The Fourth Time This Year

It is always the same three verses, and he has stood and listened to them four times since January.

His aunt in February. A cousin, forty-four, in April, which was the one nobody has recovered from. His wife's father in June. And then in August a great-uncle he barely knew, at a service he went to mostly so his mother would not be sitting on her own.

Same reading every time. Somebody in that family decided a long time ago and nobody has questioned it since, and it gets read out at every single one, in the same translation, by whoever is asked.

The first time this year he barely heard it.

The second time, in April, it went through him like a hand.

The third time he noticed he was mouthing along and stopped himself, because it felt like a thing you should not do.

And in August, sitting near the back with his mother beside him, listening to a woman he did not know read those three verses for the fourth time in seven months, what he felt was nothing at all. Flat. He might as well have been listening to an announcement about a car in the parking lot.

He has not told his mother that. He has not told anybody.

Because what kind of man goes numb to that? He believes it. He would say so to anybody. And he sat there in August and it went past him like traffic, and he has been carrying that around ever since, worrying at it, wondering whether four funerals in a year have used something up in him that does not come back.

The words did not wear out, and neither did you

Let me start by taking the number seriously, because everybody around you has stopped counting and you never did.

Four. In seven months. One of them a cousin of forty-four. That is not an ordinary year and there is no rule that says a man should be able to stand in front of the same reading four times in seven months and produce something each time.

Hear this, and take it as settled rather than as sympathy: what went flat in August was not your belief and it was not your heart. That is not my gentle framing of a hard year, it is what stands written in John's fourteenth chapter, where the Lord tells frightened men that He is going ahead to prepare a place, and the same Holy Spirit who carried those words to that room carried them to a man sitting near the back with his mother.

Read what He actually says, because He says it to people who are about to lose Him and He does not soften it into poetry.

My Father's house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.John 14:2-3

I will come back and take you. Not a sentiment about the departed. A promise made in the first person by somebody who intends to keep it.

Those words were true in February when you barely heard them. They were true in April when they went through you like a hand. They were exactly as true in August while you were sitting there feeling nothing, because their truth has never once depended on the condition of the man in the fourth row.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a return of feeling: the promise stands over four graves this year, because the written word puts it in the mouth of Christ Himself, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been holding your family up through seven months whether or not anybody in it could feel Him.

Now let me tell you what the flatness actually was, because you have diagnosed it wrong.

It was not indifference. A man who was indifferent would not still be worrying at it in his own kitchen weeks later.

It is what a body does after four. Grief is not a tap and it does not refill on schedule, and by August you had spent what you had. The numbness in that room was the same thing as the ache in April, arriving in the only form left.

And here is the second thing, which is worth more than the first. Those three verses did not go flat. Your capacity to receive them did, temporarily, and the reason the family reads the same three every time is precisely so that the reading does not depend on anybody being able to receive it that day. What is written stays put whether or not the room is up to it, and the Holy Spirit works through a fixed reading in exactly the year when nobody has anything left.