The One You Married Has No Pastor

He worked it out in a coffee shop, watching her through the window, and it took him about four seconds and it has taken him a year to know what to do with it.

She was at a table with a friend. A good friend. They have known each other eight years and they laugh a great deal and that woman has been genuinely important to her.

And he stood on the pavement with a bag in his hand and thought, quite suddenly: she cannot say anything real to her.

Not because that friend is untrustworthy. Because that friend is a member. Everything his wife might want to say about the last eighteen months, the actual sentences, the ones with names and specifics in them, would land in the church the moment they were spoken. Not maliciously. They would simply exist there, in somebody's head, and change how that person sat in a room, and his wife has known that for eleven years and has never once tested it.

So she talks about the children and the extension and a program they are both watching, and it is a real friendship and she loves that woman, and there is a room in her life with the door shut and nobody has ever been in it.

He went through the list on the pavement.

Her mother, who worries and would carry it badly. Her sister, who does not go to church and would tell her to leave. The two friends from before, who are three hours away and who she sees twice a year and who would need forty minutes of context before she could start. Nobody at the church, obviously. Not another minister's wife, because she has met four of those and they all knew each other and word goes round that world faster than any other.

And him. She talks to him. She is honest with him and they are close and that is the one thing in this that is entirely well.

But he is the subject. That is what he understood on the pavement. Every difficult thing she carries is about, or adjacent to, or caused by, the man she would have to say it to.

He went in and bought the coffee and was completely normal.

The word Ecclesiastes uses is woe

There is a passage everybody reads at weddings and almost nobody reads for what it actually says about isolation.

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

Look at the word in the middle. Woe.

That is not a mild word. The writer of Ecclesiastes is not a sentimental man and he does not hand out that word cheaply. He is not saying company is nice. He is saying that being alone at the moment of falling is a calamity, and he says it in the flattest, most unromantic book in the Bible, which is exactly what gives it its weight.

So hear this, standing on a pavement with a bag in your hand: what you saw through that window is real, and Scripture calls it by a serious name. That is not my dramatization; it is what His word says about the state of a person who has nobody to be lifted by, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a hard word out of a hard book and makes a man able to look at his own household honestly.

Now let me get at the guilt, because it arrived on that pavement with everything else and it has been sitting there since.

The guilt says: I did this to her. And there is a shape of truth in it, in that the isolation follows from the position, and the position is yours.

But look at what you are actually guilty of, and be precise, because imprecise guilt is the kind that never lifts. You are not guilty of harming her. You are not guilty of choosing this for her out of selfishness. You are a man whose calling has a structural consequence that neither of you understood at twenty six, and that consequence has landed on somebody you love.

That is grief, not sin. His word never once treats an unforeseen cost as a moral failure, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been running a case against you on that pavement for a year.

And here is what I want you to notice, because you have not, and it changes the shape of the thing.

You saw it. In four seconds, through a window, from the outside, you understood the exact contour of your wife's isolation, including why the friendship is real and why the door is still shut. That is not the perception of a man who has stopped paying attention to his wife. That is the perception of somebody who knows her extremely well and who was, in that moment, entirely on her side.

She is not alone in the sense the verse fears most. There is at least one person in the world who can see the shut room from the pavement, and that person is the man she married.

You may hand this over tonight. Not fix it, because fixing it is not available and pretending otherwise would be another burden on her. Hand it over, out loud, by name, to the One who is entirely able to put a person in her life who does not need forty minutes of context.

Scripture never once puts another person's friendships under a spouse's authority, and the Holy Spirit is the one who arranges company, in His own way and His own time, in ways no husband has ever been able to organize.