The Week After

The funeral was on the Tuesday and it was a good one.

People came. Somebody said a thing about her mother that made everybody laugh, and there was a woman there she had not seen since school, and the sandwiches were exactly what her mother would have wanted, which she had arranged herself at eleven o'clock the night before.

Wednesday she wrote the cards. Thursday she canceled the deliveries and rang the council about the equipment collection. Friday morning she went to the chemist to take back the boxes and boxes of things nobody needed now.

She got home from the chemist at about half past eleven on the Friday and sat down on the kitchen floor with her back against the dishwasher, and she was there for two hours.

Six years. Every morning at seven, every evening, the nights in the last year, the schedule she kept on the back of the door, the way she learned to move somebody who cannot help you move them.

And when she thought about who to call, she went through the whole list and stopped, because every single person on it was somebody she had been the strong one for.

The doctor. The two neighbors. Her mother's friend from church who is eighty one. Her own brother, who lives abroad and who cried on the phone on Tuesday and whom she had comforted.

There is nobody left. That is not self pity. It is an accurate description of an address book.

If you have been the one who does the comforting, you know exactly what I mean.

Who comforts the comforter

Let me say first what I will not do. I am not going to tell you what these six years were for. I do not know and it is not mine to say, and if somebody has told you that God was preparing you or refining you, put it down for ten minutes; it can be picked up later if it turns out to be true.

Here is what can be said.

Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; who comforteth us in all our tribulation.2 Corinthians 1:3

The God of all comfort. Not the God who arranges for other people to bring it. That may happen and often does. But the source named in this verse is not a person on your list, and that matters enormously this morning, because your list is the problem.

You are being comforted by God Himself on that floor, and the supply does not run through anybody you have to be strong for. That is not my sentiment. It is written in 2 Corinthians 1:3, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a woman's ears into the place where she actually lives.

And look at what Paul says the comfort is for, two verses on. It is so that we can comfort others with the comfort we ourselves have received. Which means the whole system runs downhill from God, and everybody in it is receiving before they are giving, and there is no rank in it where a person only ever pours.

You have been standing in a place that does not exist in that verse. For six years you have been a source, and no human being is one, and that is why you are on the floor and not why you are weak.

You have been receiving all along whether or not you noticed, and it is what you have been handing out. The word settled that before your mother was ill, and the same Spirit who inspired it is on that kitchen floor while you read this.

An empty address book is a fact and not a verdict

Here is what is worth naming, because you have already begun to explain it to yourself unkindly.

You did not build that list badly. You built it the way anybody does who spends six years as the person other people lean on. The leaning goes one way and then everybody, including you, forgets that it could ever go the other, and after a while asking would feel like a change of terms.

It is not too late and nothing has been broken. But it is worth knowing that the reason nobody has come is not that they refused. It is that not one of them knows you are on the floor, because the woman they know does not sit on floors.

There is one more thing and it is the important one. God is not on that list. He is not waiting for you to be strong enough to approach Him, and He does not need you to be composed first, and He was on that floor at half past eleven before you sat down.

You have permission to be the one who needs something today, and the permission does not have to be earned by finishing the admin first. 2 Corinthians 1 names Him the God of all comfort; His Spirit is the one who makes a person able to receive without immediately turning it into a task.

One plain word, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If the weight has gone as far as thinking about not being here at all, please tell somebody living today. In the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour, and it can be a text if a voice is too much.