Forty Times He Has Said It

He keeps a list. Not of the sermons, of the funerals, because after the first dozen the names start to run together and that felt like a failure of respect.

Forty one now, in eighteen years. Forty one families in a front room or a side office or the corridor outside a ward, and in nearly every one of them, at some point, he has said the sentence. You will see her again. You are not saying goodbye forever. This is a parting and not an end.

He means it. He has always meant it. He does not consider it a professional courtesy.

His mother died in March, and about a week after the burial his own senior elder, a good and slightly awkward man, sat opposite him with a mug he never drank from and said: you will see her again, you know.

And he said thank you. And then something in him went sideways that he has not been able to name since.

It was not that it felt untrue. It was that it arrived like a tool he recognized. He watched it being handed to him. He knew the shape of it, he knew what it was for, he knew where in the conversation it goes and roughly what a person is supposed to do with their face when they receive it, and knowing all that seems to have made it impossible to actually take.

He has been in this work eighteen years and he does not know how to be a person who is being pastored.

Sit in the office with the door shut. Nobody here needs you to be the one holding it.

The sentence was never yours

Start with the ownership, because that is where the jam is.

You have been the one who says it for eighteen years, and somewhere in that time a quiet assumption formed: that the sentence belongs to the office. That it is something you dispense from a position, the way you hand out bulletins. Which makes being handed it feel like a category error, like a doctor being wheeled into his own ward. Nothing written anywhere set it up that way, and the Spirit did not license a class of people to hand out a comfort they are not allowed to take.

But the sentence was never yours. It is not clergy equipment. It was given to a frightened congregation by a man who was not present with them, in a letter, and its own instruction at the bottom is that ordinary people say it to one another.

So take it as it stands with the door shut. You are inside the promise rather than in charge of it, and what is written closes that passage by telling everybody to speak it to each other, and the Spirit did not attach a clause exempting the person who normally does the speaking.

The awkward elder with the untouched mug was doing exactly what the text tells him to do. That is not him mishandling a tool of yours. That is him being obedient in your front room.

They desire a better country

Now the promise itself, and I want you to read it the way you would if you had never taught it.

But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.Hebrews 11:16

That comes at the end of a long list of people who died without receiving what they had been promised. The writer is very direct about it: they did not get it in their lifetime, they saw it from a distance, they died in faith.

And then he says God has prepared a city, and he says God is not ashamed to be called their God, which is a strange and warm thing to put into a paragraph about people who died waiting.

You are in that paragraph. Hebrews 11:16 is not a gallery of exceptional people you are meant to admire from outside it; the whole argument of the chapter is that this is the ordinary condition of faith, and the Spirit who inspired the list put no gate on the end of it.

Your mother is in that category and so are you. What is written puts the whole company of the faithful in one long line of people who are given a country rather than a schedule, and the Spirit is the one who keeps that promise standing over a man in an office who cannot currently apply it.

Notice the word prepared. Past tense. Not will prepare, not is considering. The city is not a plan. It is a place already made ready, and the readiness of it does not depend on the state of anybody's grief.

How to be on the receiving end

Here is the practical part, and it will be harder for you than the theology was.

Being pastored is a skill and you have not practiced it in eighteen years. That is not a character flaw, it is an atrophy, and it responds to use. Nothing written anywhere exempts a minister from being served, and the Spirit distributes what a church needs across a church so that nobody has to run on his own supply.

What it actually requires is that you stop assessing. When the elder said it, part of you watched the delivery. You noted the pause, the mug, the way he did not make eye contact. That is a trained reflex and it is very hard to switch off, and it is also the exact thing standing between you and the sentence.

Try this instead. When somebody says a true thing to you, do not evaluate it. Say the words thank you, and then say nothing else, and let it sit there being awkward. The awkwardness is not a sign that it went wrong. It is what receiving feels like to somebody who has been giving for a long time.

You are permitted to be ministered to badly. Nothing written anywhere requires the delivery to be skilled before the truth in it counts, and the Spirit has been known to use a man with a mug he never drank from.

And say something to one person about your mother that is not pastoral. Not a reflection, not an insight. Just a thing she did, and that you miss it.