I have said the words hundreds of times. Remember that Christ died for you and He loves you so much. I say them over open palms and over hands that shake, over people I have prayed with through their worst weeks. The words are true. But a thing can be true and still pass over you like weather, touching everyone in the room except the one holding the ciborium.
Then one member gripped my hand.
He knows my story. I had told him, in one of those conversations where you stop being the pastor for a moment and become just another person broken by his own life. He carries his own share of it. So when I placed the wafer on his hands and said the words, he took hold of my hand and would not let go.
I had come to give. I was not ready to be given to. That is the thing about standing on the serving side of the rail week after week, ciborium in hand. You forget you have hands that can be held. His grip closed around mine and held it there, firm, warm, insistent. He did not shake it or press it politely and release. He held on, the way you hold something you are afraid will be taken from you, and in that hold I understood he was not only receiving the bread. He was answering the words back to me. Saying, with his hand because he could not say it any other way, that he had heard me, and that he knew, in the way only another wounded man can know, exactly what those words cost to keep saying when your own faith runs thin.
The tears came before I understood them. Not grief. Something closer to being found. My hand was shaking a little inside his and he did not let that make him loosen his grip. He held me steady. The one I had come to serve was steadying me. And the words I had been saying to everyone had finally been said to me, not from a pulpit or a page, but through the hand of a man who had suffered enough to mean them.
On the road to Emmaus, two disciples walked away from Jerusalem with their grief still raw. They had believed. They had followed him, staked everything on him, and now they were walking home in the wrong direction with nothing to show for it but a sealed tomb and a story that had ended the way they most feared. A stranger fell into step beside them. They talked the whole way, this stranger opening the Scriptures to them, their hearts stirring without their understanding why. They did not know him. Luke says it plainly: "but they were kept from recognising him" (Luke 24:16).
Here is the tenderness of it. He did not wait for them to recognise him before he drew near. He came alongside them while they were still getting it wrong, still grieving a man they did not know was walking beside them. He was there the entire time. In the dust, in the conversation, in the ache they were carrying home. And they had no idea.
Then they sat down to eat. "When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognised him, and he disappeared from their sight" (Luke 24:30-31).
The bread broke and the truth landed. Not new information. Their eyes opening to what had been beside them all along.
He had been walking with them since Jerusalem. It only took the breaking of bread for their eyes to open.
That grip on my hand did the same work the broken bread did. I had been telling people all along that Christ loved them, that he died for them, that they were not carrying their pain into an empty room. I meant every word. I just had not let myself believe it was addressed to me too.
The loneliness of the long walk is real. The days when your faith runs on fumes and you serve out of obedience more than warmth, comforting others because it is your calling while privately wondering who is comforting you. That loneliness was real for the two on the road as well, walking away from the city with their hope in pieces.
But they were not alone on that road. Not for one step of it. The One they grieved kept pace with them the whole way.
You may be further along your own road than you ever wanted to be. Someone is walking with you. He has been walking with you since before you noticed. Sometimes it takes another wounded person, gripping your hand, saying back to you the words you have worn out saying to everyone else, before your eyes come open and you finally see him there.
You never were walking this alone.
