The Door I Did Not Want to Knock On

I drove past the Ellis place four times in nine days and the fourth time I slowed down enough that a person inside would have seen the truck slow.

There had been a death in that house. I am not going to write about it beyond that, because it is theirs and not mine, and because everybody reading this has a house like it in their own parish.

Here is my reason for driving past, and it is the reason nearly everybody has: I did not know what to say.

That is not laziness and it is not indifference. I had gone over it. I had four openings and every single one of them was either a thing that would sound like a greeting card or a thing that would put them in the position of comforting me about how awkward I was being, and I could hear both of those out loud in my head in the truck.

So I drove past. Four times. And every time I drove past, the not going got a bit heavier, and by day nine it had stopped being about them at all and had become a thing about me and my own failure to have gone yet.

Toby came with me the day I stopped. That was not planned and it is not a nice detail, because what happened is that I was taking him somewhere else and had to go that way, and having him in the truck meant I could not do the thing I had done the other four times, which was to have a private conversation with myself about it.

I stopped. He asked why, and I said because we should have called in, and he said all right, and he picked up the tin from the back seat that had been in that truck for nine days.

I did not have anything to say. I want to be exact about that because it is the whole of what I learned. I stood on that step and said their names and said I was sorry and then said nothing at all for a while, and then we were in the kitchen and Toby was being asked about school, which was a mercy for all four of us.

Bucky was in the back of the truck the entire time and ate a corner off the tailgate, and when we came out the woman of that house looked at what he had done and laughed for about four seconds, and I have thought about those four seconds more than I have thought about anything I said.

Who goes first

Moses says something to a whole people and the preposition in it is the load bearing part.

And the LORD, he it is that doth go before thee; he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee: fear not, neither be dismayed. (Deuteronomy 31:8)

Go before thee. Not go with you, though that is in the next clause. Ahead. First. Into the place before the person gets there.

That is a very specific comfort for anybody standing outside a door, because the fear at a door is almost never about what happens on the doorstep. It is about the room beyond it, which nobody has seen and everybody has imagined.

You are walking into a room somebody has already gone into, and Deuteronomy 31:8 puts Him in front rather than alongside. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as an arrangement instead of as a sentiment.

And then the second clause adds the other position, he will be with thee, so the promise covers both the room ahead and the person standing outside it, which is more thorough than anybody would think to ask for.

You have not been sent anywhere ahead of Him. The written word puts the going before first in the sentence, and His Spirit is what makes that order matter to a man in a truck.

What a person actually brings

There is a passage about comfort that is famous and is almost always quoted without the mechanism in it.

Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. (2 Corinthians 1:3, 4)

The comfort being handed over is described as a specific substance with a history. It came from God, it went into a person during their own trouble, and it goes out from them to somebody else, and the last clause is the one people skip: by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted.

So the thing brought to a door is not words. It is something a person received in their own bad year, and it does not need to be articulate, because it was never verbal when it arrived.

You are carrying something to that door that is not made of sentences. 2 Corinthians 1:4 traces the comfort from God through a person and out, and the Spirit of God is what makes that a real cargo rather than a metaphor.

And the passage says in all our tribulation, which means the qualification for this is having had a bad time, and nothing else at all.

You have already been qualified by something you would not have chosen. 2 Corinthians 1:4 makes the trouble the training, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a letter into a truck with a tin on the back seat.