Three Funerals In Four Years

Lorraine had the chairs counted before she had her coat off.

That was the first thing she did now, at anything. A cookout, a graduation, a Sunday dinner, the church supper in the fall. She would come around the side of a house and her eyes would go down the table and do the arithmetic before anybody had said hello to her, and the arithmetic was never how many are here. It was always the other one.

Four years. Her sister Junie in the spring of the first one. Her husband fourteen months after that, in the front room, in the chair by the window. Then Miss Alta from next door, who was not family and who had also somehow been all of it, thirty-one years of walking over with a plate.

So the counting was automatic. It was not even sad most of the time, which was the part she could not explain to her son when he asked her what was wrong at his birthday. Nothing was wrong. It was just that anything ahead of her, anything at all, arrived with a list attached to it, and she read the list first, and by the time she was done reading it the thing itself had gone flat.

That Sunday it was the backyard, the long table, two folding tables pushed onto the end of the real one and covered with a sheet so it looked like one table. Early fall, the good kind, with the light coming in sideways under the tree.

Her granddaughter Nia was setting places, working fast and humming, not thinking about it at all, the way you do a job you have done since you were seven.

And at the far end, in the spot that had been Junie's spot at every table this family had ever set, Nia laid a plate. Fork, knife, folded napkin. And then she went to the cabinet and came back out with the tall green glass, which was Junie's glass, and set it down beside it.

Lorraine opened her mouth.

And her son, without even looking up from the ice, said, "Leave it, Mama."

Maybe you count too. Maybe you cannot get to anything ahead of you without first going down the list of who will not be in it, and the list is not even a grief anymore, it is more like a habit your eyes have. You are inside a people God has settled a future on, and that future is already fixed rather than wished for. That is what Scripture says God has done, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes something that far off arrive as something you can lean your weight on today.

What John was actually shown

At the end of the Bible a man is given a look at what is ahead, and the striking thing about it, the thing people miss because they are busy looking for a schedule in it, is how crowded it is.

He is not shown a private paradise. He is shown a city. A whole population. God dwelling in the middle of a people, and a voice saying they shall be his people, plural, the same plural He has been using since Ezekiel. And then there is a table in it, and a supper, and a great many people at it.

Let me name the corporate part plainly, because this is a message about a people and not about anybody's private inner life. What is ahead is a gathering. It is a company, an assembly, the whole church of God from every century sitting down together in one place. It is not a romance and it is not a picture of one soul alone with Christ. It is a room full of people, and the reason it matters to a woman counting chairs in a backyard is that she is one of the people in the room.

You are expected at that gathering, and your place there is already accounted for rather than hoped for. The word says God has made a people for Himself and set that table, and the Holy Spirit in you is the down payment God put on it.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.Revelation 21:4

Look at whose hand is in that sentence. It is not a general improvement in conditions. It is God, personally, going eye to eye with people, doing something with His own hand. That is a strangely close and physical thing to say about the Almighty, and He said it about Himself on purpose.

You have a God who has already declared what He is going to do about the tears, and He named it Himself and put it in writing. It is written, and the Holy Spirit is the One who keeps a written promise from going abstract on a person.

The counting is not a defect in you

I want to stop and say something to the part of you that has started apologizing for this.

The counting is love. That is all it is. You count because those people were real and their absence is real and your mind has correctly refused to pretend otherwise. A woman who can go to a table and not notice who is missing would not be healthier than you, she would be less attached, and nobody in Scripture is praised for that.

And here is the thing that nobody says: the list you read before every gathering is the same list heaven is keeping. God did not lose Junie. He did not misplace your husband or Miss Alta from next door. Scripture calls the death of His people precious in His sight, which is an odd word until you sit with it, and then it is the only word.

You are grieving inside a promise, and the promise is already made and already holds every name on your list. That is what the word says about those who belong to Him, and the Holy Spirit is the seal on them the same as He is the seal on you.