The First One In This House Alone

The day is coming and the house is the problem.

Not the people. Several of them have asked, and two of them have asked properly, and there is somewhere you could be if you wanted to be somewhere.

The problem is that every part of this day was divided between two people for a very long time, and the division was so old that neither of you could have described it. She did that and you did that and nobody ever agreed it out loud.

And now the whole of it is yours, or none of it is, and there is no version of it that is the size it used to be.

So you have been not deciding. Not out of confusion. It is that every decision requires you to picture a version of the day, and every version has a gap in it in a different place, and after a while a man simply stops looking.

I want to say the first thing plainly, and it is a small thing that matters.

You do not have to decide the day. You are not obliged, three weeks out, to have a plan for eleven hours. Almost everything you have been trying to settle can be left unsettled, and the thing that cannot be left is much smaller than the whole.

And before we go any further: if the weeks since the funeral have taken you somewhere past what one man can hold, that is not a thing to carry through this alone. 988 is a crisis line in the United States and it is answered. A doctor, a counselor, or a pastor you trust are all lawful places to take it. Nothing on this page is a substitute for a qualified human being in a room with you.

Abraham came to mourn for Sarah

There is a verse about a man and a death that is almost entirely plain reporting, and that is what makes it useful.

And Sarah died in Kirjatharba; the same is Hebron in the land of Canaan: and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her. (Genesis 23:2, King James Version)

Came to mourn. He came. It is a verb of travel and of arrival, and it means that at some point a man walked into the room where his wife was dead and began.

And the text gives him two verbs, which is more than anybody usually gets. To mourn, and to weep for her. It does not compress them into one word or hurry either of them.

Nothing else is recorded about that afternoon. No speech, no lesson, no explanation of what it meant. Just a man arriving and doing two things, at length, and Scripture letting it stand.

You have permission to be doing only that, and the written word does not hurry the man out of the room. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps a man company in a house where nothing is recorded except the mourning, and it is written into Genesis 23:2 that Abraham came to mourn and to weep and nothing else is added.

And notice how ordinary the reporting is around it. A place name. A country. The plain geography of an ordinary day.

You are somewhere real rather than nowhere, and the Holy Spirit is present in the plain geography of a house on a Tuesday. Genesis 23:2 attaches a man's mourning to an actual town on an actual day, and Scripture puts the place name and the grief in the same sentence without ceremony.

Why the whole day cannot be decided

Now let me be practical about the stuckness, because it is not indecision and it is worth knowing.

A day like this is not one decision. It is about forty of them, and each one requires imagining a moment, and each imagined moment is an encounter.

Deciding about the meal means picturing the table. Deciding about the afternoon means picturing the room at four o'clock. Deciding whether to go to somebody else means picturing an arrival without her, and a doorway, and a question about how things have been.

So the reason the planning has not happened is not that you cannot make decisions. It is that each one costs a great deal more than a decision normally costs, and you have been paying that price forty times over in your own head for three weeks.

You were never obliged to settle all of it, and Genesis 23:2 records an arrival rather than a plan. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in a man's own house while forty imagined moments go past, and the written word gives Abraham two verbs and no schedule.

And here is the second thing, which is more practical still. Most of those forty decisions do not actually need making in advance. They will make themselves, on the day, in the ordinary way that a day makes its own decisions once it is under way.

The one that genuinely needs deciding is the first hour.

You have one decision rather than forty, and the Holy Spirit does not require a man to have eleven hours arranged before He will be in the room. Genesis 23:2 leaves the whole of the rest of that day unrecorded, and Scripture records the coming and the weeping without one word about what happened after.

Decide the morning

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately one hour long.

Decide one thing about the morning, and tell one person the decision is made.

The morning is the part that will otherwise do you real damage, because it is the part you will face alone with no structure and nothing to do, in the specific hour that was most thoroughly shared.

Decide something small and concrete. Where you will be at nine. Whether you will be in the house or out of it. Whether somebody comes to you at ten, or whether you are in the truck at half past eight going somewhere.

You are able to settle one hour and leave the rest open, and the written word puts no plan around Abraham's grief at all. The Spirit of God is the one who is with a man deciding a single hour rather than a whole day, and it is written into Genesis 23:2 that the record is a man coming and mourning and nothing beyond that.

And tell one person, because a private intention in that particular hour will not survive. Say it plainly: I am going to be at the yard at nine, or: I would like you to come over at ten if you can.

I want to be clear that I am not telling you to be busy. Being out of the house is not better than being in it, and being with people is not better than being alone. There is no right answer here and anybody who gives you one is guessing.

What matters is that the first hour is a thing you chose rather than a thing that happens to you, because an hour that happens to a man on that morning goes somewhere very hard, very fast.

You are choosing rather than being carried, and the Holy Spirit carries a man through an hour he decided rather than one he fell into. Scripture never once puts a schedule on a man who came to weep, and Genesis 23:2 gives the mourning its own verbs without prescribing a shape.