Warm In Public, Grieving Nowhere

He saw them at the garage on the Tuesday and it went perfectly well, which is the problem.

They were at the pump on the other side. There was that half second where both of you decide, and both of them decided the same thing he did, which was to do this properly. So he came round the front of the car and shook the husband's hand and asked about the daughter's exams, and the wife said something warm about his own boy, and there was a joke about the price of diesel, and everybody laughed at it, and it lasted about two minutes and there was nothing false in any of it.

He likes them. That is the thing people do not understand. He is not performing warmth. He would have them in his house tomorrow.

He got back in his car and drove three miles and then found that he had gone past his own turning.

Here is the situation, and it is one almost nobody outside this job has to hold. In a town this size, he sees them constantly. The school gate. The big supermarket. Somebody's fiftieth in the spring, at the same table, which was arranged by a person who had no idea and was being kind. Every one of those encounters is warm and real and he means it every time.

And there is nowhere to put what it costs.

Not with his wife, who carries enough of the church already and who was hurt worse than him by it and has done her own work to get where she is. Not with the elders, because anything he says in that room becomes a matter. Not with a friend in the same town, because it would travel and it would reach them and it would take a good goodbye and turn it into a story. And not with the family themselves, obviously, because that is not what a two minute conversation at a pump is for and it would be an unkind thing to hand them.

So there is a grief with no venue. It comes out at odd angles: driving past his own turning, a flatness on Tuesday evenings, a small dread before things where he knows they will be.

And there is a sentence underneath it all that he has never said out loud, and it is this. Being warm to them in public is the loneliest thing I do all week.

The one place it is safe to empty

Before the verse, let me say the honest thing plainly, because you have had nowhere to hear it said.

That is a hard arrangement. It is genuinely hard, and it is not made easier by the fact that everyone involved is behaving beautifully. A grief you are not permitted to display anywhere, in front of anyone, in a town where you keep meeting the subject of it, is a specific and heavy thing, and being good at it is not the same as being unaffected by it.

Nobody has said that to you because nobody knows. So I am saying it.

Now here is the verse, and I want you to look at the verb.

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.Psalm 62:8

Pour out. Not mention. Not bring in an orderly way. The image behind it is a vessel turned completely upside down until nothing whatsoever is left in it, which is the opposite of every conversation you have had about this for a year. The Holy Spirit is the One who makes that true in a person rather than merely accurate on a page.

And notice the order of the sentence. The command to pour out comes first, and then the reason: God is a refuge. The pouring is safe because of where it is being poured, not because the contents are acceptable.

So hear this, sitting in a car past your own turning: there is a venue. That is not my encouragement; it is what His word tells a whole people to do with what is inside them, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a verb like pour out and makes it something a man can actually do at half past four on a Tuesday.

Now let me get at the part you have been most careful about, because your care is the thing costing you.

You have been protecting everybody. Your wife, from more church. The elders, from a matter. The town, from a story. That family, from an awkwardness they did not ask for. Every one of those decisions is right, and I am not going to undo one of them, and I want you to see what the sum of them is: you have built a very good containment system and then had to live inside it.

There is one direction you have not been protecting, and it is upward. God does not need protecting from what this costs you. He is not going to repeat it, He is not going to think less of you, and there is no version of that family's story that gets damaged by a man saying the true thing to Him in a car.

You are permitted the whole of it. His word says pour out, to the bottom, and never once asks for the contents to be edited first, and the Holy Spirit is not standing at the door of your car deciding what is appropriate.

And here is the last one, and I want you to have it because it is the thing you have half suspected and been ashamed of.

Warmth and grief are not in competition. You are not being two faced at that pump. The handshake was real and the three miles afterwards were real, and a man can hold both of those without either one being a performance. Scripture never once treats a genuine kindness as invalidated by a private sorrow, and the Holy Spirit has never called you insincere for asking about somebody's daughter's exams and then driving past your own turning.