Nobody Is Rushing You Out Of This

The second toothbrush is still in the cup and it has been six weeks.

She notices it the way anybody notices a step that is not there. Every morning, in the two seconds before the tap runs. It is the blue one. She could put it in the bin in about four seconds flat and she has not, and she could not tell anybody why, and she has stopped asking herself.

It is a Wednesday afternoon, which is the worst of them, because Wednesday used to be the night neither of them cooked. The house is very tidy now. That is the thing nobody warns anybody about. Nothing gets moved, so nothing needs putting back, and the tidiness sits there in every room like a held breath.

The photographs are still up in the hall. Three of them, and the big one at the end by the coat hooks. Taking them down is not a five minute job. It is an afternoon of its own with a chair and a screwdriver and whatever else comes with it, and she is not doing that today and she was not doing it last Wednesday either.

Six weeks. Here is what six weeks is. The casseroles have stopped. The messages that came every day have thinned to a message on a Sunday, and then not always. Her sister rang constantly for a fortnight and now rings when there is news. Everybody has gone back to their own kitchens, which is right, and which is what people have to do, and which leaves the afternoons enormous.

She still fills the kettle to the second line out of habit, and then stands there looking at it.

Somebody at work, meaning nothing in the world but kindness, told her on Monday that God has beauty for ashes and that she is going to come out of this stronger. She said thank you. Then she sat in her car at lunchtime for twenty minutes with the engine off and her hands in her lap.

What she was thinking, and could not have said out loud in that office, is this. I do not want to come out of it yet. I have not finished being in it. Everybody keeps standing at the edge of this thing with a hand held out, trying to walk me off somewhere else, and there is nowhere to be walked to, and the walking is not the help.

Maybe that is where you are this afternoon. Not needing a way through it. Not yet. Needing somebody to sit down in it and not look at their watch.

The word on the sign, before it can do anything sly

I will do the plain thing first, because on a page with a name like this one the word has to be nailed down before anything at all is offered underneath it.

Abundance is not money. It is not a fuller house either, it is not a replacement, and it is not the promise of a better second chapter with better people in it. It means one thing here, and it is the thing John 10 actually says: fullness of life, given by a Shepherd who came so that His own would have life and have it over the brim. Not a payout. Not a rebuild. Life, and more of it, inside the life a person is actually living, which today is a tidy house and a kettle filled to the second line.

That is the only definition this page will ever hand anybody, and I am setting it down early so nothing further along gets to lean on the other meaning.

You are held right now, in the chair, at six weeks, with the photographs still up and no plan whatsoever for them. Not held once the hall has been sorted out. Now. That is not my sentiment; it is what Scripture says in Psalm 34, that the Lord is near to the broken hearted and saves the crushed in spirit, and the Holy Spirit carries a written line like that into a house with one person in it.

Six weeks is its own country

I want to stay here a while, because a page that hurries past six weeks has not understood what six weeks actually is.

Six weeks is when the drama has finished and the life has not restarted. It is when everybody who came has gone, correctly, back to their own week. It is the hour between four and five when the light changes and the house says something it does not say at any other time of the day. It is having to answer the question at work. It is the second toothbrush, which is the smallest object in the building and weighs more than the furniture.

And here is what I am not going to do with any of it. I am not going to tell you that somebody upstairs arranged this for a reason, or that you will be glad of it in a few years, or that this is simply how God opens doors. Those sentences get said because standing in silence next to a hurting person is hard work, and they are not true, and I am not putting one in your hands in the sixth week.

You were not left in that hallway on the worst evening of the last six weeks. Somebody was there, in the dark, before anybody from church knew a single thing had happened. That is not a comforting way of describing an evening; it is what God already said about Himself in Psalm 34 and in a hundred places besides, and it is His Spirit who takes an old written promise and makes it land in a room where the tap is running.

Being met is not the same as being moved

There is a kind of comfort that is really impatience wearing a coat. It arrives with a verse and a plan and a slightly brisk tone, and what it actually wants is for the grieving one to be further along, because further along is easier for the person standing there.

God does not do that. Look at the way He handles grief all through the Scriptures. He lets Job speak for chapters. He weeps at a graveside where He fully intends to raise the man within ten minutes. He sits with Elijah under a tree and feeds him twice and lets him sleep before a single word is said about anything that comes next.

You have His nearness this evening as a possession and not as a possibility, and it is not measured out according to how well anybody is coping. That is written into the character of God right through His word, and the Holy Spirit is not somewhere else waiting for the hall to be dealt with before He comes in.

So being met is not being moved on. Nobody is standing in this house with a stopwatch. There is no schedule for the photographs, no correct week for the toothbrush, and no version of faith anywhere that requires a person to be over something by now.

You are not behind. Not on any timetable God keeps, because He keeps none, and Scripture never once handed a grieving person a deadline. His Spirit is called the Comforter, and a comforter in a hurry would be no comfort at all.