They Left Over Something You Would Do Again

There is a particular kind of grief that has no exit, and it is this one, and almost nobody names it.

If she had been wrong, there would be a road out. She could repent. She could go and sit in their front room and say the sentence, and it would be humiliating and it would be right and it would end somewhere. There is a whole machinery in the Christian life for being wrong, and it works.

She was not wrong.

The decision was made in April. It concerned something in the life of that church that she had prayed about for months, and taken counsel on, and lost sleep over, and it was the right call. She knows it was the right call the way you know a thing you have examined honestly and repeatedly. She has gone back over it eleven times looking for the flaw and there is no flaw. Given the same facts on the same Tuesday she would make the same decision again and she would make it faster.

And a family of five left the church over it.

Not angrily. They were dignified about it, which is somehow worse. They wrote a letter that was fair. They said they respected her and that they could not stay, and both of those things were true at the same time.

She had known that family for eleven years. She was at the hospital when the youngest was born. She has a drawing on her office wall from the middle one that says PASTER in enormous letters with the E and the R the wrong way round, and she has never had the heart to take it down or the ease of mind to look at it.

So she is carrying a loss with no confession attached to it, and here is what that does to a person over five months. It turns into a kind of low grade permanent trial. Because if she cannot repent of it, and it still cost five people, then some part of her has to keep going back to check whether it really was right, and every time she checks it is right again, and every time she has to feel the cost again, and there is no verdict that ever ends the hearing.

Luke refuses to assign blame

There is an episode in Acts that most people skip past quickly because it is embarrassing, and it is one of the kindest things in the book if you slow down.

Paul and Barnabas are planning a second journey. Barnabas wants to take Mark. Paul does not, because Mark had left them partway through the first one. And then this:

And the contention was so sharp between them, that they departed asunder one from the other: and so Barnabas took Mark, and sailed unto Cyprus.Acts 15:39

Now read what Luke does not do.

He does not say who was right. He had every opportunity. He is writing years later, with the outcome in front of him, in a book that names names and settles arguments elsewhere without hesitation, and here he simply reports that two good men could not agree and separated.

And then look at the next sentence. Paul took Silas and departed, being recommended by the brethren unto the grace of God. Both went. Both were sent. The chapter carries on and God's work goes on down two roads instead of one, and nobody is ever told which of them should have given way.

So hear this, sitting in an office with a drawing on the wall: your decision is not a sin and you are not required to confess it. That is not my opinion about your church; it is what His word does with the sharpest recorded disagreement between two apostles, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a refusal to assign blame and makes it a place a woman can put her weight down.

Now let me get at the endless hearing, because that is the thing eating you.

You have been treating the pain as evidence. The logic runs like this: something that cost this much must have been wrong somewhere, so go back and look again. And you look again, and it is right again, and the pain does not move, so you conclude you must have missed something, and you go round. It is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who carries a sentence like that out of its own century and sets it down where you are standing.

But pain is not evidence of error. It never has been. The whole of Acts 15 exists to show that a genuinely right decision can produce a genuinely painful separation between people who love each other, and that God does not hold the separation against either party.

You are not on trial. His word closes that chapter by recommending both parties to the grace of God, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been convening a hearing in your office every Tuesday since April.

And I want to say the other thing, because it is the half you have not let yourself have.

You are allowed to grieve them. That is not a contradiction of standing by the decision. You can be entirely certain you were right and be broken about the cost, and holding both at once is not confusion, it is what integrity actually costs. Nobody grieves the family the way you do, because nobody else in that building was at the hospital when the youngest was born.

You are held in both halves this morning. Scripture never once asks a person to stop loving the people their conviction cost them, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to file five people under a decision and move on.

I am not going to tell you they come back. I do not know. What I know is that Acts 15 has two boats leaving the same harbor in different directions with God's blessing on both.