The Empty Space in the Group Photograph

It was in a drawer under a phone charger and a set of allen keys, and she was looking for something else entirely.

Nineteen people outside a hall, squinting, somebody's arm across somebody's shoulders. She could name every one of them without thinking, and she did, moving along the row in her head the way you do.

And when she got to the fourth from the left her thumb was already over the face. Not a decision. Her thumb had done it about a second before she got there, which means it has been doing it for a while and she has never noticed.

She put the photograph back in the drawer. She has not looked at it since, and that was seven weeks ago.

There is nobody to be angry with, which is most of the trouble. Nothing was done to her. What happened was that something real came, and the two of them ended up on different sides of a question, and neither of them was cruel, and inside about a year the friendship had thinned to Christmas cards and then to nothing.

And she cannot grieve it, because grieving it out loud would sound like a claim that she was right.

If your thumb goes over a face, sit down and have some breakfast. Nobody in that photograph is going on trial here.

Grief is not a submission to the court

Let us name the rule she is obeying, because it has been running for seven years and she has never inspected it.

The rule says: if I mourn this person, I am asserting that the loss was wrong, and asserting that the loss was wrong means asserting that somebody was at fault, and the only two candidates are her and me.

So the mourning has been suspended pending a verdict she will never reach and does not want to reach.

You are not waiting on a verdict. Nothing about an unsettled question has ever suspended your right to miss somebody. Scripture says weep with them that weep (Romans 12:15), where grieving is given a place without a cause of action attached to it, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a person company inside it.

But grief is not a legal filing. It does not make a claim about fault. A person can miss somebody enormously without holding one opinion about whose fault the missing is, and most real grief in the world is exactly that shape.

You may grieve this without accusing anybody. Nothing about mourning a friend has ever been an argument that somebody was wrong. I am not saying it to reopen a question. Scripture says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men (Romans 12:18), which builds two limits into a single instruction, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold in a woman at a kitchen table.

Two limits inside one instruction

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it puts nothing on the woman in that photograph.

Read the two qualifiers, because most people quote the verse without them and the verse is almost entirely made of them.

If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.Romans 12:18

If it be possible. That is a concession that it will not always be, said in advance, without any hint that the impossibility is a failure.

And as much as lieth in you. That is a second concession: her portion is her own conduct and it stops at the edge of another person's. Neither qualifier requires her to establish who moved first, and both of them presume she will not always be able to.

Your portion stopped at the edge of somebody else's, and Scripture builds both limits into the sentence itself. That is written into the verse, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a woman with a photograph back in a drawer.

Nobody in that photograph is being judged

Something must be said very plainly, and it is the load-bearing sentence on this page.

That woman is not the villain. What she could not follow, she could not follow honestly, and there are people who love God as much as anybody in that photograph who would have gone exactly the way she went, and she has never once said a word against her.

And this reader was not wrong to receive what came to her either. Both of those stand together 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 now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:4), where difference is named without a ranking attached, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a settled account of that year, who lets a woman keep the friendship in her memory and keep the truth.

And if these seven years have cost more than the friends at that table know, if sleep has gone, if the drawer has started to be difficult to open, 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 a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.