The Card I Keep Not Writing

There are eleven cards written and one that is not, and it has been the same one for about forty minutes.

Three of them round her sister's kitchen table with the box open in the middle and a list in somebody else's handwriting. Thank you for the flowers. Thank you for coming such a long way. Thank you for the sandwiches, which was an enormous kindness and none of them can now remember eating. The ballpoint her sister is using skips and she keeps doing that scribble in the corner of the envelope to get it going again, and every time she does it the brother-in-law says get another pen, and she does not.

The window is open because it is warm for the time of year, and somebody two gardens down is mowing. Three weeks tomorrow.

Her card is for the woman who came in on the Tuesdays. And she is not stuck on the wording. She knows the wording. She is stuck because underneath the wording there is a question that arrived in the third week the way these things do, at about ten to four in the morning, and has not left since.

She knows what she believes about all of it. She could tell you the passage. She has read it since, and it is not that she doubts it. It is that her mother never said anything, one way or the other, in eighty-one years, and now there is nothing left to go on, and the not knowing sits in her chest like a held breath.

Perhaps you have been at that table. Perhaps yours is not a card. Perhaps it is the drive home, or the sorting of a closet, or the moment in the supermarket where you reach for the thing they liked. And underneath whatever you are doing with your hands there is a question that you would not say out loud to anyone in your family, and you are not looking for a lecture about it.

The pit, before anything else

I am not going to hurry you out of this.

Three weeks in is nowhere. It is not the beginning and it is not through anything, and the strange administrative kindness of thank-you cards is that they give the hands something to do while the rest of a person is still standing at the graveside. Getting up, answering the phone, being sensible about the house: none of that means what people seem to think it means.

And the specific pain of your question is worth naming exactly, because it is not doubt. You believe what you believe. It is the particularity of it. Doctrine is general and your mother was not general. She was a specific woman who never said anything about it in eighty-one years, and the general thing you believe does not reach into that gap, and at four in the morning the gap is the whole room.

You are not being disloyal to God by not knowing, and you are not being disloyal to her either. Scripture never once treats an honest griever as a problem to be managed, and the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter for a reason that has nothing to do with getting anybody to stop.

What is settled, and it is a great deal

Now let me give you what is actually settled, because it is more than you may be holding at the moment.

Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.2 Corinthians 5:8

Read the two halves of that. Away from the body. At home with the Lord. For those who are Christ's there is no third place, no interval of waiting alone somewhere, no gap in the keeping. Paul is not speculating in 2 Corinthians 5:8; he is stating what he would prefer, and you do not prefer a thing you are unsure exists, and the Spirit inspired a preference rather than a theory.

And in the passage this whole site is named from, Paul writes the same comfort to a church that had buried people and was frightened about them. He tells them plainly that they do not grieve as those who have no hope, and he does not tell them not to grieve. The Holy Spirit carried that letter into a room of mourners and He is carrying it still.

You have a hope that is not a wish, and it does not depend on how well you are holding up this month. That is the written word, and the Holy Spirit is the One who carries a settled thing into a person who is not settled at all.

Notice what that hope actually rests on. Not on how vigilant anybody was. Not on how much anyone understood, or how well they explained themselves, or whether they used the right words in front of their family. It rests on Christ, who keeps what is His. The keeping was never the kept one's job.

The question I am not going to answer

And now the honest part, and I would rather be honest with you than useful.

I do not know about your mother. I am not going to tell you that I do. Nobody writing anything, anywhere, can hand you a verdict on a particular person, and if somebody offers you one, in either direction, they are giving you something they do not have. This site will not do that to you.

What I can put into your hands is God's character, and it is not a consolation prize.

Abraham, standing in front of God and arguing about a city, says: shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just? He asks it as a question and it functions as a foundation. The One deciding is not indifferent, not careless, and not less merciful than you are. He is not less kind to your mother than you would be. He is not working from the outside of a life the way you are, guessing from what was and was not said in a kitchen. He was in the room for every one of those eighty-one years, including the parts nobody was told about.

You are handing this to the only One who both knows everything and is entirely good, and He has never once needed a family's help to be merciful. Scripture says He does what is just, and the Holy Spirit does not carry dread to a person about something God has kept in His own hands.

That is not a fudge and it is not a maybe dressed up warmly. It is the difference between an answer and a resting place. You are not going to get the answer. You can have the resting place tonight.