Two Sacks on the Tailgate

Two fifty pound sacks of layer pellets, and the kid carrying them out is nineteen and buried his father two weeks ago.

Dale knows this because Marion at the register told him, quietly, while she was ringing up the pellets and the fence staples and the roll of baler twine he did not really need. She did not look up when she said it. "Would you say something to him? You know." And then she handed him the receipt, and that was that, because Marion has been running that counter for thirty years and she knows exactly how much a man can carry across a parking lot in one go.

So now here they are at the tailgate. The boy sets his sack down beside Dale's and does not straighten up right away. His work gloves are too big for him. They were probably somebody else's. Dale's father has been gone since March, and there is a chair in the front room that Dale still walks around, and last week he found himself standing in the shed holding a wrench and not able to remember why he had come in there. He has not cried at the funeral, or after it, or since. He has said the sentence "he had a good long life" to eleven people because it is the sentence people hand you and it saves them having to hand you anything else.

He has nothing finished. That is the trouble. Marion has asked him to hand this boy something and the only thing he has is half a thing, still raw in the middle, and he does not know how you hand somebody half a thing without it falling apart on the way over.

You have stood at that tailgate. Somebody is looking to you, and the look says you know what this is, and you do, and that is precisely why you feel unqualified. Because knowing what it is has not finished it. Because your own chair is still empty. Because if you open your mouth, what comes out might be your own grief and not his, and you are frightened of putting your weight on a boy who is already carrying two sacks.

The comfort does not wait until the grief is done

Here is the pit, and I am going to name it plainly before I say anything else, because you deserve to be seen in it first. You have been asked to be the comforter, and nobody has comforted you. Not properly. Not in a way that reached the middle. And there is a small, mean voice that says you have no business opening your mouth for anyone else until your own house is in order, until you can sit in that chair, until you have wept the way you think you were meant to. That voice sounds like humility. It is not. It is a lie about how comfort works, and it is the lie this message exists to put down.

You are comforted, right now, in the middle of the unfinished part, and you were comforted on every day since March that felt like nothing at all. I am not saying that as my own idea. Scripture calls Him the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction so that we may be able to comfort those in any affliction, with the comfort we ourselves have received (2 Corinthians 1:3-4). Read the tense of it slowly. Comforts. Present. Not comforted once, at the start, and then dispatched. It is His Spirit doing the comforting, and it is His Spirit doing it while you stand at the tailgate.

Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.Luke 22:31-32

Look at when Jesus said that. Not after Peter's worst night. Before it. Peter has not fallen yet, has not stood by the fire and sworn he never knew the man, has not heard the rooster and gone out and wept bitterly. All of that is still ahead of him. And Jesus, knowing every bit of it, hands him a job: when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers. Not when you have recovered. Not when you have processed it. When you have turned. Peter is going to strengthen other men out of a wound that is still open, and Jesus set it up that way on purpose.

You have the same commission and it comes with the same timing. Jesus did not wait for Peter to be finished, and He is not waiting for you. His word to Peter is written down so that you would know the shape of the thing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it more than a story about a fisherman. It is the pattern. Strength handed on by men who are still being sifted.

I want to be careful here, because there is a way of hearing this that would hurt you, and I refuse it. I am not saying that comforting the boy is how you get comforted. I am not handing you a chore dressed as a cure. Helping him is not the road to your own comfort, and if anyone ever tells you to pour yourself out so that you feel better, that is a person who has confused a river with a pump. You comfort him because he needs it and because you have something. That is all. Your own grief stays yours, and God attends to it on its own account, in His own time, and He does not bill you for the boy.

And what do you actually have? Not a finished thing. But you have the one thing the boy cannot get from anybody who has not stood where you stand. You know that the sentence "he had a good long life" is a door somebody closes on you kindly. You know about the shed and the wrench. You know that the chair is the hardest piece of furniture in the world. You know that it does not get explained. It gets sat with. You have been sat with by God in it, whether or not it felt like much, and what you were given is exactly the size of what he needs: not an answer, one true sentence from somebody who is not pretending.

You are not being asked to be finished, and you were never asked to be. You are being asked to be honest, and the honesty is the comfort. The word says the comfort we hand on is the comfort we ourselves received, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a half sentence across a parking lot and makes it land whole. What He has given you, you can hand on unfinished, because it was never your finish that made it good.