The Month Nobody Knew About

There is a work thing on Thursday and you are both going, and you have both said you are going, and neither of you has said anything else about it.

Eleven weeks.

You had a date in your head. You had, between the two of you and nobody else, a rough plan for who to tell first and when, and there was a Sunday in about four weeks' time that had quietly become the day.

You had not told anybody. That was deliberate and it was sensible and it is now the whole shape of this.

So the world is exactly as it was. Nobody's face changed. Nobody sent anything. Nobody at that work thing on Thursday will do the small awkward kindness that people do, because there is nothing for them to know about.

And you are both walking around inside a thing that, as far as every person you will speak to this week is concerned, did not happen.

She went back on the Monday. You went back on the Tuesday. Somebody asked if you had a good weekend.

The verse does not ask who else knew

There is a line in Psalm 147, sitting between two enormous statements about the stars.

He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds. He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.Psalm 147:3-4

He counts stars and He names them individually, and in the verse immediately before that He is binding up somebody's wounds.

Nothing in that sentence asks how many people were told. There is no threshold. There is no minimum before a wound qualifies as a wound.

You are inside that verse this week, both of you. I am not putting my own idea over you here. Scripture says He healeth the broken in heart and bindeth up their wounds, Psalm 147:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a house where nobody outside has any idea anything has happened.

Nobody is naming a cause here

I want to be as plain as I know how, because you may have already had thoughts, and possibly a sentence from somebody.

There is no cause here to find. Nothing either of you did. Nothing either of you failed to do, ate, lifted, worried about, or prayed wrongly. No faith was weighed and found short.

Anyone who has implied otherwise, however gently, was speaking outside Scripture and outside their authority, and you may put whatever they said down and leave it where they left it.

And I am not going to hand you a purpose for this. I do not have one. Scripture is willing to sit inside a loss and never explain it, Job 2:13, and the Holy Spirit does not require an explanation to be accepted before He is willing to be in the room.

You are not under a judgement. That is not a comfort I am offering. It is a fact about God.

The particular weight of an unknown loss

Now the part that is specific to your situation, because it is real and almost nobody names it.

Scripture does not require an announcement before a loss counts, Psalm 147:3, and the Holy Spirit has been in this house since the day it happened. Grief usually comes with a small scaffolding around it. People know. There is a bit of allowance. Somebody makes a meal. Somebody does not ask you to do the thing on Thursday.

You have none of that, and you did not do anything wrong to end up without it. You simply had not got to the telling yet.

So you are both carrying a full weight with no allowance, in ordinary rooms, being asked about your weekend.

That is exhausting in a way that people who have not done it cannot picture, and it is not a sign that you are handling it badly. Scripture says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, Psalm 103:14, and the Holy Spirit is not grading either of you on this fortnight.

You have not been asked to carry this without help. Scripture says bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, Galatians 6:2, and the Holy Spirit does not require a household to have made an announcement before He sends somebody to sit with them.

You may tell one person. Not the work thing, and not the family group. One person who will not need it managed. That is not a betrayal of the privacy you chose. It is one human being knowing why this month has been what it has been.

And you are grieving different shapes

One more, and it is between the two of you. Scripture never issued one shape for a grief, Psalm 147:3, and the Holy Spirit does not run two people through the same sequence.

You will not grieve this the same way, and the difference will not follow any of the patterns people describe.

One of you will want to talk about it and one will not be able to, and it will swap over, probably more than once, and neither state is the correct one.

The failure mode here is not the difference. It is each of you privately concluding that the other one has moved on.

You have not lost each other in this month. Scripture says two are better than one, for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow, Ecclesiastes 4:9-10, and the Holy Spirit has been in that house on every one of these ordinary evenings.