A Lot of What He Calls Anger Is Grief With Nowhere to Go

It started about four months after, which is why nobody connected the two, including him.

At the time of the funeral he was fine. That is the word everybody used and it was accurate. He organized things. He drove people. He was the one holding the paper with the order of service on it, and he did the whole day without anything happening to him.

Then in the spring he started coming apart over small things. A machine at work. A driver. A thing his cousin said that was not even about anything.

He is not a man who was ever angry before. That is what makes it strange to everybody who knows him. He was known for the opposite, and he can hear people adjusting their idea of him in real time and he cannot explain it either.

Nobody has once said the word grief in a room with him about any of it. Not because they are unkind. Because it has been eleven months, and eleven months is apparently the point at which the subject moves.

There is a whole book of it in the Bible

There is an entire book in the collection whose only job is to grieve out loud, and it does not resolve.

Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall. My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me. (Lamentations 3:19-20, King James Version)

My soul hath them still in remembrance.

That is not a man who has moved on and is writing about it afterwards. It is present tense and it is unresolved on the page.

And it was kept. Somebody assembled a collection of writings and decided that a book of grief with no tidy ending belonged in it.

That is worth sitting with for a man who was fine at a funeral and came apart in the spring, and who has picked up, from nowhere in particular, the idea that grief has a proper duration and a proper shape.

You are not carrying something the collection has no room for. Lamentations 3 keeps the affliction in the present tense and never resolves it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old unresolved book feel like permission.

God put a number on it once and then let it end

There is a small detail at the end of Deuteronomy about how a nation handled a death.

And the children of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days: so the days of weeping and mourning for Moses were ended. (Deuteronomy 34:8)

Thirty days.

Two things sit in that. A real amount of time was given, in public, with nobody expected to be producing anything during it.

And it was allowed to end, and the ending is recorded without anybody treating it as a betrayal of the man.

What is not in that verse is a rule that grief arrives during the thirty days. Nobody in that camp was told that if it turned up in the spring instead, it was something else and should be called something else.

You were given room rather than a schedule to keep to. Deuteronomy 34 sets a length and never sets a shape, and it is His Spirit who makes an old provision reach a man eleven months out.

He wept where He did not have to

There is a moment in John that removes any question about whether this is a failure of faith.

Jesus is standing outside a tomb. He knows exactly what is about to happen. He is minutes from calling the man out.

Jesus wept. (John 11:35)

Two words.

He is not weeping because He is out of options or because He has lost confidence. Both of those are unavailable as explanations, because of what happens four verses later.

He weeps in a situation He is about to reverse.

You are not disqualified by grief arriving where it was not required. John 11 puts the tears in the one scene where they were least necessary, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes two words carry a weight a paragraph could not.

A king made everybody learn a song about it

There is something in 2 Samuel that says what a culture used to do with this.

David loses two people at once, and here is what he does.

And David lamented with this lamentation over Saul and over Jonathan his son: Also he bade them teach the children of Judah the use of the bow. (2 Samuel 1:17-18)

He writes it down and has it taught.

That is grief being made public and repeatable on purpose. Not managed privately and not got over on a timetable. Written, distributed, learned by children.

And the man who did that was the king, in front of everybody, about somebody who had spent years trying to kill him.

You are looking at grief a whole nation was taught to say out loud. 2 Samuel 1 records the writing and the teaching in one sentence, and it is His Spirit who makes an old public act reach a man whose people have all stopped mentioning it.

And nothing that got missed got lost

There is a strange verse in the Psalms about a container and a book.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8)

Tellest means counted.

The picture is somebody keeping what was produced. And by the shape of it, keeping account of what was not produced too, because the counting is of wanderings and the collecting is of tears, and both are described as being on record.

A man who was fine at a funeral did not fail to grieve. He deferred it, and the verse says the accounting has not been thrown out.

You have not lost the four months that went somewhere else. Psalm 56 has Him counting and keeping rather than assessing, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old strange image reach somebody who came apart in the spring.