I Do Not Know Whether To Mark It

It is in seventeen days and nobody has said the word.

Everybody knows the date. Two people have made small careful sounds about it in passing and then moved on quickly, and one of them changed the subject in the middle of her own sentence.

So the day is coming toward a family that has silently agreed not to talk about it until it arrives.

And you are the one who will end up deciding, because you always are, and because the others are waiting for you even though nobody has said so.

Here is the shape of the problem, and I want to lay it out properly because you have been turning it over for weeks and it has not got any clearer.

If you mark it, you have made everybody spend an afternoon inside it. Somebody who was managing will stop managing. Somebody else will feel obliged to come who is not ready. And there is a version where it is unbearable and it was your idea.

If you do not mark it, the day passes in silence, and everybody spends it alone thinking about her without saying so, and you will have let the first one go past with nothing at all, and that will be a fact for the rest of your life.

Neither one is obviously right. That is not because you are being indecisive. It is because there genuinely is no right answer, and nobody has told you that.

And before anything else: if these weeks have taken you somewhere past what a person can hold on their own, 988 is a crisis line and it is answered, and a doctor, a counselor or a pastor you trust is a lawful place to go with it. Nothing here replaces a qualified human being.

David arose and washed

There is a passage where a man does something that shocked everybody around him, and the shock is the useful part.

Then David arose from the earth, and washed, and anointed himself, and changed his apparel, and came into the house of the LORD, and worshipped: then he came to his own house; and when he required, they set bread before him, and he did eat. (2 Samuel 12:20, King James Version)

His child had died. He had been on the ground for seven days. And when the child died, he got up, washed, changed his clothes, went and worshipped, came home and asked for food.

His servants could not understand it. They said so out loud, which the text records, because the ordering of it made no sense to them at all.

And nothing in the passage condemns either the seven days on the ground or the rising or the eating. All three are reported as what a man did.

You have latitude here that nobody has given you, and Scripture reports the whole of it and judges none of it. The Spirit of God is present in a man who has been on the ground for a week and also in the same man asking for bread, and it is written into 2 Samuel 12:20 without one word of correction in either direction.

And notice that the people around him got it wrong.

You are not obliged to be legible to that room, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man whose family cannot read what he is doing. The written word puts their confusion in the account without holding it against him, and 2 Samuel 12:20 records servants who did not understand a thing that was entirely right.

There is no correct answer

Now let me take something off you, because I think it is most of the weight.

There has been a search going on for the right answer. Not the answer you want. The right one, the one that honors her properly, the one a better man would arrive at.

There is not one.

Marking it is not more loving than not marking it. Not marking it is not braver or more restrained. Those are two different shapes for the same grief and the whole of the difference is what the people in your family can carry this particular year, which is a thing you can only guess at.

You were never going to find the right answer, and the written word does not contain one. The Spirit of God is present in both of the available options, and Scripture records seven days on the ground and a man asking for bread and calls neither one the correct procedure.

And here is what the search for a right answer has actually been doing. It has kept you from deciding, and the not deciding has a default, and the default is the worst of the three.

Because if nobody decides, the day arrives undecided. And an undecided day means everybody in that family spends the morning wondering what is happening, and somebody rings somebody else, and by lunchtime there are three different versions of what the plan is, and then the afternoon is spent managing that instead of grieving her.

You have a decision available that outranks the right answer, and the Holy Spirit does not leave a man to a default. Scripture shows a man moving before anybody understood him, and 2 Samuel 12:20 has a man rise and act while everybody around him is still confused.

Decide it and tell one person

So here is the assignment, and it is not the answer that has been looked for.

Decide whether to mark it or not, and tell one person which way it went.

Either one. Genuinely either. Flip the thing in your head and see which one you are relieved about, and take that one, and do not go back over it.

You are able to decide without being certain, and the written word puts no verdict on either the lying down or the getting up. The Spirit of God is with a man making a decision he cannot verify, and it is written into 2 Samuel 12:20 that a man rose and washed and ate while his own household could not follow him.

And tell one person, and ask them to tell the others. That second part matters more than it sounds.

A decision that lives in your head is not a decision as far as that family is concerned. Somebody has to know it, and it has to travel, or the morning will still be spent on phone calls and versions.

Say it plainly. We are doing something at four, or: we are not doing anything this year, and I did not want anybody wondering.

You are ending a silence rather than settling a question, and the Holy Spirit carries a family through a decided day better than through an undecided one. 2 Samuel 12:20 lets a man move before anybody agrees with him, and Scripture puts a man's own action in front of a household that had not caught up with him.