Two Years On and Still in the List

He does it in the car now.

Not planned. It started because of a Tuesday about fourteen months ago when he had to go into the church for something about the roof, and on the way out somebody was kind to him in the wrong way, and it came up on him in the porch, and he got to the car before it landed properly.

And he sat there in the parking lot with his hands on the wheel until it went, which took about eleven minutes, and then he drove home.

And he thought afterwards: that was better. Nobody had to do anything about it.

So now that is where it happens. He goes in, he is fine, he is genuinely fine, he asks about people's mothers and he means it, and then he comes out and gets in the car and sometimes it comes and sometimes it does not.

Two years last month. And at some point in the last half year the tone changed around him, gently, the way a tone does. Nobody has been unkind. But there was "you seem so much better", said hopefully, which he could hear was a question. There was a man who said "she would want you living, mate", which is true and which he has thought about roughly nine hundred times. There was the woman who said, very warmly, that grief has stages and that eventually it lifts, and looked at him while she said it in a way that suggested a schedule existed and he was behind on it.

So he does it in the car. Because doing it in the car means it is not on anybody else's calendar.

If you have started grieving in a place you chose so that nobody has to watch you do it wrong, you know that parking lot. And you know the thought that sits in the passenger seat: I have taken too long. Whatever the right shape of this is, I am not that shape, and the ones who love me are starting to worry, and now I have to manage that too.

There is no date on that sentence

Let me sit in the car with you for a minute and say the low thing, because you have not said it to anybody.

It is not the grief that is crushing you now. You have made a kind of accommodation with the grief. It is the sense that you are doing it wrong, that there was a curve you were supposed to be on and you have come off it, and that the people who love you have quietly started to worry, so now you are grieving and also managing their worry about your grieving, and that second job is the one that is actually finishing you off.

So let me take you to the sentence, and I want you to look at what is not in it.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.Matthew 5:4

No timetable. No stage. No note about how long is reasonable. No word about doing it in the right place or at the right volume or in company.

And notice what the word blessed is doing, because this is the whole thing. It does not mean happy and it does not mean the mourning is good. Blessed means God's favor is resting on that person. His face is turned toward them. Jesus is standing on a hillside pointing at people in the worst condition a human can be in and saying: God is toward these ones.

He is not describing an easier life. He is describing where God is looking.

You are standing inside a sentence Jesus said out loud, and He put no end date on the front of it or the back of it. Matthew 5:4 blesses the mourners as they are and never once mentions duration, and it is the Holy Spirit whom Jesus Himself calls the Comforter, which means the comfort in the second half of that verse has a name and a Person attached to it.

Comforted is not the same as finished

Now the second half, because people use it as a deadline and it is not one.

They shall be comforted. The word there is the one Jesus uses for the Holy Spirit, the one who comes alongside. It does not mean cheered up. It does not mean returned to a previous state. It means somebody comes and stands with you in it.

Which is a completely different promise from the one you have been failing to meet. You have been trying to be finished. The verse offers to be accompanied.

Think about how that changes the parking lot. If the promise is that grief ends by a certain point, then eleven minutes with your hands on the wheel at two years is evidence of failure. If the promise is that somebody comes and stands in it with you, then eleven minutes with your hands on the wheel at two years is exactly a place where the promise is being kept, and it was being kept in the porch too, and on the Tuesday about the roof.

You have been accompanied every single time, including the times you did not notice, and the noticing was never the condition. Scripture attaches the comfort directly to the mourning rather than to the recovery, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the Comforter by name, so what has been in that car with you is not a coping strategy, it is a Person.

And your friends are not villains here. The man who said she would want you living meant it and is right. The woman with the stages read something once and was trying to help. They love you and they are frightened by grief the way everyone is, and their timetable is their own fear talking, not a verdict.

You are not behind, and there was never a curve to be behind on. The written word puts the blessing on the mourner without a single reference to how long, and His Spirit is the one who can settle that in a man's chest at a point where reassurance from people has stopped reaching him.

Jesus is not squeamish about grief

One more thing, and it is the one that matters most on the drive home.

Jesus wept. He knew exactly what He was about to do at that grave and He still stood there and cried in front of everybody, and John did not tidy it up. He groaned in the spirit. Twice.

So the idea that grief at two years is a sign of thin faith cannot survive twenty seconds in the actual Gospels. The one person who had the fullest possible view of resurrection is the one person who cried hardest at a funeral.

You are doing something in that parking lot that Jesus did in front of a crowd, and He did it with full knowledge of how the story ended. John 11:35 records it in two words that nobody has ever needed explaining, and the same Spirit who was upon Him is the one in you, which is why your grief and your faith have never actually been in competition.

And I will not tell you when this changes shape. I do not know. Nobody knows, and every person who has given you a schedule has been guessing in a kind voice. What I will tell you is where God's face is pointed while you sit there, and it is pointed at you.