The Group Thread That Stopped in March

Forty-one messages in eleven days, and then nothing for five months.

Somebody set it up on the second night and called it For Dee, and if you scroll back you can watch a whole street become useful in a week.

I can do Thursday.

Does anyone know how she takes her coffee.

She said the back door sticks. I've got a plane in the garage, I'll come Saturday.

And then, on the third of March, one line from a woman who was doing three of the nights herself.

Sorry all, crazy week here. Anyone free?

Nobody answered.

The thread is still there, a third of the way down your phone now, under the school trip one and the furnace one. It has not moved since March.

You have opened it eleven times since May.

You have typed and deleted three messages. Just thinking of you, because it says nothing. How are you doing?, because it is not a question with an answer in it. The third you cannot remember, only that you were still holding the phone twenty minutes later.

And then last Wednesday, the coffee aisle.

She had a basket over her arm and saw you a fraction before you saw her, and you both did the thing. The lift, the smile, the small noise. And you said, "How are you?" and she said, "Yeah. Good, yeah." And you said, "Give me a shout if you ever need anything," and she said, "I will," and went off toward the front of the store.

You sat in the car afterward with the keys in your hand.

Give me a shout if you need anything is the most honest sentence you have said to her since February, and the heaviest thing you could have handed her, because it asks her to do the noticing, the deciding, the asking and the receiving, in month six, when she cannot decide what to have for lunch.

It is an offer shaped like a task.

And you know that. You have known it since the parking lot. What you cannot work out is why you did not say, I'm coming Tuesday, I'll bring the good coffee, you don't have to talk.

Work with your own hands

Here is why you did not say it, and it is not cowardice.

You believe comfort is a talent.

You believe there is a category of person who is good at this, that your sister-in-law is one of them, that they know the words, and that you would get it wrong and set her off in her own living room, and that the kindest thing an unskilled person can do is stay out of the way.

Now look at what Paul tells a whole church to aim at.

And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you.1 Thessalonians 4:11

Study there is not homework. The word underneath it is the word for ambition, for striving after honor, the thing a man in that world chased in public all his life. Paul takes it and points it at being quiet.

Make it your ambition to be quiet. And then he says where it goes: your own business, and your own hands.

Not the gifted hands. Not the ones that know the words. Yours, and 1 Thessalonians 4:11 says those are the ones you were asked for, with the Holy Spirit and not your vocabulary doing the work.

And comfort is not a talent. Look where Scripture puts the seven best days anybody ever spent with a suffering man. Job's friends heard what had happened, came and sat down on the ground with him, and for seven days and seven nights said absolutely nothing, because they saw that his grief was very great. That week is the only stretch of that entire book where those men get it right.

Everything that went wrong, went wrong when they opened their mouths.

You are not going to make it worse by being there, and the written word puts the sitting before the speaking, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting on you to phrase it well.

Then Paul says where comfort comes from, and it is not from the person who is good at this. God is the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, and this is what He does with it.

Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.2 Corinthians 1:4

Follow the direction of travel. It starts in God, comes into a person, and goes out of that person into somebody in any trouble. You are not the source. You were never asked to generate one drop of it, and the moment you thought you had to, the job became a performance and you quite reasonably declined it.

You are carrying something that came from the Father of mercies, and 2 Corinthians 1:4 says it was put in you so it could go on somewhere, and the Holy Spirit is the one moving it.

Now, month six, because nobody warns anybody about it.

The messages stop around week three. The cards stop by week five. The calls thin out around week ten, and it is nobody's fault, because everybody has a life and a furnace and a school trip, and grief has no end date in a calendar.

Then there is a long corridor. From about month three to somewhere past month eighteen, the world has moved on and the person has not, and they stop mentioning it because they can hear how old it has got.

She is in the corridor. You know she is. That is the whole reason you keep opening the thread.

You are the one within reach of that corridor, and that is not an accident, and 1 Thessalonians 4:11 hands the work to your own hands rather than to somebody better at it, and the Holy Spirit put you there on purpose.

There was a man once who mended shoes and kept a map of the world on his workshop wall, made out of scraps, in his own hand. When he said out loud what he thought ought to be done about it, he was told to sit down. An awl, a bench and a wall was the whole of it.

You have a car, a Tuesday evening and her address, and 1 Thessalonians 4:11 calls those your own hands, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting on you to have more.