My Father Would Have Known How

You had the phone in your hand before you knew you had picked it up.

That is the bit nobody tells you about. Not the funeral. Not the first Christmas. This, which happens in a utility room at ten past seven in the evening with a flashlight in your other hand, about something as small as a fuse box.

He would have known. That is the whole of it. He would have said something down the phone in about four seconds, in that flat way he had, and then he would have said something about the weather, and it would have been fixed and you would have got on with your evening.

Fourteen months. And there it was again, in your hand, and you put it back down on the shelf and stood there for a while in the dark with a flashlight.

And then you did what you have done every time, which was to decide that this was ridiculous.

You are a grown woman. It is a fuse box. He was eighty one and he had been ill, and everybody said it was a mercy at the end, and you agreed with them and you meant it.

And you have never once said out loud to a single human being that the hardest part of this whole house has been the not being able to ask him things.

Grief comes back through small doors

Let me tell you what I have seen over a long time, because I think there is a belief in this house that it is being done wrong.

Grief does not arrive on the big occasions. It arrives at a fuse box.

The big days are braced for. You know Christmas is coming. You know his birthday is coming. Something in you gets ready, and the readiness works, and you get through them and people say how well you did.

What nobody braces for is the small practical moment when the specific thing he was for comes up, and the hand goes to the phone before the mind has caught up. That is where the whole of it comes through, because there was no guard on that door.

You have been ambushed through a small door, and grief arriving at a fuse box has never once meant you were doing any of this badly. It is written in Isaiah 41 that God says I will hold thy right hand and says it to a person who is afraid, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing in a utility room at ten past seven.

And I want to say something about the specific loss, because it is a real one and it does not get named.

When a person who knew things dies, you do not just lose the person. You lose the answers. You lose a whole library of practical knowledge that lived in one man and is now not anywhere, and every time you meet a thing he would have known, the loss happens again, freshly, in a small way.

You have lost a library and not only a father, and needing what he knew has never once been the same as being unable to cope. Isaiah 41 has God taking hold of a right hand rather than instructing it, and the Spirit of God is the one who knows exactly what went out of the world with him.

I will hold thy right hand

Here is the verse, and I want you to notice what kind of help it is.

For I the Lord thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee. (Isaiah 41:13, King James Version)

Hold thy right hand.

That is not instruction and it is not information. Nobody is being taught anything in that sentence. It is physical, and it is close, and it is the thing you do with somebody who is frightened rather than somebody who is uninformed.

And I want to be careful, because I am not going to tell you that God is going to tell you about the fuse box.

That is not what the verse says and this site does not deal in that. He may send you a neighbor who knows. He may not. What is promised here is the hand and not the answer.

You are offered company in the not knowing rather than a replacement for what he knew, and the hand has never once been a lesser thing than the answer. The written word says I will hold thy right hand and never says I will tell thee what to do, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the holding rather than the explaining.

And then look at the right hand specifically, because it is chosen.

The right hand is the working one. In that whole world it is the hand that does, that lifts, that signs, that fights. So the picture is not of somebody being comforted while sitting down. It is of somebody being held by the hand they work with, while standing up, in the middle of the job.

You are being held by the hand you are working with, and being in the middle of a job with no idea what to do has never once put you outside that verse. Isaiah 41 takes the working hand rather than sitting the person down, and the Spirit of God is the one who chose which hand to name.