The Arithmetic Has an End

Six of them round the corner table on a Saturday, which is more than fits, so somebody always ends up with a chair leg in the aisle. Toast on a board. Two teapots. Ray is explaining about his boiler for the third week running and nobody has the heart to stop him.

Gordon is doing arithmetic.

He is seventy-one. His father made eighty-four and his grandfather made eighty-nine, so call it fourteen. Fourteen more Octobers. Fourteen more of putting the bin out on a Tuesday and the second mug staying in the cupboard. He works it out the way other men work out a mortgage, and he has done it in this cafe most Saturdays since the spring, and he could not tell you why except that a number feels like something you can hold.

Ray says something about a pressure valve. Gordon laughs at the right moment, because he is good at this and always has been.

You have done that sum.

Yours might be in different units. Nights. Anniversaries. The years until the youngest leaves and the house goes properly quiet. And when they said the words at the graveside, and the words were about seeing them again, you nodded, and part of you meant it, and another part of you filed it with the other things people say when there is nothing to say. Not because you doubt God. Because it did not sound like a fact. It sounded like a kindness.

Paul did not tell them to stop crying

Before anything lifts here, let me stand in the low place with you for a minute, because that is where this passage was written and I will not hurry past it.

The letter these words come from was sent to people who had buried their own. Not to students. To mourners, some of them fresh, all of them frightened that the ones they had lost had somehow missed out. And Paul, who was not a sentimental man, wrote to them about it directly.

Read what he does and does not say. He does not tell them to stop grieving. He says he does not want them to grieve as those who have no hope, which is a sentence about the kind of grief, not a sentence forbidding it. He leaves the tears exactly where they are and puts something underneath them.

You are allowed to grieve this fully and it is not a failure of faith. Scripture never once shames a mourner, the shortest verse in it is the record of Jesus crying at a grave He was about to open, and the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter precisely because there is something here to be comforted about.

The one word in the sentence that does the work

Now here is the sentence itself.

Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.1 Thessalonians 4:17

Together with them.

Not near them. Not in the same general arrangement as them. Together, and the word sits there in the middle of the verse doing quiet, enormous work, because it is the answer to the exact question those people were asking. What about ours. What about the ones already gone. And the answer given was that when it happens, it happens to all of you at once, and nobody is left out of the meeting.

You have God's own word on the reunion, and He does not say things loosely. That is written, and He put it in a letter for the specific purpose of comforting people in your position, and it is His Spirit who makes an old sentence land in a cafe on a Saturday morning as fact rather than as a nice thought.

I am going to stop where He stopped

And now the discipline, because this is where people who mean well start improvising.

I am not going to describe it to you. I do not know what the reunion looks like, and neither does anybody who has told you they do. God gave us the fact and withheld the picture, and I have come to think that was mercy, because any picture I invented would be smaller than the thing and you would end up grieving my version of it.

I am also not going to pronounce on where anybody is now. That is not mine to say and this page will never say it. What I can put in front of you is the character of the God who is handling it, who is merciful beyond anything we would have written, and who has never once been careless with somebody He made.

You are held by a God who keeps what He says, and the keeping is not on your shoulders. His word says the Lord is not slow concerning His promise, and His Spirit is the seal on that, and none of it waits on how strongly you happen to believe it on a Saturday.