You Are Allowed to Miss Them

The Thursday nights were the thing. That is what he told me.

Not the drinking, particularly. He could take or leave that part now and he had never been the worst of them anyway. It was the Thursday. Nine or ten of them in the same back room of the same place since 2011, and a running argument about a football team that had been going so long nobody could remember who started it, and the fact that if anything went wrong in your week there were nine men who would know by Friday without you having to explain it.

He came to faith in the March. Nothing dramatic. He did not stand up and denounce anybody. He just started saying no to a few things, and being a bit quieter about a few others, and by about the September there were no more Thursdays for him.

Nobody threw him out. That is the part that still gets him. There was no falling out he can point to and no cruel word he can quote. The invitations just thinned, the way a fire goes out when nobody puts anything on it, and one week he realized he had not been asked in two months and that nobody had noticed he had not asked either.

And when he told me about it he did this thing I have watched a hundred people do. He told the whole story and then he apologized for telling it, because, he said, it was his own choice and he did not have the right to be sad about it.

Jesus put a number on it

Here is something I do not think we notice about the way Jesus talked to people who followed Him.

He never once pretended it was free.

And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel's, But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life. (Mark 10:29-30, King James Version)

Read the list. He does not say you might lose something. He itemizes it. Brothers. Sisters. Mother. The house. The land. He names the specific relationships, out loud, in front of the men who had already left them, and He does not soften a single item on the list.

That is not a warning. They had already gone. It is an acknowledgment, and it is the first thing He does before He says anything about what comes back.

You have lost something real, and heaven has never once pretended otherwise. Mark 10:29 lists brothers and sisters and mother and land by name rather than in general, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person stop arguing themselves out of a grief that is actually there.

The rule you made up

Now here is the rule I want to take off somebody, because I made it up too for a long stretch and it cost me about four years.

The rule is this: if you chose it, you may not mourn it.

It sounds like integrity. It is actually a way of paying twice. You pay once when the friendships go, and then you pay again every time you feel the loss and tell yourself you are not allowed to, and the second payment goes on for years after the first one is finished.

And nobody in the Scripture behaves like that. David chose to spare Saul and then wept over him. Paul chose his road and then wrote that he had great heaviness and continual sorrow in his heart for his own people. Jesus chose Jerusalem and then stood on a hill outside it and cried over the city He was walking into on purpose. The Holy Spirit never once asked any of them to pick one of those two things and drop the other.

Choosing a thing and grieving it are not opposites. We have just decided they are, and it has made a lot of people lonelier than they needed to be.

You are allowed to grieve something you chose, and the choosing does not disqualify the sorrow. The word says He was moved and He wept over a city He had set His face toward, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person feel two true things at once without calling one of them a betrayal.

The hundredfold is not a swap

I want to be careful with the second half of that passage, because it gets used as a way of hurrying people.

An hundredfold now in this time. People take that and hand it to somebody two months into losing their whole circle, and what it sounds like is: stop being sad, you got a better deal. And that is not what it says and it is not how anybody actually experiences it.

Look at what is in the list on the way back. Houses and brethren and sisters and mothers and children and lands. And then three words most people skip. With persecutions.

He does not describe an upgrade. He describes a real, populated, ordinary life on the other side that also has hard things in it. That is not a swap. That is a man being honest with you about the shape of the road.

You were promised a full house on the other side, and you were never promised that the first one would stop mattering. Mark 10:30 puts the hundredfold and the persecutions in the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person from reading an honest promise as a tidy one.