The Engagement That Ended in March

Blossom on the path and a bench that is dry for the first time this year, and she has forty minutes before she has to be somewhere.

Four years in March.

It ended badly, which is a phrase that covers a great deal and which she has used about three hundred times because it stops the follow up question. What it means is that there was a thing she found out, and then two weeks of him explaining, and then a Sunday afternoon in a parking lot where she said the sentence she had been rehearsing and he did not argue with it, and that was the worst part.

And ever since, people have handed her that verse.

Her mother, twice. A woman at work who is lovely. Somebody at a wedding who did not know her. Two separate people at the actual church, one of whom said it in the hall about six weeks after, holding a cup.

All things work together for good.

She has got to the point where she can feel it coming from about a sentence and a half away. There is a face people do. And she has developed a response, which is a small nod and a change of subject that she is quite good at now.

The thing is, she has never read it.

Not properly. Not once, sitting down, on her own, without somebody's face in front of it. Four years of a verse being applied to her and she could not tell you what the rest of the sentence says or what comes before it or who wrote it to whom.

If a verse has been used on you often enough that you flinch at the reference, you know that bench. And you know what it costs: they have taken a thing off me and I do not even know what it was, and I am not going to ask any of them.

The word, and then the verse read once, properly

Let me sit on the other end of the bench and say the plain thing, and then do one thing that nobody has done for you in four years, which is read it without a face on.

The problem is not the verse. The problem is that eleven words have been used as a way of ending conversations about your worst year, and being ended is what you have been feeling every time, and after about the fifth time a person stops hearing the words at all and only hears the ending.

So first, the word, because it will turn up in this too.

Blessed does not mean it turned out fine. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is about where He is looking. It was on you in the parking lot on that Sunday afternoon, which is a sentence nobody has said to you, and it is on you on this bench.

Now the verse. Whole, and with what it actually says.

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.Romans 8:28

Read the subject of the sentence. All things work together. Not: all things are good. Not: each thing is good.

It is a sentence about a combination. It says that the whole of a life, taken together, is being worked toward something, and it says nothing at all about the character of any individual item in it.

A thing can be entirely bad and be worked with. Those are different claims and the verse only makes the second one.

You have a verse that never once said the thing that happened to you was good, and it has been used as though it did for four years. Romans 8:28 puts the working together in the plural and the good at the end of the process rather than in any of the items, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the subject of the six verses immediately before it, which nobody who quoted it to you has ever mentioned.

What is actually in the six verses before it

Now that, because it is the part that would have helped and nobody ever gave you.

Read what comes immediately before verse twenty eight.

Paul is talking about the whole creation groaning. He says we ourselves groan within ourselves. He says we do not know what we should pray for as we ought.

And then: the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.

That is the paragraph. Groaning, groaning, not knowing what to pray, and a Spirit who prays underneath a person who has run out of words.

And then verse twenty eight arrives: and we know that all things work together for good.

So the famous sentence is not a sunny thing said to somebody who is fine. It is the conclusion of a paragraph about people who cannot pray and are groaning.

You are in the paragraph that verse belongs to rather than outside it, and the paragraph is about people who do not have words. Romans 8:26 says the Spirit maketh intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named there by name as the one doing the praying in a person who has stopped.

Nobody who handed you those eleven words in a church hall told you that they come with a Spirit groaning underneath a person who cannot get a sentence out. That is what was actually on offer in the six weeks after March, and it was withheld by accident, by kind people, holding cups.

Four years on, and what I will not say

Now, plainly, because you are the person who has been managing everybody else's discomfort about this for four years and nobody has managed yours.

I am not going to tell you it was for the best. It was not. There was a thing you found out and two weeks of him explaining and a parking lot, and it took a year out of you and it changed how you are with people in a way you can describe.

And I am not going to tell you what came out of it, because that is yours and you may or may not have a list and it is not my business to write one for you.

And I am not going to hand you the verse. It has been handed to you enough. What I have done is opened it up on a bench so that you can see what is in it, and what is in it is not what has been done with it.

Both halves. March was a loss and God has been at work in four years, and neither of those requires the other.

You are favored and it ended the way it ended, and neither of those is evidence about the other. Romans 8 keeps the groaning and the working together in the same paragraph without one canceling the other, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been interceding underneath the whole four years, including the parts you could not pray about.