A Grief You Had To Put In A Report

The cell she had to fill in was column F, and the number she put in it was minus fourteen.

The spreadsheet is not a wicked document. That has to be said or none of the rest of this makes sense. It exists because a building has a roof, and a roof costs money, and a group of decent people meet four times a year and try to be responsible, and one of the things they look at is how many people are in the room. Nobody in that meeting has a bad motive. She built the template herself in her second year and she was proud of it.

Column F is year on year change.

She sat with it open on the Thursday night and did the arithmetic, and the arithmetic came to minus fourteen, and then she sat there for a while looking at what fourteen was.

Fourteen was a family of five who moved for work, which is nobody's fault and is a good thing for them. It was a woman of eighty one who died in January and whose funeral she took and cried at. It was three young adults who went to university and are, as far as she knows, doing well. It was a couple who left over something. It was two people who faded. It was a man who is in hospital and cannot come, who is not gone at all, but who has not been in that room for seven months and therefore does not count.

Minus fourteen.

She typed it in and it went into the cell right-aligned in red, because that is how the template she built formats a negative number, and she sat back and thought: I have just put Eileen's funeral in red.

And on the Sunday she stood up and preached, and it was a good service, and nobody in that room had any idea that their pastor had spent Thursday evening turning them into a figure and had felt something close to shame doing it.

God tells Samuel what He is looking at

There is a scene in Samuel about measurement, and it is usually preached as being about David, and it is really about a prophet using the wrong instrument.

Samuel has gone to find a king. Jesse's sons are brought out one by one, and Samuel looks at the eldest, who is tall and impressive, and thinks: obviously this one.

But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature, because I have refused him: for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.1 Samuel 16:7

Notice what God does not say. He does not say height is evil. He does not tell Samuel that measuring is wicked, or that he should not have noticed how tall the man was. Height is real. It is a fact about a person and you can measure it accurately.

What He says is that the measurable thing is not what He is looking at.

So hear this, sitting in front of a spreadsheet on a Thursday: the number you typed is true and it is not the truth about that year. That is not my sentiment; it is what His word says about the gap between what can be counted and what God is attending to, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a correction issued to a prophet and lands it in a woman with a laptop open.

Now let me get at the shame, because the shame is the injury here and it is misdirected.

You felt something close to shame because you had put a funeral in red. But you did not put Eileen in that cell. You put a fact about a room in that cell, and Eileen is not in the room because she is somewhere considerably better, and the number recording her absence is not a verdict on her life or on your care of it.

The spreadsheet is not lying. It is simply answering a question nobody should mistake for the important one. How many chairs were occupied is a real question with a real answer and a roof depends on it.

Your grief is not a management issue. His word puts the heart in a different category from the countable and says outright that God is in the second one, and the Holy Spirit is not reading column F to find out how the year went.

And here is the one I most want you to have.

You noticed. That is what the whole story turns on. A person who had become what you are afraid of becoming would have typed minus fourteen and gone to bed. You sat there and worked out what fourteen was, one by one, and got to a man in hospital who is not gone at all, and felt something.

That is a shepherd doing exactly what shepherds do, which is to see the individuals inside the total. Scripture never once treats that as inefficiency, and the Holy Spirit was in that office on Thursday evening while a woman refused to let fourteen stay a number.