It Was Not Even Mine

Jodie cannot pray any more and it did not happen to her.

That is the sentence she cannot get around and it is the reason she has not told anybody.

Her best friend's family have had four years. Three separate things, and none of them are connected to each other, and none of them were anybody's fault, and the arithmetic of it is what has undone her. One would be a hard year. Three is a pattern, and she cannot look at a pattern without asking what is making it.

She has watched it from about eighteen inches away. She has been in that house. She has done school runs and sat in a corridor and taken a phone call at half past eleven at night.

And somewhere in the third year something in her stopped.

She does not have a dramatic version of this. She has not stormed off anywhere. She still goes, and she still sings some of it, and she has stopped praying properly, and what she notices most is that she cannot say the word Father any more without something in her closing.

The worst part is that they are fine.

Not fine. But they still believe, plainly and without any fuss, and they say things in that kitchen that she used to say, and they mean them, and it is the mother of that family who has been holding everybody together for four years.

And Jodie, who has lost nothing, cannot pray.

She has decided she has no right to it. That is what has kept it in her for a year. What right does she have to a crisis about somebody else's life. She was not on the ward. She has all her people. She goes home.

She said it eventually. Badly, on the front step, in April, mostly by accident, and the wrong way round so it came out sounding like an accusation.

And Ruth listened to the whole thing.

And then she said, "Good."

And Jodie said, "What?"

And Ruth said, "Somebody has to be angry about it. I have not got the room."

Now let me ask you what you are actually angry about.

Because if this is yours it has a specific shape and it is probably one particular detail rather than the whole of it, and you have never once said it in plain words to God because you have decided you are not entitled to.

Two days, and then He wept

There is a line in John 11 that people read past because it is inconvenient, and then a line two verses from the end of the story that everybody knows and nobody sits in.

The sisters send word that Lazarus is ill. It is a short message and it is not a request, it is just: the one You love is sick.

And this is what the text says next.

So when He heard that he was sick, He then stayed two days longer in the place where He was.

Read that slowly. He heard, and He stayed. Not delayed by circumstances, not caught up elsewhere. He stayed, on purpose, and the text puts the two facts in the same sentence with a so in front of them.

I am not going to explain that to you. I could give you the arguments and there are decent ones, and every one of them, said to a person who is angry, functions as a way of making them stop being angry.

What I will do is take you to what He does when He arrives.

Jesus wept.John 11:35

He is standing at the grave of a man He is about to call out of it. He knows what is going to happen in about four minutes. He knows better than anybody in that garden.

And He weeps.

Not because it is permanent. Because it is wrong. Because death is an obscenity and being God does not make Him serene about it, and the shortest verse in the Bible is God, in a body, crying at the thing itself with full knowledge of how the day ends.

So hear this said over you, on a front step in April having just said the wrong thing out loud. Your anger about what happened to them is not a defect in you, and the God you cannot say Father to is the one who stood at that grave and wept about exactly this. That is written in the shortest verse there is, and it is the Holy Spirit who intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words, and groaning is what He does with a prayer that has no acceptable sentences in it.

Now let me handle the guilt, because it is the thing keeping you silent.

You think you have no standing.

You have decided that because it did not happen to your body or your house, your reaction is a kind of theft, and so you have been running a real crisis with no permission to have it.

That is not humility. It is a rule you made up, and it has one consequence: the person who could actually be angry on their behalf has gone quiet, and Ruth just told you she has not got the room.

There is a reason you cannot look away. You love them. Compassion means suffering with, and it is not a metaphor: it is a thing that actually happens in a person, and God has it, and He describes Himself as having it constantly.

And I am not going to tell you why their four years happened.

Not one reason. Not a purpose, not a lesson, not a plan you would understand later. I do not know, and no article knows, and this site does not hand out explanations for a specific family's suffering.

And I am not promising you a Lazarus, either. That story ends the way it ends and yours is not that story and I am not going to imply otherwise to make you feel better today.

What I am telling you is the thing the two verses give you together.

He is not neutral. He stayed two days and He never explains it, and then He stood at the result and cried.

Whatever is going on that you cannot see, indifference is not it.

The word says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those crushed in spirit, and it does not put a qualification on whose heart. And the Spirit of God is the one who helps in our weakness, and He is the reason a person who cannot form a prayer is still praying.