Somewhere With More For The Children

They told him in the doorway with their coats already on, which is not a criticism, because there is no good place to say a thing like that.

It was the woman who said it, and she said it well. She said they had loved it here. She said that the boys were nine and eleven now, and that there were two other children in that age group and neither of them came regularly, and that they had been to the place on the ring road twice and the boys had not stopped talking about it.

She said: we are not leaving because of anything. We just think there is more there for them.

And he said, and he meant every word of it, that he thought they were doing the right thing. He said the boys come first. He said it warmly, standing in a doorway with his own coat over his arm, and he shook the husband's hand and said something about the older boy's football, and it was a good goodbye and everybody behaved well.

Then he went and sat in the vestry for eleven minutes with the light off.

Here is what has been sitting on him since, and it is a strange one to describe because it has no complaint in it. He agrees with them. That is not a posture and it is not politeness. If that family had asked his advice about it as a pastoral question, he would have told them to go, and he would have been right, and the boys are thriving, and he has heard so and is glad.

And it hurt more than any leaving he has had, and he cannot work out what he is allowed to do with a hurt that has no argument attached to it.

Because if they had been wrong, he would have something to hold. If they had been unkind, or shallow, or if the woman had said one graceless thing, there would be a place to put it down. She did not. She was gracious and clear and she was right, and she took two boys he taught to say the Lord's Prayer out of that building forever, and he agreed with her while she did it.

He asked the twelve an honest question

There is a moment in John that people usually preach as a passage about commitment, and it is worth slowing down and watching what it is actually like in the room.

A large number of people who have been following Jesus stop, all at once, after a hard teaching, and go home.

From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him. Then said Jesus unto the twelve, Will ye also go away? Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.John 6:66-68

Now let me be careful here, because a verse like that can be misused, and I am not going to misuse it at you.

The people in John 6 left over a teaching they could not accept. Your couple left because there were two children in their boys' age group instead of twenty. Those are not the same thing, and I am not putting that family in that verse. Nothing in this message grades them.

What transfers is what it was like to be the one standing there.

Because look at the question He asks. Will ye also go away. That is not rhetoric and it is not a test. It is a man watching a road empty and turning to the people still in front of Him and asking the question out loud.

Jesus felt it. That is the whole of what I want you to have from that verse. The Son of God stood and watched people He loved walk off down a hill, and He did not chase them, and He did not change the teaching, and He also did not pretend it was nothing. He turned round and asked a question with real weight in it.

So hear this, sitting in a vestry with the light off: you are allowed to be hurt by a goodbye you agreed with. That is not my permission; it is what His word shows in the one who never once had a wrong reaction to anything, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a question asked on a hillside and makes it a place a man can sit down.

Now let me get at the thing you cannot work out.

You have been assuming that agreement cancels grief. That if the leaving was right, then the hurt is either self pity or ego, and since you are not going to permit yourself either of those, there is nowhere for it to go. So it has been going nowhere, for months, which is why it weighs more than the ones with an argument in them. The Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line spoken in one decade and makes it live in an ordinary room today.

Agreement does not cancel grief. It never has. Parents agree with a child leaving home and cry in the car park. A right departure and a real loss sit together constantly, and Scripture is full of them, and nothing in the Bible asks a person to feel less about a thing because it was correct.

You are not being petty. His word never once treats sorrow over a right outcome as immaturity, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over you asking why a good goodbye is taking this long.

And here is the one I want to leave with you, because it goes underneath the whole thing.

Nothing about that conversation was a verdict on your building. Two children in an age group is arithmetic, not a judgement. You have been hearing the sentence there is more there for them as a sentence about you, and it was a sentence about a rota and a room and how many nine year olds happen to live in a place. Those numbers are not a report card and God has never once graded a shepherd on them.

You are held right now, in the specific soreness of having said the right thing warmly and then needing eleven minutes in the dark. Scripture puts a hard hillside and a real question side by side, and the Holy Spirit was in the vestry with the light off.