The Questions I Cannot Ask in a Church

They had spoken on the Tuesday. About nothing. About a match, and a van, and something one of them was doing at the weekend.

He has been over that conversation more times than he can count, and there is nothing in it. That is the part he cannot get anywhere with. Not a hint, not a strange pause, nothing that could have been read by anybody.

It has been fourteen months.

The funeral was full. People said the things people say, and a man he had never met before said something at the front about how much his friend was loved, which was true, and which sat oddly beside the fact of what had happened.

Nobody said the thing anybody was thinking.

And afterwards there were the questions. Not one; a set of them, and they arrive at various hours, and he has never said any of them out loud to another human being.

Where is he now, and does anybody actually know.

Was there a moment on the Tuesday when it could have gone differently, and did I miss it.

Is it allowed to be angry with somebody who did that, and what kind of man does that make me.

And the one underneath all of them, which he could not say anywhere near a church: if God was there, what exactly was He doing.

That is you, and the questions are not the problem. The place where they have been kept is.

Before anything else

If you are having thoughts of ending your life, tell somebody today. Not eventually. In the UK, the Samaritans are on 116 123, free, any hour of any day. If you are somewhere else, your local emergency number will connect you to help, and there is a crisis line in almost every country. If you are in immediate danger, go to an emergency department or ring the emergency services. Scripture stands under that in Psalm 88:18, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

You are not a burden for ringing and you will not be judged. That is what those lines are for and the people who answer them chose to be there. It is written, in Psalm 88:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

And if you are grieving somebody lost this way, there are organizations for exactly that, with people who have been where you are, and being in a room with them is not the same as any other bereavement group.

You are not outside anybody's reach. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit, Psalm 34:18, and no cause of death was ever attached to that verse as a condition, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is nearest at whatever hour these arrive.

What I will not do

I am not going to tell you where he is. I do not know, and neither does the man at the front of that funeral, and neither does anybody who has ever spoken confidently to you about it in either direction. What I can tell you is what the Bible actually holds: that God is described as merciful beyond what anybody expects, that He alone knows what was happening in a mind, and that judgement belongs to Him and has never at any point been delegated to us. That is genuinely all any honest person has, and I am not going to give you a false certainty in order to end a conversation.

I am not going to tell you it was not your fault. I am going to tell you something better, which is that it was not yours to prevent. There is a difference, and we will come to it.

And I am not going to hurry you past the anger.

You are not being punished with silence for asking. Scripture says if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not, James 1:5, and upbraideth not means He does not tell anybody off for the asking, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who taught you these questions were unspeakable.

The psalm that does not end well

There is a psalm that most people have never heard read in a service, and it is in the Bible, unaltered, and it is the one you need.

Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.Psalm 88:18

That is the last line. Not the last line before the turn. The last line of the psalm.

Psalm 88 has no resolution. It does not do the thing every other lament does, where the writer remembers God's faithfulness in the final verses and lifts. It goes down, and stays down, and ends in the dark, addressed to God the whole way.

Somebody wrote that. It was kept. It was put in the book that gets read aloud, and nobody at any point in three thousand years edited a hopeful verse onto the end of it.

That tells you what God is prepared to hold. Not tidy grief. Not questions with answers attached. A man saying, straight to Him, that everything he loved has gone into the dark.

If that is in Scripture, then your questions are not too much for a church. They may be too much for some churches, and that is a fact about those rooms rather than about God.

You are not asking anything the Bible has not already said louder. Scripture says lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness, Psalm 88:18, and God preserved it without a resolution rather than correcting it, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to be more reverent about this.

The Tuesday

Fourteen months of going over one conversation.

Let me say the thing that is true about it, and it is not comfort exactly.

You were not equipped to read what was happening, because it was not written where you could read it. People in that state very often speak about vans and matches and the weekend, and they do it convincingly, and they do it to the people who love them most, precisely because those are the people they are protecting. Scripture settles that in Psalm 88:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

The absence of a sign is not evidence that you missed one. It is evidence of how well it was hidden, and that was not your failure. It was not even his, exactly; it is what that condition does.

And here is the distinction that matters. Whether something could theoretically have gone differently is not the same question as whether it was yours to prevent. You are not trained, you were not told, you were not there at the hour, and no reasonable person on earth would have read that Tuesday differently.

You did not miss it. Scripture says the Lord looketh on the heart, 1 Samuel 16:7, and the whole force of that verse is that the inside of a person is visible to God and not to the people around them, and the Holy Spirit is not the source of the sentence that arrives at three in the morning about the Tuesday.

The anger is allowed

You are angry with him. That is what you cannot say anywhere, and it is what almost everybody in your position feels, and it does not make you a bad friend. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Psalm 88:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

He left. Whatever else is true about the state he was in, and a great deal is true about it, the fact from where you stand is that somebody you loved is not here and did not have to be, and being angry about that is not a moral failure.

Two things are true at once. He was ill, or in a place that no well person can reach, and it was not a decision in the way ordinary decisions are made. And you are furious, and grieving, and both of those live in you at the same hour. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Psalm 88:18, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

Holding both is exhausting and it is also correct. Resolving it early, in either direction, is what has kept you from saying any of it out loud.

You are not disloyal for being angry with somebody you loved. Scripture says be ye angry, and sin not, Ephesians 4:26, and it treats anger as a thing to be handled rather than a thing to be denied, and the Holy Spirit is not shocked by anything you have felt about him in fourteen months.