The Friendship I Got No Vote On

Makoa can tell you the last normal thing they did, which was nothing, which is the point.

They picked up a part for a boat trailer. Forty minutes in the truck. They talked about somebody's roof and a fight they had both watched, and Makoa dropped him off, and neither of them said anything memorable because there was no reason to.

That was four years ago in June.

Nothing happened. That is the whole story and it is a difficult story to tell because there is no incident in it. There was no falling out, no words, nothing said at a funeral, no money between them, nothing about anybody's wife. He has been over it the way you go over a room looking for a set of keys, and there is nothing on any surface.

The messages got shorter and then they got slower and then they were only at birthdays and then they were not at birthdays.

Twenty-six years. From nineteen.

They are cordial. That is the word for it. They see each other perhaps three times a year in the way you do in a place that size, and it is warm, genuinely warm, and lasts ninety seconds, and it is not the thing.

And Makoa has never asked.

He has drafted it. He knows exactly what he would say and he has known for about two years. He has not sent it because the answer might be nothing, why, in which case he is a man making something of nothing, or the answer might be a reason, and he does not know which of those he is less able to hear.

He is forty-five.

And what arrives, usually when he is doing something with his hands, is not anger and is not really grief either, because grief has a shape and this does not.

Nobody asked me. And I am in this on my own.

You may know that truck.

Maybe yours was a friend, or a sister, or a group of four who were everything and are now a group chat nobody posts in. And there was no event, and you never got a vote.

What I am not going to do

Let me clear the sand, because people are careless about this one in particular.

I am not going to guess why he pulled away. I do not know him, I have not heard his side, and there is a decent chance he could not tell you himself in a sentence, because people mostly cannot.

I am not going to tell you what to do about it. I am not going to tell you to send the message, and I am not going to tell you not to. You are a grown man who has thought about it for two years and you do not need a stranger deciding.

I am not going to tell you God removed him from your life for a reason. I do not believe that and I will not write it.

I am not going to ask what you have learned. Not a word of that.

And I am not going to tell you it comes back. I do not know. Sometimes it does and sometimes it does not and anybody promising you either is guessing.

One thing.

The shortest verse, and where it happens

There is a place in John where Jesus arrives four days after somebody has died, and He already knows what He is about to do, and He knows it will be all right in about eleven minutes.

And this is what the text records.

Jesus wept.John 11:35

Two words. And the astonishing thing about them is the timing.

He is not weeping because the situation is hopeless. He knows precisely how the afternoon ends. He could have arrived with the outcome and skipped the grief entirely, and it would have been efficient and nobody would have known what was missing.

Instead He stands in the middle of a thing that hurts, with people who are hurting, and does the thing they are doing.

He did not manage the grief. He joined it.

And He does not stand outside a hurt and wait for it to resolve. The written word puts Him weeping in a place where He already knew the ending, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man doing something with his hands four years on.

And you are not being asked to have a shape for this. The word does not explain His tears or attach a purpose to them, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring a category.

Nobody has counted this one

Here is the part I think has been quietly costing you.

If somebody dies, there is a form for it. People come. There is food and there is a date.

Twenty-six years ending with no event has none of that. There is nothing to announce and nobody to tell, and if you did tell somebody they would say have you asked him, which is a reasonable thing to say and also the end of the conversation.

So four years of it has gone entirely uncounted, including by you, because you have not been sure it qualifies as a loss.

It qualifies.

And this is a real loss and it does not require a ceremony to be one. The word says a friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity, and the Spirit is the one who makes that name the size of what has actually gone.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has spent four years quietly auditing himself for what he did.