Watching Everyone Else Receive

The card was already in her bag, bought on Tuesday, written on Wednesday, and she had thought hard about the wording.

She got there early because she always gets there early, and she helped carry the trestle table, and she was the one who found where the scissors live. Then the room filled up and the announcement was made properly, and she cheered, and she meant it, and that is the part she wants you to understand. She was not pretending. She loves them. She has prayed for them by name.

And somewhere in the middle of the clapping, standing between the window and the tea urn with her hands still up, she felt it arrive: a slow, hot ache under the breastbone, the exact shape of a thing she asked for a very long time ago and has not received.

She kept her face perfectly. She has had a lot of practice at this particular face. She stayed for the whole thing, and she washed up afterwards, and she said goodnight, and she got into the car and sat there with the key in her hand for a minute before she started the engine.

Beloved, that ache is not jealousy, whatever you have been calling it in your own head. Jealousy wants them not to have it. You have never once wanted that. You want them to have it and you want yours too, and there is no word in ordinary English for that, so you have been filing it under a word that carries shame with it and paying interest on the shame for years.

Let me give it its actual name. That is grief. It comes to the door dressed as somebody else's good news, and it is grief, and grief is allowed.

Two true things in the same hands

You have been trying to feel one thing at a time, and it has been costing you.

Because you know you are supposed to rejoice with those who rejoice, and you do, genuinely, and then the ache turns up in the same chest at the same moment and you decide one of them has to be fake. So you interrogate yourself in the car park. Am I actually glad. Am I a hypocrite. Is this what a small heart looks like.

Stop the interrogation. Both are real. Gladness and grief arrive together in the same room and neither one cancels the other, and holding both at once is not double mindedness, it is what a whole person looks like when they love somebody and are still waiting themselves.

And there is a second cost that nobody sees, which is what the waiting has done to the asking. You still ask, but you have made it smaller. You have taken the edge off it, you have started adding clauses to protect yourself, and lately you catch yourself asking in a tone you would never use with a friend, apologetic, quick, ready to withdraw it. You have been praying with your coat on, standing near the door, so that when nothing changes you have not made a scene.

That is not lack of faith. That is a person who has been disappointed and has learned to hold their hands where the disappointment can reach them less. It is self protection, and it is entirely human, and I am not going to tell you off for it. We carry that. You do not.

The name she gave Him

Here is the ground under this whole message, and it comes from the mouth of a woman nobody was celebrating.

Hagar. Pregnant, mistreated, out in the desert on the road to nowhere with no standing and no claim on anybody, in a household where somebody else's promise was the whole subject. She was not the one the covenant was announced over. She was the one carrying water for the people it was announced over.

And God came and found her by a spring in the wilderness, and spoke to her about her own life, and she did something no one else in the whole of Scripture had done yet. She gave Him a name.

Thou God seest me.Genesis 16:13

The first person in the Bible to name God is an overlooked foreign servant girl in a desert, and the name she gives Him is not Almighty, and not Provider. It is You see me.

Sit in that. Of all the names she could have reached for, that was the one the moment handed her. Because being seen was the thing she had lost, and He came out into the wilderness personally to give it back before He gave her anything else.

You have been standing between the window and the tea urn feeling like the one nobody notices. And you are being seen by the God who came the whole way out to a spring in a desert for one woman whose name nobody in the story cared about.