Every Hard Conversation But Mine

The tea went cold in front of you again.

It is the third pot of the week and it is only Wednesday. Somebody was sitting where they always sit, on the side of the table that catches the last of the light, and they said the thing they came to say, and you did what you always do. You let the silence sit. You did not fill it. You put your hand flat on the table between you, not touching them, just there, so they knew somebody was still in the room with them.

They talked for two hours. You poured. When they left they said, I do not know how you do this, and they meant it as a compliment, and it landed somewhere odd in your chest and you closed the door before you had to answer it.

Now the plates are stacked and the light has gone off the wall and you are wiping down a table that four people have wept at this year.

And here is the thing that has never once happened at this table.

You have never sat on that side of it.

Not once. Not in eleven years. Not when your father was ill and not in the spring when everything came apart at work and not last month when you got the news you have still not told anybody about. Every hard conversation in this circle happens in your house, and not one of them has ever been yours.

I want to say something before we go any further, because I know how this reads to you.

I am not telling you off.

There is nothing wrong with a person whose house is where people come. That is a gift and it is a real one and half the people you know are still standing because of it. I am not going to turn your hospitality into a symptom, and I am not going to hand you a lecture about boundaries.

I am saying I noticed which chair you sit in. That is all.

Where the comfort came from

Let me tell you what I think has happened, because I do not think it is what you think.

You have not run out. You are not empty and you are not a fraud and the comfort you handed across that table on Wednesday was real comfort, not a performance of it. I am not saying that to be kind. I am saying what is written about where that comfort comes from, and the Holy Spirit who was in the room while you poured is the same Spirit who is in the room now that the guests have gone.

Here is the sentence.

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

Read the last eight words slowly.

Wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.

Paul does not describe a person who generates comfort and hands it out. He describes a person who receives it and passes it on. The comfort in your hands on Wednesday was not manufactured at your table. It arrived there. It came in the same door your guests came in, and it came first, and it came to you.

Which means the tap was never one directional. It never was. There is a spring over that table, and eleven years have gone by with the host of it calling himself a bucket.

And I want to say this to you plainly, because you have spent eleven years hearing everybody else's plainly and nobody has said it back.

You are one of the comforted. Not one day, not when you have earned a turn, not once things calm down. Right now, with the cloth still in your hand, you are inside the first half of that verse and you have been the whole time. That is not my encouragement to you; it is what the word says, and it is His Spirit who takes a written line and makes it land in the chest of a tired host.

Now, why has that side of the table stayed empty?

I do not think it is pride. In my experience it is almost never pride. It is usually a very quiet arithmetic that a person does once, years ago, and never revisits: if I sit down, who holds the room?

And you looked around and concluded, correctly at the time, that nobody would. So you stayed standing. And standing became a posture, and the posture became a personality, and now eleven years later there is a chair in your own house that you cannot make yourself sit in.

That is not sin. That is what happens to somebody who has been load bearing for a long time and was never given a rota.

But hear this, because it is finished rather than pending. You have a Father called the Father of mercies, and mercies are not a stock you draw down by using them. The word says all comfort, and the word says in all our tribulation, and neither of those is a rationed word. The Holy Spirit does not audit how much you have already given out before He carries what you are about to say.

You are not the source. You never were, and it is a relief rather than a demotion.