The Study Partner Who Lost His Son

They have sat at that table on Tuesday and Thursday nights for nine years.

Two books, two glasses of tea, one lamp, and a way of working that neither of them has ever had to explain to the other: read the line, sit with it, say what you see, argue about it, move on when it is finished and not before. They have gone through whole books that way. They have gone through years that way.

Aviv died on the fourteenth of March. He was twenty six.

And the first Tuesday after the funeral, at seven o'clock, out of a kind of instinct neither of them examined, they both showed up.

That is nine weeks ago. They have not missed a night since.

And here is the thing that is quietly taking the man apart. He has nothing to bring.

His own father died in November. Four months. And he came into this expecting that his four months would be some kind of equipment. He had thought, without ever putting it into words, that having been through it recently would give him something to say to a man who was in it now.

It has not. It has given him nothing. If anything it has taken his words away, because everything he considers saying, he tests first against the question would this have helped me in December, and the answer is always no, and so he does not say it.

So he arrives at seven with nothing. He sits. Some nights they read three lines. Some nights they read nothing at all and the books stay open at the same page for an hour and a half. Last Thursday the other man cried for a while and neither of them referred to it.

And on the drive home, every single time, the same sentence: I am not doing this properly. I am not helping. I am just a man sitting there.

If anybody has driven home from a table saying that, stay with me. There are two verses in the fourth chapter of Ecclesiastes that describe exactly what is happening in that back room, and they describe it better than he can.

Two on the ground, and one of them is also down

Here is the passage, and everybody quotes the first half and stops.

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

Look at the grammar of verse ten, because it is doing something people miss.

If they fall. Plural. Both of them. That is not one strong man reaching down to one fallen man. That is two people on the ground, and out of the two of them, one gets a hand up first and turns around.

The whole scene assumes both of them have gone down. The advantage is not that one of them is standing. The advantage is that there are two.

That is what has been happening on Tuesday and Thursday nights, and it is exactly what the text describes, and neither man in that room recognized it because they had both been reading verse ten as though it were about a rescuer.

You are the second man in that verse rather than the rescuer in it, and you were the second man on the very first Tuesday when you both just showed up. Ecclesiastes 4:10 is the written word putting both of them on the ground before anybody lifts anybody, and the Spirit who breathed that line has been in that back room at seven o'clock for nine weeks.

And notice the terrible half of it. Woe to him that is alone when he falleth. The whole weight of the passage falls on aloneness, not on inadequacy. It never says woe to him whose friend had nothing prepared. It says woe to him that is alone.

A man showing up on a Tuesday with nothing at all in his hands has already answered the entire problem the verse names.

You have already given the one thing that passage asks for, and you were giving it on every night when the books stayed open at the same page. Ecclesiastes 4:10 names aloneness as the danger and never once names emptiness, and the Holy Spirit does not require a man to arrive prepared before He will use his chair.

Your four months did not become equipment, and that is right

Now let me deal with the disappointment underneath, because it is real and he has not admitted it out loud.

He expected November to make him useful. It did not.

Here is why, and it is not a failure. Grief does not convert into technique. It never has. A man who has been through a thing does not come out the far side with a set of tools; he comes out with a body that knows something. And a body that knows something cannot be handed over in a sentence.

But watch what his four months actually did for him. It did not give him lines. It took lines away. Every consoling sentence he now declines to say, he declines because November taught him what those sentences do when they land on a man in the first week.

That is not nothing. That is the most valuable thing in that room.

There is a whole world of people who would have filled those nine weeks with words. Not one of them would have known that the third Tuesday is worse than the first, or that a man in the second month sometimes needs to sit in front of an open book and not read it for an hour and a half, or that referring to last Thursday would have been a small cruelty.

He knows all of that. He knows it without being able to say how he knows it.

You are equipped in a way that never turns into speech, and you were equipped like that from the first night you drove over there. 2 Corinthians 1:4 says the comfort a person receives in trouble is what gets handed on into any trouble, and the Spirit of God does not waste one month of what a man has been through, even when none of it becomes words.

The page you are not reading is doing the work

Now let me say something about the books, because he has stopped counting the nights when nothing was read.

Nine years of Tuesdays and Thursdays. That table is the most familiar object in either of their lives. The way the light sits. The way the tea goes cold in exactly that spot. The two chairs at exactly that angle.

And on the fourteenth of March, the whole world of one of those men came apart, and there is one hour and a half, twice a week, that is exactly the same as it was before.

That is not avoidance and it is not a failure to talk about it. That is an anchor. There is a man out there whose son is dead and whose entire life has changed shape, and twice a week he sits down at a table where nothing has changed at all, opposite a person who does not require anything of him.

Sometimes they read three lines. The three lines are not the point. The table is the point, and it was the point long before either of them noticed.

You are holding a fixed place in that man's week, and you were holding it on every night that neither of you read a word. Psalm 46:1 says God is a very present help in trouble, and the Holy Spirit is at work in a room where two books lie open at the same page for an hour and a half.