The Christening in the Cold Church

You keep your coat buttoned in church because it is cold, and because a buttoned coat is a thing to hold.

Your great-niece is nine weeks old and she is wearing the gown that has been in the family since your grandmother, and your nephew is holding her the way men hold a first baby, which is to say incorrectly and with enormous care.

The water goes on her head. She does not cry. Everybody makes the sound a congregation makes.

And in the fourth pew from the back, in a buttoned coat, a woman of sixty-eight is having a thought she has not said out loud in forty-one years, and it goes: I would have been a grandmother by now.

Nobody in this building knows that. Not one person.

They know you never had children. They knew it in 1985 and they knew it in 1996 and at some point everybody stopped noticing it, the way people stop noticing a thing that has stopped being news. You have been the aunt who is good with them ever since. You are genuinely good with them. That has never been a performance.

But you are still carrying it. That is the part nobody would believe, and it is why you have never mentioned it, because a woman of sixty-eight who says she still wants a child sounds to her own ear like a woman who has not moved on.

The service ends. Everybody goes to the hall for tea, and you go too, and you are glad for them, and you keep your coat on.

God chose the comparison Himself

There is a line at the very end of Isaiah where God reaches for an image to describe what He is going to do, and the image is startling.

As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem.Isaiah 66:13

He does not say as a general comforts his troops or as a judge acquits a prisoner. He picks the most physical, unhurried, wordless comfort there is, the kind a mother gives, and He says that is the kind He gives.

Sit with that for a second in a cold church. The comparison God chose for His own comfort is the exact thing your arms have been shaped for and never held.

That is not an accident aimed at you and it is not cruelty. It is God saying He knows precisely what that kind of holding is, well enough to use it as the measure of His own.

You are being comforted in the way you would have comforted. I am not offering my own sentiment here. Scripture says as one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you, Isaiah 66:13, and the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter, and He does not consider a forty-one year old grief out of date.

There is no cause here and nobody is going to look for one

I want to say this as plainly as I can, because you may have heard otherwise in 1985 and people said things then that they would not say now.

Nothing about this was your doing. There is no fault to find, no decision to trace back, no amount of faith that was weighed and came up short, and no cause anybody is entitled to speculate about. Anybody who ever implied otherwise, however gently, was speaking outside Scripture and outside their authority.

I am not going to explain it either. I do not have a reason. Nobody does, and a reason handed to a woman in year forty-one is another person's guess wearing a coat.

You have not been under a judgement for four decades. Scripture is willing to leave a hard thing unexplained and stay in the room, Job 2:13, and the Holy Spirit does not require a woman to have understood a thing before He is willing to comfort her in it.

The grief did not expire

Here is what I most want you to hear, and it is the reason this article exists.

There is an unwritten rule that a longing has a shelf life. That it is legitimate at thirty, sad at forty, and by sixty-eight has become something a woman ought to have processed. Nobody says the rule out loud. Everybody in that hall would deny holding it. And you have obeyed it for four decades.

The rule is not from God, and the Holy Spirit did not write it. Scripture does not put an expiry on a sorrow, Psalm 56:8. Naomi came back to Bethlehem and told the whole town to call her Mara, years after the losses, and nobody in the text tells her she is late.

You are not carrying this too long. Scripture says He healeth the broken in heart and bindeth up their wounds, Psalm 147:3, and the Holy Spirit does not check the date on a wound before He binds it.

It is allowed to still be there. It is allowed to arrive at a christening, in a cold church, in the fourth pew, forty-one years on.

And you were glad for them, and both are true

You were genuinely glad today. That was not an act, and Scripture never asked you to choose, Romans 12:15, and the Holy Spirit is not confused by a woman doing two things at once.

Two things can sit in one chest without either of them being a lie. You can be delighted for a nephew and hollow for yourself, and neither cancels the other, and the presence of the second does not make the first false.

That is the whole reason you kept the coat buttoned. You thought the gladness would be discredited if the other thing were visible.

It would not. You are allowed both, and God is not confused by a woman holding two things. Scripture says rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep, and it puts both in one sentence, Romans 12:15, and the Holy Spirit has no difficulty attending to a heart doing both at once.