The Man People Call Now

Two mugs, and one of them is his and one of them is a man called Steve's, and it is twenty past eleven on a Tuesday.

Steve has been here about forty minutes and has said about nine sentences and four of them were about the traffic.

He does not rush it. He knows what the traffic sentences are for.

Four years ago he stopped being able to leave the house for a period of about eleven weeks, and before that there were about eight months of something building that he could describe now in detail and could not describe at all at the time.

It cost him the job, in the end, though the company was decent about it in the way companies are decent, which is to say correctly and without warmth.

It cost him a table of about six friends. Not through cruelty. Through the fact that four of them did not know what to say and so said nothing, and a nothing that goes on for five months becomes a decision, and by the time he was well enough to mind it was too late to mind properly.

Two of them stayed. One of those is why Steve is here.

And this is now his life, in a way. Three or four times a month somebody rings, and mostly it is late, and mostly it is a man, and mostly the first eleven minutes are about the traffic or the football.

And people say things about it. His sister says that God used it. A man at church said, warmly, that his breakdown was the making of him.

And he smiled at that man and something in him went hard and stayed hard for about two weeks.

If your worst thing turned into your most useful thing, you know that kitchen table at twenty past eleven. And you know the sentence you cannot say out loud without sounding ungrateful: I am glad Steve is here and I would not undo the four years to get out of it, and I will not have those eleven weeks called the making of me.

The word, and then what Paul actually praises

Let me sit in the third chair for a minute while Steve is in the bathroom.

The problem is not Steve. Steve is the best thing about a Tuesday and you know exactly what these evenings are worth because you know what it was like not to have one.

The problem is that everybody has a sentence about it, and every sentence turns eleven weeks of your life into a training course, and you have been smiling at those sentences for four years and going hard inside.

So let me put the word straight first.

Blessed does not mean the useful thing came out of it. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is about where He is looking. It was on you in the eleven weeks when you could not get to the front door, and it is on you at this table, and it did not increase when you became useful.

Now the verse, and I want you to notice, very carefully, what Paul blesses 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

Blessed be God. That is where the word goes. Not: blessed be the tribulation.

And read the chain. He comforts us in tribulation. The comfort is what gets passed on. By the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted.

The thing that transfers is the comfort. Not the affliction. Paul does not say your suffering equips you, he says the comfort you received equips you, and those are two entirely different claims and only one of them is in the text.

You have something to give people that came out of what you received rather than out of what you suffered. Second Corinthians 1:4 says by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted, and it is the Holy Spirit whom Jesus named the Comforter, which means the thing being passed across your kitchen table at eleven at night has a Person behind it.

The four years, named properly

Now the four years, because I am not going to let them be a training course either.

Eleven weeks of not being able to leave a house is not a lesson. Eight months of something building that you could not describe is not a curriculum. A job lost is a job lost. And four friends who did not know what to say cost you something that has not come back and probably will not.

God did not send that to make you useful. If He had, then the making of a good listener would require the breaking of a man, and any God who works that way is not the one in that verse, which opens by calling Him the Father of mercies.

You are not the product of a method, and nothing in that passage says the tribulation was administered. Second Corinthians 1 blesses God rather than the affliction and calls Him the Father of mercies in the same breath, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the Comforter by name, which is a role that responds to trouble rather than causing it.

And here is the thing that is true and that the tidy sentences are clumsily reaching for.

When Steve says the fourth thing about the traffic, you know what it is for. You are not being patient with him. You are not managing him. You know, from the inside, exactly what a man does with eleven minutes before he can say the actual sentence, because you have been the man who needed eleven minutes.

That is not the affliction being useful. That is you knowing what was done for you and doing it.

You are handing on something that was handed to you rather than making use of your own wreckage. The written word puts the comfort as the thing that transfers, and it is His Spirit who was the one comforting in the eleven weeks, which means what arrives in that kitchen came from Him first and through you second.

What you can say when somebody says it

So here is the practical thing, since your sister will say it again at Christmas and the man at church will say it again in about six weeks.

You do not have to correct them. They are reaching for something true with the wrong hand and they mean you well.

But you can have your own sentence and you can keep it internally, and if you ever want to say it out loud it will not be aggressive.

It is this: it should not have happened, and God comforted me in it, and I am handing that on.

Three clauses. The first one is true and you have never been allowed to say it. The second one is what actually happened. The third one is what Tuesday nights are.

You have three clauses that are all true and that nobody will argue with, and none of them requires you to call the eleven weeks the making of you. Second Corinthians 1:4 keeps the tribulation and the comfort and the passing on in one sentence in exactly that order, and it is the Holy Spirit who supplies a form of words a man can live inside for the next forty years.

And keep going to whoever you go to. The doctor, the person you see, whatever the arrangement is. That is not undermined by any of this and it is part of what makes Tuesday nights safe for Steve as well as for you.