I Still Reach for the Phone to Tell Him Things

My father has been dead a long time and I got halfway to the phone about eleven days ago.

It was nothing. It was a thing about a car, a specific thing that he would have had an opinion about and would have been right about, and I had the phone in my hand before I understood what I was doing.

That is what nobody prepares you for. It does not arrive on the anniversary. It arrives in a hardware store, in an aisle, over a fitting, and it puts you on your heels in public.

I have talked to a lot of people about this and the shape is always the same and everybody thinks they are the only one it happens to. They also, almost always, apologize for it. They say something like: it is ridiculous, it has been nine years.

I want to say the plain pastoral thing first, and then I want to read a verse that I think is one of the strangest and best in the Psalms.

The plain thing is this. Grief that arrives out of order is not a malfunction. It is what love does when the person it is aimed at is not there to receive it, and it goes on doing that for as long as the love lasts, which is to say permanently.

The request is about being counted

Here is the verse.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8, King James Version)

Thou tellest my wanderings. Tellest in the older English means counts. He is saying God keeps a count of where he has been.

Then the request: put thou my tears into thy bottle. It is a peculiar image and there is nothing else quite like it in Scripture. He is asking for his crying to be collected and kept.

And then, as if that were not enough: are they not in thy book? He answers his own request with a question that assumes it is already being done.

What that verse gives a person is not comfort exactly. It is dignity. It says the crying is not a mess to be cleaned up. It is being collected, kept, and recorded, by Somebody who thought it was worth keeping.

You have tears that are being kept rather than tolerated. Psalm 56:8 asks for them to be put into a bottle and then assumes they are already in a book. It is His Spirit, Romans 8:26 who helps our infirmities and makes intercession with groanings, who is described as being present in exactly that kind of moment.

The shortest verse in the Bible is at a graveside

There is a scene where Jesus is about to raise a man from the dead, which means He knows, better than anybody present, that the situation is temporary.

And this is what He does first.

Jesus wept. (John 11:35)

He is minutes away from calling Lazarus out of a tomb. He has said out loud that this sickness is not unto death. He has more reason than any person in history not to cry at that graveside.

And He cries. The word used is not the loud wailing word used about the crowd. It is a quieter one, about tears.

Which means grief is not a failure of faith and it is not evidence that somebody has forgotten what they believe. The one Person present who knew exactly how the afternoon was going to end still stood there and wept.

You are not failing at anything by crying about somebody who is gone. John 11:35 has Him weeping minutes before He raises the man, and it is the Holy Spirit, Romans 8:26 making intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered, who carries what a person cannot get into words at a graveside.

The verse about God being afflicted with them

There is a line in Isaiah that goes further than most people expect and I have never got over it.

In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old. (Isaiah 63:9)

In all their affliction he was afflicted.

That is not sympathy at a distance. It says God is described as being afflicted in the affliction, which is a claim about shared experience rather than about observation.

And the end of the verse gives the picture: he bare them, and carried them all the days of old. Carrying, over a long period, for people who could not manage the road.

For a man standing in a hardware store aisle with a phone in his hand, that is a better sentence than any encouragement. Not: this will pass. Somebody is in it with you, and is described as carrying, and has been doing it for a long time.

You are being carried by Somebody described as afflicted in your affliction. Isaiah 63:9 says in all their affliction he was afflicted, and he bare them, and carried them. It is the same Spirit, John 14:16 given as another Comforter to abide with you for ever, who is named for that exact work now.

What is promised, and what is not

I want to be exact about the promise, because grief is where careless promises do the most damage.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. (Revelation 21:4)

Shall wipe away. Future, and it is placed in a chapter about a new heaven and a new earth. Nothing in that verse says the tears stop this year.

And notice the picture: wiping away is something done to somebody's face, up close, by hand. It is not a general improvement in conditions. It is an act performed on a person.

So the promise is not that the aisle stops happening. The promise is that there is an end to it, that the end is personal, and that it is done by hand.

Meanwhile, the psalm's promise is the one that covers a Tuesday: the tears are in a bottle now, and in a book now, and being counted while nothing at all is being fixed.

You have a present tense promise about the tears being kept and a future one about them being wiped. Psalm 56:8 collects them now and Revelation 21:4 wipes them later. It is the Spirit of God rather than the passing of time who is named as the Comforter given to abide in between.