gone to bed. You have become extremely skilled at containment, and somewhere in the last year or two you absorbed the idea that the containment is what healthy looks like, and that the grief itself has become a fault in you rather than the exact shape of how much you loved them.

Nobody but God sets the clock on this

I am not going to lift you anywhere yet. First I want to say back to you what is actually happening, because I do not think anyone has done that for a while.

You are not sad. Sad is a word for a thing that passes. What you are is amputated. The person is gone and the shape they left is exactly their size, and you keep arriving at it. The chair. The second cup you nearly poured. The stupid joke that only two people alive ever found funny and now only one. Their number, still in your phone, which you have not deleted and will not discuss with anybody.

And on top of the loss itself there is the second, quieter injury, and it is the one that brought you here. You have been made to feel that your grief has become an imposition. Nobody said it cruelly. It arrives as concern. It arrives as we just want to see you happy again, and as advice, and as the pause before someone changes the subject. And the effect of all of it is that you have gone underground with the very thing you most needed company in, and you are now lonely on top of being bereaved, which is a weight no one should have to carry in a car park. Psalm 56:8 has God keeping count of your wanderings and your tears kept in His own bottle, and the Holy Spirit is what carries a line like that down to level four instead of leaving it on the page.

So let me put something in your hands.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.Ecclesiastes 3:1 and 3:4

Look at what that list is. It is not a list of moods. It is a list of appointed seasons, given by God, each with its own hour, and mourning is on it as a legitimate season of a human life, sitting on the same line as dancing without any suggestion that one is the healthy one and the other is the fault.

And then notice who is absent from the passage. There is no committee. There is no eighteen month rule. Nowhere in the chapter is a neighbor, a colleague, a relative or a church given the authority to declare somebody's season closed. The times belong to God. He appointed them, He keeps them, and He has not delegated the clock to the people around your table.

Which means the sentence that was said to you was not the voice of God. It may have come from someone who loves you. It was still not His voice, and you are free to stop measuring yourself against it tonight. That freedom is not something I am granting you. It stands written into the chapter you have just read, and where the Spirit of God is at work a written season stops feeling like a technicality and starts feeling like permission.

Now go and look at what He is actually like in the presence of a grave.

Jesus arrives at Bethany four days after Lazarus died, and He knows exactly what He is about to do. He says it out loud beforehand. And when He sees Mary weeping, and the others weeping, He groans in His spirit and is troubled, and He asks where they have laid him, and then comes the shortest verse in the Bible. Jesus wept.

Hold that carefully, because it dismantles everything you have been told. He is not weeping out of ignorance. He is not weeping because He lacks faith about the outcome. He knows. He weeps anyway, in company, in front of people, without apology and without hurry, and He does not skip the grief in order to get to the power. God stood at a graveside and cried, and nobody in that account tells Him it might be time. John 11:35 is two words long and it was kept for you on purpose, and the Holy Spirit has never once let that verse fall out of the book for the sake of tidiness.

If mourning were a failure of faith, that verse could not exist.

The whole Bible is quieter and kinder about this than we are. Jacob, told his son was dead, refused to be comforted, and Scripture reports it without one syllable of rebuke. David wept openly for a son who had wronged him terribly. There are whole books of the Bible that are nothing but lament, kept in the canon on purpose, for people exactly where you are, so that the words would already be written on the nights you cannot make any of your own. That was the Spirit's provision, not an accident of editing: tears kept in the canon so nobody has to invent language at two in the morning.

And there is one sentence people reach for when they want to move you along, so let me hand it back to you the right way round. Paul is writing to a young church that is burying its own, and he says he does not want them ignorant concerning those who have fallen asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. Read where that sentence actually ends, because everything is in the second half of it. He does not say do not sorrow. He says do not sorrow the way people sorrow who have nothing at all to hold. The words describe the manner of the grief, not the permission for it, and there is no duration anywhere in them, no month named and no limit set. He is separating your sorrow from despair. He is not separating you from your sorrow. Somebody along the way turned that verse into a stopwatch, and it never was one.