The Fourth Row From The Back

The hall on a Tuesday afternoon, with the chairs stacked eight high against the wall and the heating off and that particular echo a room gets when there is nothing soft left in it.

He had come in to fetch a folder. He fetched it. Then he stood for a while at the back and looked at a patch of floor.

Fourth row from the back, on the right, the two seats nearest the aisle so the small one could get out fast. Nine years of Sundays. The girl who used to draw on the back of the notice sheet and once brought him a picture of a whale with legs, which he kept, and which is still in a drawer at home under some cables.

They went in March. There was no falling out. There was no letter and no meeting and nothing to answer. They came, and then they came less, and then a Sunday happened where he realized he had not seen them in six weeks and had not noticed the exact one that had been the last.

He did the right things. He rang once and left a warm message. He wrote once, short, no pressure. He did not chase, because chasing people is not shepherding and he knew it.

And then in June he came round the end of an aisle with a basket in his hand and there they were.

Two seconds. Maybe three. There was a look, and something started to happen on both faces, and then it did not, and they went the other way past the bread and he went and stood in front of the cheeses for a while with a basket that had two things in it.

He told nobody. There is nobody to tell. If he said it to another leader they would nod and say that people come and people go, and if he said it to his wife she would carry it for a fortnight on top of what she already carries, and if he said it out loud in a meeting somebody would want to talk about how to follow up better.

So it went in the drawer with the whale.

Stop there. Because that is your drawer too, and I am not going to walk past it.

Somebody is counting what nobody counted

Here is what I want to say to you first, before any verse, because if I do not say it first you will not hear the verse properly.

That was not attrition. That was a friendship, and it ended, and you were not given a reason, and there was no funeral for it and no card and no one asked you how you were doing.

It is a grief. It behaves like one. That is why it is still there in June.

And the reason it has nowhere to go is that everyone around you, including you, has quietly agreed to file it under something else. Movement. Season. Transition. Those words are not wicked, they are just accountancy, and a person cannot mourn an accounting entry, which means you have been carrying a live grief in a category that does not allow for one.

Now the verse, and I chose it because of one strange, specific, physical image in it.

You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?Psalm 56:8

A bottle. Of tears.

It is such an odd picture that people usually hurry past it, and I do not want you to. The man writing it is on the run, and what he says God does is not comfort him, not fix it, not explain it. He says God collects. That the wet on his face is not evaporating into nothing, that somewhere it is being kept, and that there is a book with the number of his sleepless turns in it.

Hear how specific that is. Kept count of my tossings. Not my prayers. Not my ministry. The turning over in the dark at two in the morning, which nobody sees and nobody counts and which does not go on any report anywhere, and God has the number.

Which means this, and I want it said plainly to you: the three seconds in that aisle are on record in heaven. The whale picture under the cables is on record. The Sunday you stood at the back of a cold hall looking at a patch of floor is on record.

You are the one everyone else's losses come to. Nobody has come for yours. God did.

You are already on that record, and your grief over that family was never waiting on you to find the right word for it. It is written that He has kept count of my tossings and put my tears in His bottle (Psalm 56:8), and it is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who carries a line like that out of a psalm and lays it on a man standing in aisle four.

And let me be careful here, because this is where a message like this usually goes wrong.

They are not villains. The family who left are not the enemy of this story and I will not make them one, and I notice that you never have either, which tells me a great deal about you. People leave for a hundred reasons and most of them are not about you at all, and some of them are things you would sympathize with entirely if you were ever told.

Nor am I going to tell you they come back. I do not know. Nobody honest does, and a promise about somebody else's future is not mine to hand you.

What I will tell you is that the grief is legitimate, that it is seen, and that it is counted.

You are not carrying this alone tonight, and you have not been carrying it alone since June. It is written that the Spirit helps us in our weakness, and that when we do not know what to pray for as we ought, He Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26). That is the Holy Spirit doing in you the very thing you have done for everybody else.