They Were All There For The Crisis

For six weeks there were people in her house every day.

She is not exaggerating. There was a rota, which somebody made without being asked, and it worked, and there was food in the freezer for two months and somebody took the children twice a week and a woman she barely knew cleaned her kitchen at eleven at night while she slept.

That was fourteen months ago and she will not hear a word against any of them.

Then it ended.

Not abruptly and nobody announced anything. It thinned. The rota stopped being needed and then stopped existing. The messages went from daily to every few days to once a week to the ordinary rhythm of ordinary friendship, which is exactly what should happen and is what everybody assumes happens next.

What everybody assumes is that the crisis was the hard part.

The crisis was not the hard part. The crisis was terrible and it was loud and she was carried through it by about twenty people.

The hard part is month nine. The hard part is a Tuesday afternoon fourteen months later when the thing is technically over and she is sitting in a kitchen that has been cleaned by nobody but her for a year, in a life that looks from outside like a life that has recovered, and the actual work of living with what happened is going on entirely inside one person with no rota at all.

And she cannot say any of that.

She has tried, in her head, about a hundred times, and every version of it sounds ungrateful, because the first sentence has to be about how good everybody was, and after you have said how good everybody was there is nowhere to put the rest.

So she says she is doing all right, which is true on a scale of one to ten and is not an answer to anything.

And you have a fourteen months. Everybody was there for the thing itself, and nobody has been there for the long part afterward, and you have never worked out how to say that without it sounding like a complaint about people who were genuinely good to you.

He stopped a moving crowd to speak to one person

There is a moment in Luke eight that people skip past because they are hurrying to the healing, and the part after the healing is the part you need.

A woman who has been ill for twelve years touches the edge of His cloak in a crowd, and she is healed, and she plans to leave. That was the entire transaction as far as she was concerned: get the thing, go.

And He stops.

And Jesus said, "Who was it that touched me?" When all denied it, Peter said, "Master, the crowds surround you and are pressing in on you!"Luke 8:45

Read Peter's objection, because it is the whole world's objection.

There is a crowd. Everybody is touching you. There is a man's dying daughter waiting at the other end of this, and this is not the moment.

And He will not move on. He stands in the road until she comes forward, and He talks to her, and He calls her daughter, and the account is careful to record that she told Him the whole truth in front of everybody, which took time that nobody in that crowd thought was available.

He would not let her be an incident that had been handled.

You are not an incident that has been handled, and Christ has stopped whole crowds to make that point about one person. It is written that Jesus said, who was it that touched me (Luke 8:45), and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a stopped crowd on a dusty road and makes it land on a woman in a kitchen fourteen months into a recovery nobody has asked about.

Now the thing you cannot say, and why the sentence keeps failing.

Every version of it starts with how good everybody was. That is not a fault in you; it is because it is true and you are honest, and the trouble is that a sentence which starts there has nowhere to go, because gratitude occupies the whole of the space.

But the two things are not in competition. Twenty people were extraordinary for six weeks, and you have been alone for fourteen months, and both of those are simply facts about the same year.

You are allowed to hold gratitude and loneliness in the same week without either one canceling the other. Scripture says weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15), and it is the Holy Spirit who is able to be with a person in both feelings at once, which is more than most rooms can manage.

And the reason nobody came for month nine, because it is worth understanding rather than resenting.

A crisis is visible. It has a start and an announcement and it tells everybody what to do, and people are genuinely wonderful when they know what is needed.

Month nine has no announcement. Nothing happens in it. From outside it looks like the good part, the part where things are getting better, and that is precisely what makes it invisible.

You are in the part of it that nobody can see from outside, and their absence is not a judgment. It is written that man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who has been in the kitchen on every one of those Tuesdays when there was nothing visible happening.

And now what this page will not say.

It is not going to tell you to reach out, or to let people know you are struggling, or to be brave and ask. You have carried enough, and the woman who has been holding the whole of a recovery on her own for fourteen months does not also need to run a communications exercise.

You are not being handed another job, you are being told who has not gone home. Scripture says He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds (Psalm 147:3), and binding up is slow work that happens after the emergency, and it is His Spirit who does it in the months nobody is watching.