Say It and Stay

There are six lots of flowers in that front room and three vases, so two of them are standing in a bucket by the hearth and one is in a milk jug, and somebody says, for the second time, that they will want water.

Four people are in the room. The daughter is in and out of the kitchen with the teapot because being in the kitchen is easier than being in the room. A woman from two doors down is talking, quite loudly, about the parking at the funeral home. And on the edge of the armchair by the window is a man in his sixties holding a mug he did not want, who has been rehearsing one sentence in his head since he parked.

He has known Marion for eleven years. Their husbands and wives sat in the same row. He liked Ken enormously and cannot get his voice out of his head. And he came here today with something real to bring, something he genuinely believes, the thing they read out on Friday about being together with the Lord.

And now he cannot say it, because every version of it that arrives in his mouth sounds either like a lecture or like he is trying to hurry her along. So he says nothing. He says nothing for twenty minutes, and then he says he had better let her rest, and he drives home hating himself, and he is not sure he will go back.

You have been in that chair. You have got something true in your hands and you are terrified of using it wrongly, so you say the thing about the parking instead. And afterwards you decide the safest thing is to keep your distance, and the person you were sent to is left in a room with a bucket of flowers going over.

Why the good sentence keeps sticking

Let me name the low place, and the low place here belongs to two people at once. Marion buried her husband four days ago and is being talked at about parking. And the man in the armchair, who loved Ken and means every good thing he came with, is frozen by the fear of doing harm with the very thing that was given to him for her.

That fear is not silly. Plenty of us have been on the receiving end of a hope delivered badly: the verse produced too early, the bright face at the graveside, the sentence that meant do stop crying now. Anyone frightened of being that person is frightened because they have met them, and possibly because they were them once, and never quite forgave themselves for it.

So look at what the passage actually asks of you, because it is far smaller and far kinder than the thing being attempted in that armchair.

and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words.1 Thessalonians 4:17-18

With these words. Not with your own construction, not with an explanation, not with a version you have improved on the drive over. Paul writes a few lines to people who were burying their dead and frightened they had lost them for good, and then he tells the rest of them what to do with it, and the instruction is to hand it on. You have been given something to carry rather than something to perform, and that is not my softening of the text, it is what is written, and it is His Spirit and not your delivery who makes anything of it in that room.

Two things, and neither of them is being clever

Here is the whole job, and I want it to be small enough for you to actually do on Tuesday.

The first thing is to say it, plainly and briefly, in your own flat voice. One sentence. Something like: I keep thinking about what they read on Friday, that we will be together with the Lord, and I believe it. That is enough. Do not build on it, do not explain the passage, and do not answer a question she has not asked. You were given the words already finished and Scripture never once asked you to strengthen them, and the Holy Spirit is entirely capable of doing the rest without your help.

Then, and this is the part people miss, do not use it to get out of the room. That is what makes a good sentence go wrong: not the sentence, but what it is doing there. A hope offered at the door on your way out is a hope being used as an exit. The same hope offered while you settle further into the chair is a completely different thing.

The second thing is to stay. Job's friends were the finest comforters in Scripture for exactly seven days, and every one of those days was silent, and they were only ruined the moment they started explaining. So bring no explanation. Do not supply a reason for Ken's death, because you do not have one and neither does anybody else in that room, and God has not appointed you to write one for her.

Stay while she cries. Stay while she tells you the same thing about the ambulance for the third time. Stay while she talks about the parking, because sometimes the parking is all a person can hold. You have been given the ability to sit in an uncomfortable room without fixing it, and Scripture calls that a comfort passed on: the same comfort God gave you in your own bad year, handed across, with the Holy Spirit making the company mean more than the words did.

And one thing said plainly, because it matters more than any of this. If Marion says something that frightens you, that she cannot see the point of going on, that she wishes she had gone too and means it, do not carry it home alone and do not promise to keep it quiet. Say gently that you are worried, stay with her, and get help into that house today: her doctor, her family, and in the United States the number to call or text is 988. Elsewhere it is your local emergency number or crisis line. Sitting quietly is the right thing on almost every visit. That is the one hour when it is not.