The Quiet That Was Not Empty

She stopped going in the second spring, and she has never explained it to anyone, and nobody has asked her directly.

It was not one thing. It was the accumulation of a hundred small ones, and the strange part is that not a single one of them was unkind.

It was the woman at the door who took both her hands every single week and said the same sentence about God's timing, until the sentence stopped being a sentence and became a sort of turnstile she had to pass through to get into the building.

It was the men's group leader who told her, in the corridor, that her husband finished his race and finished it well, which is true, and which made her want to sit down on the floor.

It was the study group taking her passage on suffering three weeks after the funeral, and everybody being very careful, and one man saying that God does not waste anything, and her nodding.

And it was the prayer. She could not have said this to anybody at the time. Every prayer over her was a prayer for peace to come, for comfort to fall, for a release from grief, and every one of them left her feeling like a job that had not been completed. Six months of being prayed over as an unfinished item.

So she stopped. She did it quietly, no scene, no letter. She was ill one Sunday and then busy the next and then it had been three weeks and the phone had gone quiet and it turned out that leaving was easy.

Now it is six in the morning, which is when she is awake, and she sits at the kitchen table with a mug and the gray light coming up in the window and nothing said at all.

And here is what she cannot tell anybody, because it would sound like she has turned her back on God: this hour is the first thing in two years that has helped.

She has begun to be frightened of that. If the only place she can breathe is a silent kitchen with no praying in it, has she quietly left the faith without noticing?

She has not. There is a verse that has been waiting for her, and it is in one of the darkest books in the Bible.

Scripture has a posture for this and gives it no apology

Here it is. Lamentations, of all places, in the middle of the poem everybody knows for one famous verse about mercies being new every morning.

He sitteth alone and keepeth silence, because he hath borne it upon him.Lamentations 3:28

That is not a rebuke. Read the shape of the sentence. It is a description, offered without correction, of a person sitting by themselves and saying nothing, and the reason given is simply that the weight is on them.

Sitting alone. Keeping silence. Those are the two things a grieving woman has been quietly afraid mean she has drifted, and Scripture puts them in a poem about the mercies of God and does not add a single word of criticism.

You are in a posture the written word describes without disapproval, and you were never drifting by sitting still. Lamentations 3:28 is the ground under that, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept the verse in a book about ruin so it would be there for a kitchen table at six in the morning.

Look at what the chapter does around it, too. Three verses earlier it says the Lord is good unto them that wait for Him. Three verses later it puts a man's mouth in the dust. Both. In the same poem, by the same writer, in the same week.

You have not been asked to choose between the goodness of God and the honesty of your morning, and you were never the first person to hold both. That whole chapter of the written word holds them together at once, and the Spirit who inspired it does not need a woman to resolve them before six in the morning is allowed to be quiet.

Being prayed for as an unfinished item

Now the thing about those prayers, because it has been sitting in you for two years and it deserves to be looked at directly.

Nobody in that room meant it. Every one of those people was praying the best prayer they had. But a prayer aimed exclusively at the removal of a grief has a shadow in it, and the shadow is a message: this state is a problem, and our job is to get her out of it.

Six months of that will make a person feel like a project. It is not what anybody intended and it is exactly what it does.

And here is the thing that will surprise you about Scripture. It does not pray that way about grief nearly as often as the church does. The psalms mostly do not ask for the grief to be lifted. They ask God to look, to hear, to come close, to not be far off. The request in the songbook is overwhelmingly for company rather than for removal.

Right now, as you read this, you are companied rather than processed, and you were never an item on a list that somebody failed to close. The written word asks God to come near far more often than it asks Him to take the ache away, and the Spirit who inspired those psalms is not standing in your kitchen assessing your progress.

Leaving a building is not leaving Him

Now the fear underneath the fear, and I want to be gentle and completely clear at the same time.

You have not left God, and you were never leaving Him by leaving a room. Nothing in the written word ties His nearness to an address, and the Holy Spirit did not stay behind in a foyer when you stopped walking through it.

A building and a Person are two different objects, and it is worth being precise about them, because the accusation that runs at six in the morning depends entirely on confusing them.

There is nothing in the New Testament that ties His nearness to a building. The one thing Jesus says about where God is worshiped, He says to a woman by a well who is trying to argue about which mountain is the right one, and He tells her the location question is over.

And that same chapter of Lamentations, three verses on from the silence, has the writer saying the Lord is his portion, and he is sitting alone in the dust when he says it.

You are His portion at a kitchen table exactly as much as in a pew, and you have been His through every one of these silent mornings. Lamentations 3:24 puts that in the mouth of a man in the ashes, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been keeping company at six o'clock all this time.

Whether you go back is not what this page is for and I am not going to steer it. Some people do and some people do not and neither is the measure of anything. What I will not have is a woman sitting at a table believing she has abandoned God because she cannot face a turnstile.