I Do Not Need the Answer Today

The second service ends at twelve fifteen and she is at the side of the platform coiling a cable when the first one reaches her.

He is lovely. He has been in this church longer than she has. He says he has been praying about her mother and he believes God is doing a deep work in her through this season, and he says it with his whole face, and he means every syllable of it.

She says thank you. She coils the cable.

The second one catches her by the coffee table. This one is a woman her own age who lost a father four years ago, and she is kind in a way that costs her something, and she says that the timing was exact, down to the very day, and that the whole picture will make sense to her in the end.

She says thank you. She stirs the coffee she is not going to drink.

The third one is at the door on the way out, and this one is the hardest, because it is the youth pastor and she loves him and he is twenty five. He says he has been thinking about it a lot and he thinks the reason is so she can minister to other people who are grieving.

She says thank you. She goes and sits in her car in the parking lot for eleven minutes without starting the engine.

Her mother died in March. It is the end of May. She has been back on the platform for four Sundays, and she is good at it, and the whole building thinks she is doing well.

And what she cannot say to any of those three people, all of whom love her and all of whom would be devastated to know it, is that every single conversation like that takes something out of her that she does not have to spare. Not one of them has hurt her. All of them together are a weight she is carrying up a hill.

What she wants is so small she is embarrassed by it. She wants one person to walk over and say nothing about God's purposes and just stand there while she coils the cable.

If that is a parking lot anybody recognizes, stay with me. There is something in the Gospel of John that is going to take a weight off.

Jesus arrived at Bethany with the answer in His hand

Here is the scene, and I want you to notice what He does with the four days He has already had to think about it.

When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled.John 11:33

He knows. He has known since before He set out. He said out loud to His disciples, days earlier, that this sickness would end in the glory of God. He is walking toward a tomb He fully intends to open in about ten minutes.

And He sees Mary crying, and He groans, and He is troubled, and then a verse later the shortest sentence in the Bible: Jesus wept.

Stop there, because it is easy to slide past. The one person at that graveside who genuinely had the full explanation is the one person at that graveside who did not give it. He had every right to say, hold on, watch this. He said nothing of the kind. He went in with them, all the way down into it, and He cried.

You are met by that same Christ on a Sunday afternoon in a parking lot, and you were met by Him on every drive home this spring. John 11:33 is the written word showing His posture at a graveside, and the Spirit He groaned in is the same Spirit who has been in that car with the engine off.

That verse is your permission slip, and it is signed higher than any of the three people who caught you at the coffee table. You have the Lord's own example behind you when the explaining is the thing you cannot take today. It is written down in John 11 and it has not moved, and the Holy Spirit does not think less of a worship leader for wanting the room quiet.

Explaining is what love does when it is frightened

Now let me protect those three people, because you are going to see them again on Wednesday and I do not want anything sitting between you.

All three of them walked toward a woman whose mother had died. That is a hard walk. Standing in front of a loss you cannot fix, with nothing in your hands, is one of the most exposed things a human being ever does, and almost nobody has been taught how.

So they reached for the nearest solid object, which for a church person is a purpose. A deep work. The right moment. Ministry to others later. Those sentences are not weapons. They are handrails, and the people gripping them were the ones who needed steadying.

That does not make the sentences land any better. It was never going to. What it does is take the second weight off, the one where you also have to wonder whether anybody actually loves you or whether they just want the grief tidied. They love you. They were frightened by the size of it.

Keep the three people. Set the three sentences down on the coffee table and walk out without them.

Right now, as you read this, you are carried by a God who has never once needed the size of your loss made smaller before He would come near it. John 11:33 has Him groaning in the Spirit rather than explaining, and His Spirit has not changed His method since.

Nothing is required of you on the platform

Here is the part that I suspect nobody in that building has told you, and it needs saying plainly because your instinct will fight it.

You are not on that platform to demonstrate anything, and you were never put up there to file a good report about what God is doing in you. Nothing in the written word asks a mourner for resilience on a schedule, and the Holy Spirit is not standing at the side of the stage with a clipboard. The congregation is not owed a woman who has tidied her mother's death by the end of May.

The psalms are full of people singing in public with nothing resolved. Half the songbook of Israel is unfinished business set to music. There is a psalm that ends with the word darkness and nothing after it, and it was still sung in the temple, on purpose, by the choir, with instruments.

So if you stood up on Sunday and led four songs while carrying every ounce of it, that was not a performance and it was not hypocrisy. That was worship in the biblical shape, which has always had room for a person leading with a stone in their chest.

You are not required to arrive at a conclusion in order to keep leading, and you were never asked to be further along than you actually are. Psalm 88 ends on the word darkness and was still handed to the choir, and the Spirit who inspired it has never graded a mourner on where she has got to.