Seven Statements from the Cross • Week 6 • Thursday

Statement VI • John 19:30 • Aaron, 38, grief

The Setup

Aaron is 38 years old. Eighteen months ago his closest friend died without warning, the kind of sudden loss that does not give you any time to prepare because there is no preparing for it. His friend was 40 years old and healthy and there one day and gone the next, and the particular cruelty of that kind of loss is that it leaves no trail of warning signs to process, no gradual goodbye to hold onto, nothing to make sense of because there is nothing that makes sense. Aaron and his friend had been close since their early 20s, the kind of friendship that is rare and that both of them knew was rare, the kind where you can go three weeks without talking and pick up exactly where you left off, where the other person knows the version of you that exists before the performance. He has not found anyone to replace it. He is not sure that is even a goal he understands how to pursue. What he knows is that there is a chair at a table in his life that is empty in a way that is not getting easier with time the way everyone told him it would.

The Crossroads Moment

The well-meaning things people have said to Aaron over the last eighteen months have accumulated into something he is having trouble with. He believes, most of the time, that God has a plan. He believes his friend is in a better place. He believes that God can work all things together for good. He holds all of those beliefs. What he resents, quietly and with some guilt about the resentment, is the way those beliefs are being used in conversation to close a door that he is not ready to close. Every time someone offers him the meaning, the plan, the silver lining, what they are doing without realizing it is telling him that the grief should be more finished than it is. That eighteen months is enough time to have arrived somewhere. He has not arrived anywhere. He is still in it. And the people who love him are running out of patience for a grief that will not resolve on a schedule they can follow.

What Jesus Did

When Jesus said it is finished from the cross, he was not saying the suffering did not matter. He was not minimizing the weight of what had been endured or rushing anyone past the reality of what Friday looked like. He was saying that the work being done through all of it was complete. Purpose and pain are not opposites. They can exist in the same place at the same time, and the presence of purpose does not require the absence of grief. Psalm 34:18 says the Lord is close to the brokenhearted. Not close to the healed. Not close to the ones who have found the meaning and moved forward. Close to the brokenhearted. Present in the breaking itself. Aaron does not need to arrive at meaning before God shows up. God is already in the room where the grief is.

The Choice and Outcome

Aaron’s brother comes over on a Saturday morning. He does not bring a plan or a scripture or a reframe. He brings coffee and sits down at the same table where Aaron and his friend used to sit, in the chair that has been empty for eighteen months, and he says something simple and honest: I do not have anything to say that makes this okay. I just did not want you to be here by yourself. They sit there for a long time. Aaron talks about his friend in a way he has not been able to talk about him since the funeral, not the grief-appropriate summary version but the real version, the specific things he misses, the conversations they were supposed to have that did not happen, the particular quality of a friendship that does not have a substitute. His brother listens. He does not try to close it. He just stays. Aaron does not come out of that morning fixed. He comes out of it less alone in a grief that has been very lonely for a long time. The meaning does not arrive that morning. It does not need to. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted. He was in that room on Saturday. That was enough.

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