There Is No Slot For This

She brought it up once, in a good group, with people she loves, and it did the strangest thing.

It did not go badly. Nobody was cold and nobody argued and nothing was said that she could complain about, and that is why it took her about three weeks to understand what had happened.

She had said, more or less: I have been finding out about how the church and the older faith it came out of separated, and I feel really sad about it.

And there was a small pause, the ordinary length. And a man said something about how it is a complicated bit of history. And a woman said something warm about how we are all one in Christ now. And somebody else said we should probably move on to the prayer requests because of the time.

And they did, and it was fine, and she went home and could not work out why she felt as though she had dropped something.

She has worked it out since.

It was not that they disagreed. Nobody disagreed. It is that the room has slots, and her sentence did not fit into any of them.

There is a slot for a problem, which gets solved. There is a slot for a need, which gets prayed for. There is a slot for a testimony, which gets celebrated. There is a slot for a question, which gets answered.

There is no slot for a sadness about something that happened a very long time ago that nobody in the room can do anything about, and that is not a fault in the room. It is just a thing rooms do not have.

So her sentence went in and there was nowhere for it to land, and it fell on the floor between two chairs, and everybody was very kind about it.

She has not mentioned it since. That was two years ago.

You know that pause.

Maybe you said something once and it went the same way. Maybe you have never said it and you already know it would. Maybe you have concluded, without ever putting it in words, that this is a private matter, which is what people conclude about anything a room has no slot for.

Nobody shut you down. Nobody meant anything by it. The prayer requests genuinely were pressing and the man was right that it is complicated and the woman was right that we are one in Christ. Everybody in that room was being perfectly reasonable, and the thing still ended up on the floor.

The book has a slot

Here is a list that includes your sentence, and it is worth noticing what it does not do.

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.Ecclesiastes 3:4

Four items. Two of them are grief and two of them are joy, and they are given equal weight and equal time, and the list does not explain either of them or attach a task to any of the four.

There is no instruction there. It does not say weep about the following approved subjects. It says there is a time, and it puts mourning in the same sentence as dancing without ranking them.

You are holding something the book makes room for, whether or not any room does. That is what Ecclesiastes 3:4 does by naming mourning as a season in its own right (Ecclesiastes 3:4), and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Comforter, which is a title that assumes there will be people in a mourning nobody else has a category for.

And nothing here is a complaint about your church

Let me say this plainly, because you love those people and you should.

Nothing on this page says that room failed you. It did not. A group of Christians who move on to prayer requests because of the time have done nothing wrong, and the man and the woman who spoke were both saying true things, and if you took this article back into that room as evidence you would be doing something unkind with it.

Rooms have shapes. That is what makes them useful. The same shape that has no slot for your sadness is the shape that gets somebody's operation prayed for on a Tuesday, and you would not trade it.

You have not been let down, and there is nobody in that group who needs to have done better. Scripture says charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up (1 Corinthians 13:4), and it is the Holy Spirit who produces that in a person, and He has been producing it in you for two years while you said nothing.

And this page is not going to explain the history either. You are not being handed an account of who did what, and nothing here settles anything. The word says judge nothing before the time (1 Corinthians 4:5), and the Spirit who wrote that is not withholding an answer, He is declining to make a grief into a case.

Where a homeless sadness goes

Here is the practical part, and it is the whole of the article.

A sorrow does not need a room to be legitimate. It needs somewhere to be said out loud once, and out loud is the operative part, because a thing said only inside a person's own head goes round and round and never once gets set down.

You have been carrying this silently for two years because the only place you tried it did not have a shelf for it. There is another place, and it does not have a rota, and it is available at half past eleven at night in a kitchen.

You have somewhere to say this, and it does not require a group that knows what to do with it. Scripture says pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us (Psalm 62:8), and pour out is a phrase about emptying rather than about presenting a case, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a real transfer rather than an exercise.