Two hundred and eleven people signed that book. She counted, twice, on a night when she should have been asleep.
The service was a full three hours and the choir did the one he asked for years ago and nobody has ever done it better. The hall afterward held every person who came, plus about forty who only came to the hall, and the ushers had to go and get more of the folding chairs from the annex.
Her father was seventy nine. He had been a deacon in that church for thirty one years and he called everybody baby and he was, without any competition, the best man she has ever known.
That was a Saturday in April.
Since the folding chairs went back, that front door has opened for the mail carrier, a man about a gutter, and her daughter twice.
Nobody did anything wrong. That is what she has to keep telling herself at about eleven at night. Two hundred and eleven people came, in the rain, on a Saturday, and half of them are elderly, and the ones who are not have three jobs between them and children in two school districts, and every one of them loved her father.
But the flowers finally died in the second week of May, and she carried the last of them out to the trash, and she stood there in the yard holding a vase of green water in a dress she had put on for no reason at all, and that is the moment she thinks about most.
Not the funeral. That.
If that is a yard anybody has stood in, stay right here. There is a psalm that says the whole thing out loud and it is uglier and more honest than anything anybody said in that hall.
The psalm about acquaintance being put far away
Read this one and notice who it says did it.
Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me; thou hast made me an abomination unto them: I am shut up, and I cannot come forth.Psalm 88:8
Thou hast. He is talking to God about it.
That is a raw, almost impolite prayer, and the church has sung it for three thousand years. And the psalm it belongs to is the one that ends in the dark with no resolution, which means the congregation of Israel had a liturgical place for a person whose company had thinned out and who could not get out of the house and who was blaming God for it out loud.
Nobody edited it. Nobody added a corrective verse. It stands there in the middle of the songbook.
You are inside a prayer Scripture kept exactly as it was prayed, and you were never impolite for saying the honest thing. Psalm 88:8 is the written word letting a man name his emptied life without a syllable of correction, and the Holy Spirit is the one who saw to it that the rawest psalm in the book survived intact.
And look at that last clause. I am shut up, and I cannot come forth. That is a description of the peculiar paralysis of month three, when a person who could technically ring somebody finds that they cannot, and the not being able has nothing to do with the phone.
You have not been failing at reaching out, and you were never shut up in that house by anything you did. Psalm 88:8 names that exact immobility and puts it in a public song, and the Spirit of God is not standing in that front room waiting for you to make an effort.
The repast is a form, and forms end
Now let me handle those two hundred and eleven, because you will be sitting in a pew with them and I will not have you carrying anything in there.
A funeral is a form. It is a very good form, and that church runs it superbly, and the thing about a form is that everybody inside it knows exactly what to do. Come. Sign the book. Say the words. Eat in the hall. Stack the chairs.
There is no form for the second week of May.
That is the whole story, and it is not about love. Nobody in that congregation woke up on the tenth of May and decided against you. They ran out of a script, and there is no script, and most people cannot move without one when the subject is a house with a dead man's chair in it.
And here is the part that would break their hearts: every one of them assumes that house is full. They saw two hundred and eleven people. Each of them pictures the other two hundred and ten doing the looking after.
Keep them. Every last one, including the ones who only came to the hall. And do not build a ledger out of May, because it will cost you the church and it will not bring anybody to the door.
Right now, as you read this, you are attended to by one who has never needed a script, and you were never left to a form. Psalm 88 is the written word staying in a room with nothing resolved, and His Spirit has been in that front room since the chairs went back to the annex.
The vase of green water
Here is the part about the yard, because I think that is the actual center of this and nobody has ever asked you about it.
That moment was not a breakdown. That moment was the truth arriving on time.
The funeral is a public event about a man everybody loved. It is real and it is right and it does a job. But it is not the loss. The loss is a woman in a dress in a yard holding a vase of stagnant water on an ordinary Tuesday, because that is when the house has to become what it is now.
Every culture on earth has an elaborate form for the first week and nothing at all for the moment the last flower goes out to the trash. That is not a failure of your church. That is a gap in the whole human arrangement.
And Scripture, unlike everybody else, has language for the second one. Psalm 88 is not about a funeral. It is about the months.
You are met in the yard with the vase rather than only in the hall with the choir, and you were never seen accurately for the first time at that service. Psalm 88:8 keeps the emptied months in the written word rather than the ceremony, and the Holy Spirit was standing in that yard in the second week of May.
So here is where this leaves you, in a front room, with a low table and a drawer in it.
The God of Psalm 88 does not work to a form. He did not attend the service and go back with the folding chairs. He has no annex to return anything to.
That psalm is the proof, because it is the one place in the whole songbook where the singer gets no resolution at all and God still keeps the song. He did not require a better ending before He would preserve it for three thousand years. He kept it as it was.
And when He came in person, He went to a house where a funeral had already happened, four days late, and stood in a garden with two sisters who had given up on Him arriving, and He wept there before He did a single useful thing about it.
You are sat with in that front room by that same Christ, and you were sat with in the yard with the vase in your hands. Psalm 88:8 is the ground under it and John 11:35 is the proof of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that house since the second week of May.
And I will not tell you the door opens this month. Comfort is His to give, in His own way and His own timing, and a house that is still quiet in the fall is not a report on your faith or on how much that man was loved.
But there is a second weight, and it comes off today. You have carried an accusation that was never true, that a woman nobody visits has been quietly written off by a church that filled a hall for her father. Psalm 88 stands in the written word as the permanent answer to that, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a script to be in a room.
If the weight ever turns dangerous at eleven at night, and staying safe genuinely comes into question for you, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor the plain truth about the evenings. Getting another human being physically near you is not a failure of faith. It is what two hundred and eleven people did in the rain in April, arriving one at a time.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud in the front room, however tired your voice is by the evening. The authority to speak to what has settled over that house was given to you in Christ, and it does not rise or fall with how strong you feel today. Scripture is the ground under every line and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it. And whatever He does with the ache afterward is His to decide, in His own way and His own timing.
- Door that has not opened since April, you are not a verdict. Psalm 88:8 has a man telling God outright that his acquaintance has been put far from him, and I stop reading a quiet house as a judgment on my father or on me.
- Sense that I should be reaching out by now, get out in the name of Jesus. The written word names that exact immobility and calls it shut up and unable to come forth, and the Comforter is not in this room waiting for me to make an effort.
- Lord, You kept the one psalm that never resolves, as Psalm 88:8 shows, and You never asked it for a better ending. I thank You that You did not go back with the folding chairs, and I am saying his name to You now.
Psalm 88:8
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