Watching My Own Family Receive

His brother, first. Then his brother's wife. Then, two years ago, his own daughter, at a camp, in a field, at seventeen.

And he has been glad every single time. I want that understood before anything else, because a lesser man would have gone bitter years ago and he has not, and the gladness is not performance. He wept at his daughter's. Properly, in a field, in front of people.

He is the one who drives them. He has driven his family to the meetings where these things happened for eleven years, and waited in car parks, and driven them home while they talked all the way.

And here is the thing he has never had anywhere to put.

Not resentment. He has looked for resentment, honestly, the way a man checks a wound, and it is not there. What is there is much quieter and has no name in any language he speaks.

It is the experience of being permanently the one who is glad.

Of being, in his own family, the outside. The witness. The driver. The one everybody's story happens in front of.

He would never say it. If you asked him about his own walk with God he would tell you it is fine, and it genuinely is fine, and that is somehow part of the problem, because there is nothing wrong that anybody could point to and fix.

Now let me ask you.

Who have you been glad for, again and again, from the outside?

He said it while it was still happening

There is a book in the Bible that is a funeral for a city, and it is not comfortable, and right in the middle of it a man says something that has held people up for two and a half thousand years.

He has just spent two chapters describing the worst thing he has ever seen. Then he turns.

Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness. I say to myself, The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for Him. The Lord is good to those whose hope is in Him, to the one who seeks Him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.Lamentations 3:22 to 26

Notice when he says it. Not afterwards, and not from the other side of anything. You are standing where that man was standing, and the Holy Spirit has not once handed out the smaller half to the one who was glad for everybody else.

Now here is what I want you to see, and it changes the whole weight of it.

He is not saying this afterwards.

Nothing has been restored. The city is still down. He is not writing from the other side of the story with the benefit of knowing how it ends; he is sitting in the ashes of it, and the very next verses go back to describing how bad it is.

It is good to wait quietly is said from inside the waiting, by a man who has not received.

And look at the word he uses for himself. The Lord is my portion. A portion is what you get when the inheritance is divided. It is your share, the thing that is actually allocated to you.

He is in a position where everything visible has gone to somebody else or gone entirely, and he says: my share is Him.

Hear where you stand, and hear it from a man who knows what it is to stand on a shore watching.

You are not the outside of your own family. Scripture says the Lord is my portion, said by a man with nothing in his hands, and the Holy Spirit never once given a household a share and skipped the one who drove them there.

And I want to name the thing that has no name, because you deserve to have it named rather than carried unnamed for eleven years.

It is not envy. You have checked, honestly, and you were right, and I believe you.

It is grief. Small, repeated, entirely undramatic grief, of the kind nobody brings a casserole for, and it has happened maybe forty times in car parks, and every single time you have had to convert it immediately into gladness because the person coming toward the car deserved your gladness and got it.

You have never once been allowed to feel the first thing before you did the second.

That is what has been happening. And the word does not require you to skip it. The man in Lamentations spent two entire chapters saying how bad it was before he said one word about faithfulness, and nobody edited the first two chapters out.

So you are not the outside of your own house. Lamentations says the Lord is my portion, spoken by a man holding nothing at all, and the Holy Spirit poured out on all people has never given a household a share and gone past the one who drove them there.