It Came Out in His Voice

The tarpaulin comes out of the crate still cold, and it smells the way it has smelled every Saturday for nineteen years: canvas, damp rope, and the oranges in the crate underneath it.

Two poles into the sockets. Then the crossbar, which is the part that takes two people and always has, and there is a way of doing it that the pair of them worked out years ago and never wrote down. You do not lift a crossbar. You stand it on its end, you get your hands under it, and you walk it up.

His wife is at the other end this morning. She has never done this in her life and she came anyway, in the wrong coat, because it was the one on the hook. And she is lifting the bar instead of walking it, and her wrists are going in about four seconds.

The words are out before any part of him has decided to say them.

"Don't lift it. Walk it up."

Same words. Same rhythm on them. Same small push down on the word walk, exactly where his brother put it for nineteen years. She gets the bar up. Then she stands there holding it with both hands and does not put it in the socket, and she says, not looking at him, "That was him."

And then, after a second: "Say it again."

He cannot. There is nowhere on that street to go, so he goes round the back of the stall and stands with one hand flat on the shutter and looks at the cobbles for a minute, and down at the end of the row the tea van's shutter goes up with a bang, and the day starts anyway.

That is you, more or less. Maybe it is not a stall. Maybe it is his laugh arriving out of your daughter, or your thumb finding his name in your phone before the rest of you catches up. Somebody has been taken out of the middle of your life, and he keeps arriving anyway, in your hands, in a face across a table, in the way you say a word.

Come here. Sit down on the crate with me for ten minutes, because I am not in a hurry and neither is God.

What is actually underneath you

Let me say the true thing first, because in my experience the good thing does not go in until somebody else has been willing to say the true thing out loud.

He is not coming back onto that street. There is no arrangement of words, mine or yours, that puts him at the other end of that crossbar again, and I will not dress that up. I will not tell you what he is doing right now beyond what I am permitted to say, which is that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, and there I stop.

And you do not grieve somebody once. You grieve him in installments, in ambushes, at a crossbar, at a sound in a shop, at somebody who loved him too asking you, gently, to say a thing again. Every few days you meet another piece of the absence you had not met yet, and there is no clever way to find them all at once and have it over with.

Here is the part almost nobody sees. You have got good at it. You have learned the one handed version of a two handed life, the workaround, the trick with the shoulder, and getting good at it has cost you something that appears on nobody's list anywhere. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Deuteronomy 33:27, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

That is the pit, and I am not going to stand at the top of it and shout encouragement down at you. I am going to tell you what is at the bottom of it.

There is a line at the very end of Moses' life, in the last blessing he ever gave, and it is one sentence with a direction in it that most people read straight past.

The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.Deuteronomy 33:27

Read where the arms are.

Not around you, holding you together so you look presentable to the street. Not above you, reaching down to haul you up out of it by lunchtime. Underneath. Down. Which happens to be the direction you have been quietly traveling since the phone call. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Deuteronomy 33:27, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

That preposition is doing more work than it looks. A God who is only ever above you is a God you have to climb to, and grief takes the climbing out of a person early. Arms underneath do not ask you to come up first. They are met on the way down, and they are the reason the way down has a floor at all.

Now read the other word. Everlasting. Do you know how long a pair of arms can actually hold a crossbar? About a minute. Then they start to go, and anybody who has ever held one end of anything knows the exact second the man at the other end begins to shake. Everlasting arms are arms that never begin to shake. They were not fresh at the funeral and tiring now. Nineteen years, or this coming Saturday, is all the same to arms that never started and never end.

And this is not a museum piece. God did not comfort people in one century and then move on to other work. He is under you at the exact hour you are reading this, whether or not you can feel one thing. Numbness is not distance. Some of the deepest grief has no sensation in it at all.

Nor is it kept for a better class of griever, which is the other thing grief works hard to sell you. The prophet said of Jesus that He was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. Acquainted. Not briefed on it. Not sympathetic from a comfortable distance. Acquainted is the word you use about someone you actually know, whose face you would pick out of a crowd. Grief is no stranger to Him, and neither are you.

One thing about my own name, because it is why I can say the next part without flinching. Santiago is Sant Iago. Iago is Iacobus. Iacobus is Iakobos. And Iakobos is Jacob.

Four languages deep, and I am named for a man who wrestled all night with God at a river crossing in the dark, and would not let go, and was blessed, and got a new name out of it, and limped for the rest of his life. The hip never went back. And read on: Scripture keeps calling him Jacob afterwards anyway, alongside the new name, both of them, right through to the end of the book.

Now hear what I am not saying. I am not telling you God took your brother in order to accomplish something in you. I do not know why it happened. I will not invent a reason for you, and any man who hands you one has handed you something he assembled in his own head, and you are free to set it down and walk off. Scripture holds that ground in Deuteronomy 33:27, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

What I am telling you is that a man who walked differently for the rest of his days was not a man outside the blessing. You walk differently now. That is not evidence that something failed in you. A thing can change your walk permanently and you can be held permanently, and both of those are true in the same sentence, at the same hour, on the same Saturday morning.

One plain thing, and then I will leave it. If this has gone somewhere darker than sorrow, if you have caught yourself thinking the world would run more smoothly without you in it, tell a living human being today: your doctor, a crisis line where you live, or the one person who would drop everything. That is not weakness and it is not small faith. It is exactly what anybody who loves you would beg you to do. This rests on Scripture in Deuteronomy 33:27, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.