The Younger Man at the Graveside

The pastor called him on a Wednesday and asked him to go.

There is a young fellow out on the county road, twenty eight, married three years, and his wife died in September. Nobody local knows him well. He came from somewhere else for work and he has no people here. And the pastor said, you know how it is, and I do not know anybody else to ask.

He said yes because you say yes.

Then he hung up the phone and stood in his own kitchen with his hand still on it for a good while.

Ruth died five years ago in November.

Five years. And here is the thing that nobody knows about him, not his daughter, not the pastor, not the men he has coffee with on a Saturday. He still cannot say her name out loud.

He can think it. He can read it off a stone. But if he tries to say it in a sentence, in front of another human being, something happens in his throat about halfway through and he has to stop and start again on a different sentence, and he has gotten so good at building sentences that go around it that it has been years since anybody noticed.

So he has been asked to go and stand with a man in the first month.

And what he keeps landing on, sitting in the truck outside the feed store, is this: what have I got. Five years and I cannot say a woman's name. What kind of a man is that to send.

He has been telling himself he will think of something to say by Sunday. That is the plan. Come up with something.

If anybody has sat in a truck working on something to say, stay with me. There is a line at the end of the first letter to Thessalonica that takes the speech out of it entirely.

The verb goes both directions

Here is the line, and the grammar of it does the work.

Wherefore comfort yourselves together, and edify one another, even as also ye do.1 Thessalonians 5:11

Comfort yourselves together. Not comfort them. Together. It is a mutual verb, and Paul writes it that way on purpose, in a letter written to a church that had just buried people and was frightened about it.

There is no dispenser in that sentence. There is no expert and no patient. There are two people in a room and something passes between them, and Paul does not say which direction it travels, because in his experience it goes both ways at once.

That changes what a man is being sent to do on a county road. He is not being sent out as a supply. He is being sent to stand in a place where something can pass.

You are sent to that fence line as one of two men and not as the one with the answer, and you were never the source of anything you have handed anybody. 1 Thessalonians 5:11 is the written word making the comfort mutual in the plainest terms it has, and the Spirit who breathed that line is in a truck outside a feed store with a man working on a speech.

And notice how Paul closes it: even as also ye do. He is not giving them a new assignment. He is telling a grieving church to keep doing the thing they are already doing without knowing they are doing it.

You have already been doing this for five years without once calling it ministry, and you were doing it every time you stood at a fence with a man and said nothing much. 1 Thessalonians 5:11 ends with even as also ye do, and the Holy Spirit has been working through a quiet man on a pasture longer than that man has any idea.

What you cannot say is the most useful thing you have

Now let me turn the whole thing over, because he has it upside down and it is costing him.

He thinks the fact that he cannot say Ruth's name disqualifies him.

Think about the young man on the county road for a minute. Twenty eight years old. A month in. Everybody who has come by that house so far has been able to talk. The casserole people can talk. The church ladies can talk. There has been a great deal of talking at that young man for four weeks and none of it has touched the floor of anything.

And then an older man comes and leans on the fence next to him, and at some point that young man says something about his wife, and the older man opens his mouth to answer and cannot get the name out.

That young man will understand something in that four seconds that no sermon has told him. He will understand that this does not have a bottom to it that a person hits and bounces off. He will understand that the man beside him is still in it. And, most of all, he will understand that whatever he himself is feeling at four weeks is not a sign that something has gone wrong with him.

The thing being carried as shame is the most useful object this man owns.

You are able to say something to that young man that no fluent person on that road can say, and you were made able to say it by the five years you never asked for. 2 Corinthians 1:4 says the comfort a person receives is handed on into any trouble, and the Spirit of God does not waste what a man has been through, not one week of it.

Nobody needs the speech you have been writing

Now let me take the plan off him, because the plan is the problem.

He is going to think of something to say by Sunday. That is what he told himself in the truck.

There is nothing to think of. There is no sentence. Nobody has ever, in the history of the world, said the thing that fixed it, and every man who has stood at a fence with somebody in the first month knows that in his bones and forgets it the minute it is his turn to go.

So here is the whole of the assignment, and it is short. Go out there. Stand where he is standing. Look the same direction he is looking. Stay longer than is comfortable. If words come, let them be true and let them be small. If no words come, that is not a failure of the visit, that is most of the visits that ever helped anybody.

And if he tries to say Ruth's name and it does not come out, he should let the young man see that happen. That is not a thing to be managed. That is the most honest sentence available on that property.

You have every single thing that visit requires already, and you had it before the pastor called on Wednesday. 2 Peter 1:3 says His divine power has given us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, and the Holy Spirit does not send a man out to a county road short of what the road needs.