Eight Months And Then He Moved Cities

It was Wednesdays, half past six, at a place with terrible coffee that neither of them ever complained about.

Eight months of that. Thirty-one Wednesdays, and he counted them once, later, which he is slightly embarrassed about.

It was not a program. There was no book and no plan and nothing that would look like anything if you described it. They talked. The man asked good questions and then, crucially, asked a second one, which almost nobody does.

And in eight months a thing happened in him that had not happened in the previous nineteen years.

Then the man's mother got ill four hundred miles away, and there was nobody else, and he moved.

That is the whole story. There is nobody in it who did anything wrong. If you laid out the facts for anybody they would say, well, of course he moved, and they would be right, and he says exactly that himself whenever it comes up, which is rarely.

It has been three years.

They text. Genuinely, not politely: about every six weeks, and it is warm, and twice there have been long phone calls that were nearly the real thing.

And what he has never said to anybody, and what he would find almost impossible to say out loud, is that he grieved that harder than he has grieved most actual losses in his life, and he has never once felt allowed to.

Because who is the grief for. Nobody died. Nobody let him down. A good man went and looked after his mother, which is the correct thing, and the correct thing is what happened, and a man of forty-eight sitting quietly with a loss about a Wednesday coffee is not a thing he has any language for.

So he does not have the language, and it has gone somewhere, and where it has gone is that he does not really start things like that any more. Not out of protection exactly. He just does not get round to it, in a way that has been very consistent for three years.

And you have an ending like that. Nobody's fault, entirely reasonable, and you never gave yourself permission to be sad about it, and something in you has quietly stopped beginning things.

He named the fear before He named the promise

There is a sentence Jesus says to men who are about to lose Him, and the first half of it is the part that matters most for you.

I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.John 14:18

Look at the word He chose to name their fear.

Orphans. Not students without a teacher. Not a group without a leader. He reaches for the most personal word available, the one about a child who has nobody, and He names it out loud on their behalf before He says anything reassuring.

He does not tell them not to be dramatic. He does not point out that they are grown men and this is a ministry transition. He names the size of it first.

You have a grief that has been named for you by Christ Himself, which means it is not out of proportion. It is written, I will not leave you as orphans (John 14:18), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a word like orphans land on a man of forty-eight who has never once let himself use a big word about a Wednesday coffee.

Now the permission question, because that is the whole knot.

Who is the grief for, given that nobody did anything wrong.

That question assumes grief is a response to fault. It is not. Grief is a response to loss, and those are two entirely different things, and a great many people go years without noticing they have collapsed them.

You lost something real. Thirty-one Wednesdays with somebody who asked a second question. That was the only stretch of your adult life in which you have been accompanied, and it ended, and the fact that it ended for an excellent reason changes nothing whatsoever about what is missing.

You are permitted to grieve a loss that nobody caused, and no fault is required before a person is allowed to be sad. Scripture says Jesus wept (John 11:35) at a graveside where He knew exactly what He was about to do, which is grief in the presence of full knowledge and no blame, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives a man permission to feel the size of something.

And the second question, because it deserves to be named as the actual gift.

Almost nobody asks a second question. He did, thirty-one times, and something in you that had been shut for nineteen years opened, and it opened because somebody kept going after the first answer.

That capacity is now in you. He did not take it with him to the other end of the country. You know how it is done and you have been on the receiving end of it, and men who have had that done for them are the ones who can do it.

You are carrying something you were given, and it did not move four hundred miles. It is written that freely you received, freely give (Matthew 10:8), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes what was put into a man in eight months into something available to somebody else in an ordinary conversation.

And now what this page will not say.

It is not going to tell you to find somebody new, or to ask somebody to meet you on Wednesdays, or to build what you had with a different person. That instruction hands a bill to the man who has already lost something, and it treats a friendship as a slot to be refilled.

You are being told who has not moved, rather than being told to go and organize something. Scripture says I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you (John 14:18), and it is His Spirit who is precisely how that coming was fulfilled, which is the whole reason that promise reads as a comfort and not a delay.