The One Everybody Comes To

They come up the porch steps two at a time some weeks.

Somebody's diagnosis. Somebody's boy. A woman from the choir whose mother went in the night, standing at the screen door at nine in the morning with her coat still buttoned, saying I did not know where else to go. And the door opens, every time, and the kettle goes on, every time, and she sits down in the chair by the window and does the thing she has done for forty years, which is to be the place where other people are allowed to fall apart.

She has buried a husband. She has buried a sister. Nineteen months ago she buried a son.

Nobody who comes up those steps is being cruel. Most of them do not know the arithmetic. The ones who do know it say something about how she of all people understands, and they mean it as honor, and it lands on her like a job description.

Here is what she has never said out loud to another human being. She does not know where she is supposed to put her own.

She prays. She reads. She is not backslidden and she is not bitter, and if you asked her she would tell you God is good and mean every syllable. But at about half past four in the afternoon, when the last one has gone home and the cups are in the sink, there is a specific silence in that house, and in the silence there is a question with nobody to ask it to: who sits with me?

If that is you, in any form, sit down in your own chair by the window for a minute. Nothing in this piece is asking you for anything.

The comfort comes down before it goes out

There is a verse everybody uses to send people like you back out to work, and it does not say what they use it to say.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.2 Corinthians 1:3

Read the order of it. God comforts us. That is first, and it is not conditional on us doing anything with it afterward. Only then, out of a supply that has already arrived, does anything go out to anybody else.

The order matters because it has been reversed on you for years. You have been treated as a distribution point rather than as a recipient, and the verse that gets quoted to justify that is the very verse that puts you first in line.

So take it as it stands this afternoon. You are one of the us in that sentence. 2 Corinthians 1:3 says He comforts us in all our affliction, and all is a wide enough word to include nineteen months and a son, and the Spirit who is named the Comforter did not appoint you to be one.

Notice as well who is doing the comforting. Not the porch. Not the kettle. God of all comfort is a title He took for Himself, and it means the supply is His and never was yours, which is why running low is not a moral failure. It is the correct reading on a gauge.

Your own three are not in a line behind everybody else's

Now the thing that has never been said out loud, which needs saying.

Grief does not stack politely. It does not wait for a quiet week. What actually happens to a woman in your position is that every fresh grief that walks up those steps quietly opens her own again, and she has been receiving other people's while carrying three of her own for nineteen months, and nobody has ever once asked her which of the four she was crying about.

That is not weakness in you. That is arithmetic.

You are permitted your grief, and permitted is the word Scripture uses. Paul writes to a whole church that they should not grieve as those with no hope, which assumes the grieving and only corrects the despair, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept that assumption in the sentence when it could easily have been left out.

And you are not required to be bottomless. Nothing written anywhere makes a woman a well. Elijah lay down under a tree and asked God to take his life, and heaven's response was food and sleep and a second meal before one word of correction, and the Spirit of God has never been in a hurry with a servant who has run out.

You have a right to be ministered to. That is not a lowering of your calling; it is what your calling is built on, because 2 Corinthians 1:3 has the comfort coming down before it ever goes across.

Where the supply actually comes from

Here is the practical part, and it is smaller than you would expect.

The comfort of God is not usually an event. It is a supply, and supplies arrive quietly. What you are looking for is not a moment on that porch that makes the last nineteen months worth it. That is not what He promised and it is not what is on offer; the Spirit who is called the Comforter works as a supply rather than as a spectacle.

What is on offer is that He is with you, personally, in the specific afternoon at half past four with the cups in the sink. He is not out on rounds with the people who just left. He did not go with them.

You are not alone in that silence. That is written over everyone who is His, and the Spirit did not clock off when the screen door shut.

And one more thing, which somebody should have told you a decade ago. You are allowed to say no. A woman who says not today is not a woman who has stopped loving her church. The Lord Himself withdrew from crowds who wanted more from Him, repeatedly, in the middle of genuine need, and Scripture reports it without a hint of apology.