The Light Came On The Week Of The Funeral

Nadim can tell you the exact day, which surprises him, because he cannot tell you much else about that week.

It was the Thursday. His father had died on the Sunday and been buried on the Tuesday, and on the Thursday he was driving his aunt back from the house with a tray of food on the passenger seat that somebody had insisted he take, and a light came on in the middle of the dashboard.

He remembers looking at it. He remembers thinking, quite clearly and without any feeling at all: not now.

That was in April.

It is September. The light is still on. The tray came back three days later, washed. His aunt has gone home. The house has been sorted, and the phone calls have been made, and the bank has been told, and Nadim has been back at work since the second week of May, and everybody who asks him how he is doing gets a good answer and means well by asking.

And every time he gets into the car, the light comes up with the rest of the dash, and something in him says not now, and he drives.

He is not, he would tell you, in bad shape. He sleeps. He eats. He laughs at things. Last month he went to a wedding and danced and enjoyed it.

But there is a category of thing that he has not touched since April, and if you got him to list it he would be surprised by how long the list is. A shelf that needs a bracket. Two shirts at the tailor. A friend in another city he has not called back. The light on the dashboard.

None of them are hard. That is the strange part. Not one of them would take an hour.

His sister said something to him in August that he has not been able to put down. They were clearing the last of the papers, and she said, without any particular weight, "You know you're allowed to fix things."

He said, "I know."

She said, "Do you, though."

A small thing does not have to wait for a large thing to finish

Let me say first what I am not doing, so you can put your shoulders down.

I am not going to guess what that light is. I have not seen your car and I do not know your engine, and a man writing at a distance guessing at a dashboard is worth nothing to you. I am also not going to tell you that your grief should be further along by September than it is. It is not a schedule. Nobody keeps to it.

What I want to say is about the list.

Because I do not think this is avoidance at all. I think something in you decided, in a week when deciding was almost impossible, that there was only one important thing happening, and everything else could stand still and wait. And that decision was correct in April. It was mercy. It kept you upright.

It just never got switched off.

You are not neglecting your father by fixing a car, and there has never been a version of honoring him that required you to leave small things broken. It is written in Isaiah that the Lord does not break a bruised reed or quench the smoking flax, which is a picture of God handling what is already damaged with great care rather than waiting for it to be strong, and His Spirit is the one who makes that gentleness a present fact rather than an old poem.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.Isaiah 42:3

Sit with what that image actually is. A reed already bent. A wick already going out, still smoking, giving no light worth the name.

The natural thing to do with a bent reed is snap it and throw it away. The natural thing to do with a smoking wick is pinch it out. Both of them are finished, in the practical sense, and both of them are being kept.

You have been handled with that kind of care since the Sunday in April, whether you were able to feel it or not. Isaiah 42 does not say He mends the reed first and then declines to break it, and the Spirit of God is the one who applies that order to a man who is still, five months later, giving good answers to people who ask.

What the list is actually made of

Here is the thing I want to hand you about the list.

It is not a list of failures. It is a list of things a body put down in order to carry something heavier. That is what a body is supposed to do. Nobody carries the shelf bracket and the coffin in the same week.

But a list like that has a habit. It stops being a decision and becomes a description. Three weeks in, it is I have not got to that yet. Five months in, if nobody says anything, it quietly becomes that is how I am now.

Your sister was not scolding you in August. She was asking whether the decision was still a decision.

You have permission to do one small thing today, and no part of Scripture makes the permission conditional on being finished with your sorrow. Isaiah 42 puts the tenderness and the bringing forth of truth in the same verse, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is the one who makes a small repair an ordinary act rather than a betrayal.

I want to be careful here, because this is where a message like this can hurt somebody.

I am not saying get over it. I am not saying that a working dashboard is a sign of anything spiritual, and I would not insult your father's memory by suggesting that the state of a car says one word about how you loved him. Grief is not a project with milestones and a man is not behind schedule.

I am saying something much smaller. The list was put down in April on purpose. It can be picked back up one item at a time, starting with the item that takes the least, and none of that requires you to feel differently first.

You were carried through a week you do not remember properly, and the record of that is not in your memory but in the fact that you are here. The written word says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves such as are of a contrite spirit, which is Psalm 34 reporting a thing that happened and not offering a thing that might, and His Spirit is what makes an ancient nearness a present one in a car in September.