Seven Statements from the Cross • Week 4 • Friday

Statement IV • Matthew 27:45-46 • Jeff and Dana, married 18 years

The Setup

Jeff and Dana have been married eighteen years. Six months ago they lost a pregnancy at fourteen weeks. Nobody outside their immediate families knew. They made the decision to keep it private and to move forward, which is what people do when they do not have language for something and the world still needs to keep running. They moved forward. Neither of them stopped grieving. They just stopped telling each other they were.

The Crossroads Moment

Six months later the grief has not gone anywhere. It has just changed shape. Dana reaches for conversations that Jeff shuts down before they start. Jeff goes quiet in ways that Dana has begun to read as not caring, which is not what the silence means but is what it communicates. They are not fighting loudly. They are doing something quieter and more damaging, they are each carrying something that belongs to God and trying to process it through each other, which means Dana is pushing Jeff for something he does not know how to give and Jeff is absorbing pressure for something he does not know how to fix. Neither of them is taking it upward. They are taking it at each other. The house is technically standing. The foundation is sand.

What Jesus Did

Jesus cried out to God from the cross with a question no human being standing nearby could answer. He did not try to process it through his mother or through John or through anyone present. He took it directly to the only one who heals what people cannot fix in each other. Psalm 147:3 says God heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. That binding is God’s work, not a spouse’s work. A marriage can carry a lot. It cannot carry what belongs to God. When two people try to extract healing from each other that only God can give, they end up draining each other instead.

The Choice and Outcome

Dana hears about a small grief group connected to her church and goes once, mostly out of desperation. She says out loud for the first time what she has been carrying, in a room full of people who know exactly what it feels like. She drives home lighter than she has felt in months. Jeff starts going on early morning walks, not for fitness but because it is the only time he is alone enough to stop performing okayness. He starts talking on those walks, not to Dana, not to himself, to God. The unfiltered version. The anger, the confusion, the why of it. When they come back to each other two weeks later they are both carrying less of what belonged to God and more of what belongs to their marriage. They sit together one evening and Dana says: “I think we have been trying to fix each other and only God can fix this.” Jeff nods. They pray together for the first time since before the loss. The house gets a new foundation under it. It does not happen all at once. It begins.

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