The Verse That Was Handed to Her

She still has it, which she thinks is probably not healthy.

It is in the bottom of a box with the order of service and a hospital wristband. Cream card, a border of small flowers, and a verse printed on it in a script font. Somebody put it into her hand at the door of the church, on the day, before she had got as far as sitting down.

She was twenty nine. The verse was about God working all things together for good.

She is not going to say the verse is untrue. She has thought about it a great deal in the eleven years since and she believes it and she can see what it means. What she cannot do, and has never been able to do, is hear it read aloud without something in her chest going flat and hard.

The woman who gave it to her was kind and had lost somebody herself and meant every syllable.

That is what makes it complicated, and it is why she has never been able to be angry about it in a way that would have got it out of her system.

Now Priya's mother has died. Priya is a friend of fourteen years and she is going round on Thursday, and she has been in a low grade panic about it since Sunday, because there is only one thing she knows for certain about that visit: she is not going to do what was done to her.

And she does not know what to do instead.

Sit down. There is a verse about times and it names one that nobody quotes.

A time to keep silence

Here it is, and the second half of it is the part that almost never gets read out.

A time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.Ecclesiastes 3:7

A time to keep silence. Written into Scripture, given equal weight with speaking, in a passage everybody knows and mostly quotes for the seasons.

That is the whole answer to the panic you have been in since Sunday. There is a time for the true sentence and there is a time for no sentence, and the second one is not a failure to minister. It is named in the book as its own season with its own rightness.

You are inside an instruction that includes silence. Ecclesiastes 3:7 puts keeping silence alongside speaking as two right things at two right times, and the Spirit inspired both halves of that line rather than only the one that produces cards.

That is what went wrong at the church door eleven years ago. Not the verse. The timing. A true thing arrived in a season for silence, and true things in the wrong season do damage that untrue ones could not manage.

What actually happened to you

Now the card, because anger was never available here, and that is what has kept it in the box. The Spirit is not the one who put it there and He is not offended by the flinch.

The woman meant well. That is established and it is not in question, and it is precisely why you could not process it: there was nobody to be angry with, so the whole thing turned inward and became a permanent flinch at a passage of Scripture.

Here is what she actually did. She handed you an explanation at a moment when you needed company. That is the error, and it is not a small one, and it is extremely common because an explanation is much easier to give than an hour of sitting.

And notice what it cost. Eleven years of a verse being unavailable to you, out of an entire book, because of ninety seconds at a door.

You were not wrong to flinch. Nothing written anywhere required you to receive an explanation at the door of your own husband's funeral, and the Spirit is not the one who put a card in a woman's hand on that particular morning.

Thursday

Here is the practical part, and it is shorter than the panic.

You already know what to do, which is why the feeling is fear rather than confusion. The opposite of what was done to you is not a better verse. It is a chair.

Take something. Sit down. Say her mother's name. Ask her one question about her that is not about her death, and then let her talk for as long as she wants, and do not produce anything.

If she asks you something, answer it briefly and stop. If she cries, stay in the room and do not fix it. If she says nothing at all for a while, let that run too, and do not fill it. Filling silence is the exact mechanism that produced your card.

And expect to want to fill it. That is the part nobody warns people about. A silence in a grieving house is uncomfortable for the visitor and almost never for the person being visited, and every impulse you have in that hour to say something will be your discomfort asking to be resolved rather than her need asking to be met. Notice the impulse and let it pass, and it will pass, three or four times, and the hour will be better for every one of them.

You have something better than a sentence to bring. What is written names a time to keep silence as its own right season, and the Spirit works in the hour that a person is willing to give rather than in the thing they say at the end of it.

And there may come a day, months from now, when a verse is exactly right for Priya, and you will know, because she will be the one who opens it.

And if that day never comes, the visit still counted. Nothing written anywhere makes a verse the measure of whether an hour was ministry, and the Spirit is not keeping a tally of how much Scripture got said in a kitchen on a Thursday.