Suffering

Psalm 113 climbs eight verses before it lands on one woman in one house. For the parent whose children come back every week and barely speak, the Hebrew has a name for it. The barren one of the house has the house, but not what the house was for.

A label saves people the trouble of learning you. It carries the ending and none of the years that led there. For anyone introduced by the worst word in their story, and for the God who renames rather than argues with the facts.

You sat near the back and hoped nobody would ask how you were doing. Whatever everyone else carried in, your hands were empty. But the comfort that reached you where you were sinking is the one that you can offer to others.

Scripture says three times that Mephibosheth was lame in both feet, and it saves the last time for the final line of the chapter, after he is already seated at the king's table. Nobody healed him. He was welcome anyway.

"Let your steadfast love comfort me according to your promise to your servant." A pastoral reflection on Psalm 119:76, and the prayer you reach for when rescue has not come: not asking God to change the situation, only not to leave you alone in it.

I said the words over communion hundreds of times before a wounded member gripped my hand and I finally heard them said to me. The Emmaus road on why you are not walking alone.

You survived the first loss. Nobody warns you that surviving is the trap. Then the second thing walks through the door the first left open and finds you scraped to the bone. Psalm 42:7 and the grief that will not finish taking turns.

Job's friends wanted his tears to be a confession. He kept them on the table as testimony. A reflection on grief that refuses the tidy verdict, and weeps its case before a God who, astonishingly, takes your side.

You were the ugly duckling of the family, and everyone had a way of letting you know it. You carried that verdict as if it were your own face. But what God saw in the secret place was there before any of them looked.