You Lost A Friend And A Member In One Person

They cooked together. That is the detail that undoes him, and it is a small one, and it is the one he cannot get past.

Not ministry. Not planning. Cooking, on a Thursday, roughly once a month for nine years, in his kitchen, badly, arguing about salt. The friend always brought the wrong bread on purpose because it had become a joke neither of them could remember the origin of. There is a chipped bowl in that kitchen that is only ever used on Thursdays and has not been used since February.

The friend left the church in February. There was no row. There was a genuine and complicated set of reasons that he understands, and would defend on his friend's behalf if anybody attacked them, and does not believe were about him at all.

And here is the shape of the thing. Everybody in his building knows the friend left. They talk about it in the way people do, kindly, as a piece of news. The word they use is loss, but it is a specific kind of loss: he was a great servant, he did so much, he will be missed.

Nobody has said a word about the Thursdays.

Nobody knows about the Thursdays. That was not a ministry relationship and it was never on any list, and so in the collective account of what happened in February exactly one thing was lost, and it was a volunteer.

He lost a volunteer. He also lost the only person on earth who knew what he was like at half past ten at night with flour on his hands.

And only one of those two has a word available. When somebody says at a meeting that they are sorry about the situation, he says thank you, and means it, and there is a whole second bereavement standing invisibly behind him in that room with nowhere to go, and he goes home to a kitchen with a chipped bowl in it.

The psalm names them separately

I want to be careful getting to this psalm, because its occasion is not yours and I am not going to pretend it is.

Psalm 55 was written about a betrayal. Yours was not a betrayal. Your friend had reasons you understand and would defend, and nothing in this message casts him as anything other than a man who made a decision. Hold on to that; I am not handing you a grievance.

What transfers is not the cause. What transfers is that Scripture, when it grieves a person leaving, refuses to name it as one thing.

But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company.Psalm 55:13-14

Count what he names.

A man mine equal. My guide. Mine acquaintance. Sweet counsel. And walked unto the house of God in company.

Five separate things, in two verses. The friendship, the wisdom, the familiarity, the conversations, and the walking to worship together. He does not compress them into one word and he does not lead with the institutional one. He lists them, slowly, like a man going round a room touching furniture.

So hear this, in a kitchen with a chipped bowl in it. You lost two things and you are allowed to grieve both. That is not my permission; it is what His word does when it grieves somebody leaving, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes an inventory like that and makes it something a man can breathe with.

Now let me name the specific weight of your situation, because it is not the same as ordinary grief and it deserves saying accurately.

An ordinary bereavement is public. People bring things. They say the person's name to you. What has happened to you is that the smaller of your two losses is the only one with social standing, and so every single time somebody offers you sympathy, the sympathy lands on the wrong loss, and you have to receive it graciously, and the real one goes further underground.

That is exhausting in a way people do not understand, and it is why February has weighed what February has weighed.

You are not being ungrateful when the sympathy does not help. It does not help because it is aimed at a volunteer. Scripture takes the trouble to name five things in two verses precisely because a loss that is not named accurately cannot be comforted accurately, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to be satisfied by condolences addressed to the wrong grief.

And here is the one I most want you to have. God knows about the Thursdays.

Not in a general way. He knows about the bread, and the argument about salt, and the bowl, and the fact that it is half past ten and you have flour on your hands and this is the only room in your life where nobody needs anything from you. Nothing about that was ever invisible to Him, and the fact that it was on no rota and in no report has never once made it smaller in His accounting.

You are seen in the whole of it this evening. His word names the counsel and the company separately from everything else, and the Holy Spirit has been in that kitchen on every Thursday since February.