Nobody I Know Thinks This Matters

He has tried to explain it three times to people who love him and every time he has watched their faces do the same polite thing.

Interest. Genuine interest, for about forty seconds. And then a small adjustment, and then something kind, and then the conversation moving on.

Nobody has been dismissive. His wife listened properly. His friend asked two good questions. And in all three conversations there was the same moment where he could see them file it, and the file they put it in was: things he is into at the moment.

Because to them it is history. A fact about a long time ago. Interesting, the way a documentary is interesting, and then you make a cup of tea.

And to him it is not that.

He is thirty five and he cannot account for it. He is not a sentimental man and he has no particular connection to it, and he could not tell you why finding out that this came apart landed the way it did, and it has been eight months.

Some evenings it is just there. He will be doing something completely ordinary and there will be a weight, and he knows now what it is about, and if he tried to say so out loud to anybody in his house it would sound absurd.

He said to himself, washing up: I think I am the only person I know who is sad about this.

And under that, the worse thought, the one that has been doing the damage: maybe there is something wrong with me. Maybe this is self indulgence dressed up. Maybe I have found a grief that costs me nothing and I am wearing it.

You know that washing up.

Maybe yours is about this. Maybe it is about a language, or a place, or a people, or something that happened before you were born that lands on you when it lands on nobody else in the room.

And nobody in your life is at fault. It is genuinely a fact about a long time ago, for them, and they are not wrong. That is what makes it so hard to defend.

A whole song, by people who could not see it

Here is the opening of a psalm, and the thing to notice is who is singing it and what they are crying about.

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.Psalm 137:1

They are weeping about a place.

Not about their captivity, though they were captives. Not about their own hardship, which was considerable. They sat down by a river in another country and cried about somewhere they could not see, and for many of them somewhere they had never seen, because by then there were people singing that who had been born in Babylon.

And it is in the book. Not as an example of misplaced feeling. As a psalm, kept, sung, preserved for three thousand years, which is what a community does with something it considers legitimate.

You are not being sentimental, and Scripture carries an entire song by people weeping over something they could not see. That is what Psalm 137:1 is, a recorded grief about a place rather than about a circumstance (Psalm 137:1), and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that song in the book, which He would not have done if grieving a thing you never held were a category error.

Why it lands on you and not on them

Here is the part that may take the sting out, and it is not a compliment and it is not a diagnosis.

Some things land on some people. That is all. It is not merit and it is not superior sensitivity, and treating it as either is the fastest route to becoming insufferable about it.

But it is also not a malfunction. Somebody in a family notices when a photograph is missing. Somebody in a company notices that the founder's name has come off the door. It is not that the others are shallow. It is that a particular person is built to feel a discontinuity, and that person is usually alone in the room about it.

You have been given a sensitivity to something broken, and being the only one in your house who feels it is not evidence against you. Scripture says the body is not one member, but many, and God hath set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him (1 Corinthians 12:14-18), and it is the Holy Spirit who divides to every man severally as He wills, which covers what a person notices as well as what they can do.

And nothing here says your friends are missing something. You are not being told that you see more clearly than the people who love you. The word says let nothing be done through vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves (Philippians 2:3), and it is His Spirit who keeps a person from turning a burden into a badge, which is the actual danger in this territory and it is worth naming.

And nothing here explains it either

This page will not tell you what happened or who was responsible or which century it turned. Not by statement and not by implication.

You are not being handed a case to take to anybody, and no party is named here. Scripture says judge nothing before the time (1 Corinthians 4:5), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a resting place, which is what keeps a grief from curdling into a grievance.