Seven Thirty on a Thursday

The clock on the cooker turns over to half past seven and she does not move.

For six years, half past seven on a Thursday meant the buzzer going twice because somebody always leaned on it, and the folding chairs coming out from behind the wardrobe, and a lemon cake arriving in a plastic tub with the lid never quite on. Eleven people most weeks. Six good cups off the top shelf because there were never enough mugs, and the biscuit tin with the dented lid, and a prayer at the end that ran long because it always ran long.

Then she stopped going, for reasons that are hers and that nobody asked her for. The Thursdays stopped with it. That was fourteen months ago.

The tin is still on the shelf. The chairs are still behind the wardrobe. Nobody in her life has ever said the words I am sorry for your loss, because nobody has counted this as one. She lost eleven people inside a fortnight, and there was no funeral, no card, no dish left covered on the step, and not one person has asked her how she is doing with it. She has not asked herself either, because saying the word out loud would mean admitting it was worth a word.

So she stands in her own kitchen at half past seven with the kettle not on, and she tells herself she is being ridiculous, and the clock goes to thirty one.

And you know the hour in your own week. There is a Thursday of your own, and perhaps a tin on a shelf that remains difficult to move and difficult to explain.

Nobody sent a card, and it was still a bereavement

Let me count what you lost, properly, because I do not think anyone has.

You did not lose a hobby. You lost the people who knew how you take your tea, who asked about the operation, who had heard the story about your father twice and let you tell it a third time. You lost the shape of a week, and a room where nobody ever had to be told the background. Eleven of those relationships ended at effectively the same moment, and every one of them ended without a conversation, which means each one is still faintly open, and an open ending is heavier to carry than a closed one.

That is a bereavement. It has every mark of one. Waking up fine and being flattened by a smell. Reaching for your phone and putting it down. The strange, disloyal anger that arrives at the worst moment and shames you.

And it carries a weight an ordinary bereavement does not. When somebody dies, the world agrees with the mourner. People come. There is a service, and food, and a fortnight where disorder is permitted. None of that came here. Worse, other voices may have implied that leaving made the loss self-inflicted and therefore unreal. The grief has remained behind a shut door while permission to name it stayed in doubt.

You have a bereavement here, and it is worthy of care with no funeral and no card. He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds. Broken in heart is the whole of the entry requirement in that sentence. Not bereaved correctly. Not bereaved with a service and a notice in the paper and a fortnight of casseroles. Broken. The Holy Spirit meets this unacknowledged loss without waiting for one other person to certify that it counts, and the absence of a ceremony has never once made a grief smaller.

Hear this plainly, once, and then let it sit. It was a loss. It counts. The absence of a card does not mean nothing happened.

He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds. He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.Psalm 147:3 and 4

Read the two sentences together, because they were put together on purpose.

The first is a hospital. Broken hearts, bound wounds, hands doing careful work on something torn. The second is the night sky, uncountable and indifferent, and God going along the whole of it by name. And the psalm puts them in the same breath, as one thought, as though the second is the reason the first is believable. The God who does not lose one star in the dark is the God bending over one broken heart in a kitchen in the north of a small country at half past seven on a Thursday.

Notice the tense of it. Not healed. Not will heal after proper processing. Healeth. Present, ongoing, the work God does right now. That work never stopped and it was never handed over to a building.

You are met in the wound that never received a public name. Bindeth up is close work. It is done with hands, kneeling, on something torn, and it sits in the same breath as a God who does not mislay a single star in the whole dark. The Holy Spirit carries that living care into this kitchen tonight. His nearness never depended on the old room reopening, and it does not depend on it now.

And it is not general. That is the part the chest may resist. Eleven simultaneous silences can make the suspicion of being easy to forget grow quietly into a false fact. So take the second sentence personally, because it was written to be taken that way. He calls them all by their names. Not by their number, and not by whether anybody down here bothered to look up. By name, every one, including the ones nobody has ever charted.

You are called by name in the exact place the old group answers with silence. He calleth them all by their names. All of them. Including the ones no telescope has ever charted, and the ones nobody down here ever bothered to look for. The Holy Spirit makes that particular attention present to you tonight. Eleven silences cannot make divine memory forgetful. They never had the reach.

I am not going to tell you why they stopped calling. I do not know, and anybody who hands you a tidy reason is guessing at something they cannot see. Their road belongs to God, and I would rather bless them and leave it with Him than invent a story that makes you feel better tonight and worse in a year.

What I can tell you is where God has always looked. There is a law in the Word about harvesting an olive tree: when you beat the tree, you do not go back over the boughs. What is left at the top, the two or three at the very summit that nobody could reach, is not waste and it is not leftovers. It is a portion, reserved by command, and the ones it was reserved for are the stranger, the fatherless and the widow, which is to say the people with nobody. The harvest is instructed to leave them. Heaven is not.