The Last Thing to Give Back

There were eleven borrowed things in the end. She had made a list on the back of an envelope so that nothing got missed, because that at least was something she could do properly.

The urn went back to the church hall. The trestle table to the man who runs the flower stall. Two crates of white cups to her sister, who took them and said nothing, which was the kindest thing anybody managed all month. The extension lead. The chalk board. The little step somebody's dad had made her for reaching the top shelf, six years ago, when the whole thing was new and she could not sleep for excitement.

The last one is a coffee grinder belonging to the place two doors down. It has been in the boot of her car for eleven days. She keeps meaning to.

Today she does it. She parks, and she picks up the box, and then she does not go in, because through the window she can see it is busy in there, properly busy, the way hers was on a good Saturday. Steam on the glass. Somebody laughing. A queue.

So she sits down on her own back step instead, with the box on her knees, outside a door whose key she no longer has a reason to turn.

It has been six weeks. Everybody was extraordinary for about nine days. Then they went back to their lives, which is what people do and what they should do, and now the messages have stopped and the crisis is over and the life is still gone.

And you are on a step somewhere with a box on your knees. Yours will be a different box. But you know exactly what it is to be past the part where anybody rings, and nowhere near the part where anything is better.

What the word on this sign means

Let me deal with a word before anything else, because it is written above this page and being suspicious of it is entirely reasonable.

Abundance here does not mean money. It never has and it never will on any page I write. Jesus said He came so that people would have life and have it abundantly, and He said it about life itself: fullness, plenty of it, more of it than a person can hold. Not a figure. Not a turnaround. Not one thing arriving in your bank.

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.John 10:10

Nobody is going to trade on the ambiguity in that word to keep you reading. If somebody sent you here promising the money is coming, they were speaking for themselves.

So take the word off the table as a payout and leave it where it was put. You have life, and the word hands it over in the present tense rather than at the end of a recovery, and the Holy Spirit makes that real to a person sitting on a back step with a box on her knees. He has never once required the step to be somewhere else first.

And there is a second thing that is not going to happen. Nothing in the next few paragraphs is going to lift you off that step. No silver lining, no verse aimed at you like a fix, no picture of next year. Six weeks of people have already arrived at the door of your grief holding a solution, and I am not going to be another one.

Job's friends got one thing right

There is a scene in the book of Job that nearly everybody skips, because what comes afterwards is so bad.

Three men hear what has happened to their friend. They travel. They see him from a distance and do not recognize him. They weep, and tear their clothes, and then they do this.

And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.Job 2:13

Seven days on the ground, in silence. That is the last thing those three men get right before the speeches begin, and it is the only part of their ministry the Bible does not eventually correct. They ruined it later by explaining. While they were sitting, they were perfect.

You are being sat with, right now, on the step you are on, and this is not a figure of speech I am reaching for to make you feel better. Job 2:13 shows what God's own written word treats as the right response to a ruin, and the Spirit He gave is named the Comforter, which is a title about company rather than repair.

He asked for it Himself

If sitting with somebody in the worst of it seems like a small thing to offer, look at who asked for it.

In a garden, on the last night, Jesus told three friends that His soul was overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death, and then He asked them to stay there and keep watch with Him. Not fix it. Not explain it. Stay.

My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with me.Matthew 26:38

They fell asleep, and He was gentle about it, which is its own mercy for anybody whose friends have gone quiet.

But notice what He wanted in the hardest hour of the world. Company. Not a plan. So you have a God who knows from the inside what it is to want somebody in the room, and Matthew 26:38 is where He says so out loud, and His Spirit does not consider your step beneath Him tonight.

And if what is sitting in you has gone past grief into somewhere frightening, please do not keep company only with a page. Tell one living person today, and if it is heavier than that, tell a doctor or your local emergency line. That is not a failure of faith. It is the same instinct that put three men on the road to Job.