Nine years of Thursdays, three men, the same room, and then two years, and then it was one man on a Thursday.
Nobody fell out. He wants that understood before anything else, because every version of this he has ever tried to tell has been heard as a complaint about two men who did nothing to him.
What happened was that something came to him, and it was real, and the two of them could not go where it took him, and over about two years the Thursdays got harder to arrange and then stopped being arranged.
They are still cordial. He sees one of them at a wedding every couple of years and they are genuinely glad to see each other for about four minutes.
Nine years is four hundred and something Thursdays. It is the room where he learned to pray out loud. It is two men who knew things about him that his wife does not know.
And he has never grieved it, because a man who received something good is not supposed to be sad about what it cost, and because there is no funeral for a Thursday, and because saying it out loud would sound like blame.
If you lost the people you prayed with, sit down and have some coffee. Neither of those men is going on trial here.
The prohibition is his own
Let us look at the rule he has been obeying, because it has held for a long time and nobody ever issued it.
The rule says: if the thing you received was genuinely from God, then the losses attached to it have to be accepted rather than mourned, because mourning them looks like a complaint against the gift.
Nobody said that to him. No elder, no friend, nothing he has ever read. He assembled it out of decency and a wish not to be the man who makes everything about himself, and it has cost him two years of an unattended grief.
And it does not survive contact with the book, where people thank God and weep in the same breath as a matter of routine.
You are allowed to grieve this. Nothing about receiving something real has ever required you to be content about what it cost. I am not saying it to open an old subject. The written word says the contention was so sharp between them, that they departed asunder one from the other (Acts 15:39), which records a parting between good men without one word of judgment on either, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a man on a Thursday.
A parting recorded and not adjudicated
Here is the part that turned this for me, and it puts nothing on either of your friends.
Read what Luke does and does not do with that disagreement, because the omission is deliberate and it is the whole comfort.
And the contention was so sharp between them, that they departed asunder one from the other: and so Barnabas took Mark, and sailed unto Cyprus.Acts 15:39
He records it plainly. The sharpness is not hidden and not tidied, and both men are named, and both go on to real work in the very next verses.
And no verdict is supplied. Luke had access to both of them. He was writing to a church that would have wanted to know who was right. He declines, and the account moves on, and neither man is ever called the one who was wrong.
You can hold a real parting without a verdict, and Scripture records one exactly that way. That is written into the passage itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a man two years into a silence.
Neither of them is being judged here
Something must be said very plainly, and it is the load-bearing sentence on this page.
They were not disloyal. What came to him did not come to them, and a man cannot follow another man into something he has not been given, and there are people who love God as much as he does who would have done exactly what those two did.
And he was not wrong to receive it either. Both of those stand at once and neither one cancels the other.
This was real and it cost you. You can hold both without deciding which of you was wrong. Scripture says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men (Romans 12:18), where the qualifier concedes that peace was never entirely inside one man's control, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a settled account of who moved first, who lets a man keep them and keep the truth.
And if these two years have cost more than the people at that table know, if sleep has gone, if Thursdays have started to be difficult, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not going around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.
So here is the turn, and it is not a promise that the phone starts ringing again.
This was real and it cost you. You can hold both without deciding which of you was wrong. Scripture records a sharp parting between two good men and supplies no verdict on either (Acts 15:39), and it is the Holy Spirit, not a ruling you have been refusing to make, who lets you grieve four hundred Thursdays without accusing anybody of anything.
I cannot tell you whether those two ever sit in that room again, and I am not going to guess at it. Nobody honest would. What I can tell you is that nobody ever forbade you this grief, and that the rule you have been keeping for two years was written by you.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the standing under these words is His rather than your own. You speak under His will and not yours, and what God does next, and when, is His to decide, however He answers.
- Rule that I may not grieve this, you are a thing nobody actually imposed and you are not God's word on the matter. Acts 15 records a contention so sharp that two good men departed asunder and names neither of them as the one who was wrong, and the Holy Spirit left that account without a verdict on purpose. In the name of Jesus I take you off my Thursdays.
- Fear that saying it out loud would sound like blame, you are not what God says about me and you are not sitting at this table tomorrow. Romans 12 says live peaceably as much as lieth in you, which concedes that peace was never entirely in my hands, and His Spirit holds me steady without a ruling on anybody. I am naming what went.
- Father, Acts 15 says the contention was sharp and they departed asunder, and both of them went on to real work in the very next verses. I thank You for two men who could not follow me where I was taken and who have never once said a word against me, and Your Spirit has been in the grief and in the gladness at once. This was real and it cost me, and I can hold both without deciding which of us was wrong.
Acts 15:39
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