See You Soon, and Meaning It

She had not planned to say anything. That was the arrangement she had made with herself in the car.

There were about forty people and the ground was soft from the rain and somebody's heels kept going in. When the family started to move away she found she was still standing there, and everybody else was walking, and she put her hand flat on the top edge of the stone that was not there yet, on the earth where it would go, and said out loud: see you soon.

Two words and one of them a lie, is what she thought about four seconds later.

She has been at this for seven months. It comes back at odd hours. Not the funeral, not the diagnosis, not the last hospital afternoon, which she can handle and has handled. The three syllables at the graveside. Because she meant them the way you mean something you have heard people say, which is not the same as meaning them, and she has never been able to work out whether she was comforting herself, performing, or actually saying a true thing badly.

Here is the shape of the accusation, and it has a certain logic. If I really believed it, would it not have felt more like a fact and less like a card in a shop?

She has told nobody. It is not the kind of thing you bring up.

Sit down here for a minute. Nobody is going to test the sincerity of anything you said in a wet field.

You did not invent the sentence

Start here, because it changes the whole question. Those words are not a folk saying that grew up around funerals. They are close to a direct quotation, and the original speaker was Jesus.

And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.John 14:3

He said that on the worst night of His friends' lives, to a room of men who were about to lose Him, and He did not soften it and He did not qualify it. I will come again. I will take you. Where I am, you also.

Notice what He does not do. He does not tell them to be brave, He does not explain the mechanism, and He does not ask them to feel confident about it. He states what He will do and then He goes out and does the next thing.

So take what you said at the graveside and put it next to that. You are not the author of see you soon. What is written has Christ saying it first, in almost those words, and the Spirit is the one who has been carrying that sentence to grieving people ever since.

That does not make you a fraud. It makes you somebody who quoted correctly under pressure.

Feeling and believing are not the same instrument

Now the accusation itself, which needs taking apart rather than soothing.

The logic runs: if I believed it, it would have felt like a fact. That sounds reasonable and it is not how belief works in a human being under load. Feeling is a reporting instrument, and it reports on your body, your sleep, the last seven months and the temperature in a wet field. It does not report on what is true.

Peter believed enough to get out of a boat and was terrified in the water at the same time. The man in the gospel who said I believe, help my unbelief was not being clever; he was describing the ordinary condition of a person who is holding something true while it is being tested.

You are not required to generate a feeling as proof. Nothing written anywhere makes emotional certainty the measure, and the Spirit who bears witness with your spirit is the one who confirms it rather than your own chest at a graveside.

And there is something else in your favor that you have not counted. You said it out loud, in front of forty people, at the moment when it was hardest to say. A person who did not believe it does not say it there. They say something safe about her being at peace, or they say nothing, which is what you had planned in the car.

There is a second thing worth noticing about how belief actually behaves. Almost everybody who says a true thing under pressure says it slightly ahead of themselves. That is not dishonesty; it is how a person leans on something. A man puts his weight on a rope before he knows the rope will hold, and the knowing arrives afterward, and nobody calls that a lie. Scripture is full of people speaking a promise out loud before they can feel it: Abraham naming a hill after a provision that had not arrived yet, Job saying he knew his redeemer lives while he was still sitting in ashes with nothing resolved. The Spirit inspired those sentences in exactly that condition, and He did not wait for the speakers to be settled first.

Soon is His word too

One more thing about the sentence, because there is a second half you have been quietly worrying about.

Soon. You said soon and you have wondered since whether you were allowed to. The Spirit has not been auditing your adverbs, and nothing written anywhere attaches a measurement to that word.

This site does not do dates and it is not going to start. Nobody knows when, nobody is owed a schedule, and anybody who tells you they can read one is selling something. But soon in Scripture is not a measurement. When Christ uses that kind of language, He is describing certainty and nearness of relationship rather than a number of years, and the whole New Testament holds it that way without ever converting it into a countdown.

What you said at the graveside was not a prediction. It was an address to somebody you love, in the register of a promise that God made, and there is no arithmetic in it that anybody could catch you out on.

You have said nothing you need to take back. What is written puts the words in your mouth, it does not put a date in them, and the Spirit is not standing there auditing your adverbs.