Three Houses That Used To Be One

There were eleven years when their children could not have told you which of the three kitchens was theirs.

Three families. Nine children between them, and a set of back doors that were never knocked on, and a standing arrangement where whoever was home cooked for whoever turned up. Two of the women had been in the room when the other one's youngest was born.

Then something came into that circle. It came to all three houses and it did not land the same way in each of them, and within about two years two of the households had moved to a different arrangement and one had not.

Nobody was cruel. That is the fact he keeps returning to, because it is true and because it has left him with nowhere to put the loss. There was no accusation. Nobody said anything unforgivable at a barbecue. They still send cards. One of the women still texts his wife on her birthday, every year, without fail.

But the children are grown now and they do not know each other. The back doors get knocked on. And a thing that took eleven years to build stopped existing over about twenty four months without one person doing anything anybody could name.

If you lost a whole shared life rather than one friend, come into the yard and sit down. Nobody's household is going on trial here.

The size of it has never been counted

Let us be accurate about the scale, because he has been treating this as a friendship that faded and it is much larger than that.

He did not lose two friends. He lost a way of living. He lost the assumption that a door would be open, the pooled cooking, the shared eye on nine children, the particular relief of a household that was three households wide. That is closer to losing a village than to losing a friendship.

And because it went without an incident, nobody around him has ever registered it as a loss at all, including, until recently, him.

You lost something enormous. Nothing about how quietly it went has ever reduced the size of what was taken. I am not saying that to make a man feel worse. Scripture says and Orpah kissed her mother in law; but Ruth clave unto her (Ruth 1:14), which is a household dividing on a real question with a kiss in the middle of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a man in a back yard eleven years on.

A parting that is recorded and not condemned

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it puts nothing on either of those families.

Read what the verse gives Orpah, because it is easy to read past and it is deliberate.

And they lifted up their voice, and wept again: and Orpah kissed her mother in law; but Ruth clave unto her.Ruth 1:14

A kiss. That is what she is given, and the text does not follow it with a judgment. Naomi had told them both to go, twice, and had blessed them for their kindness, and when Orpah went she went with a kiss and not a curse.

Two women in the same room, in the same grief, went two different ways on the same question, and the account records both without ranking them.

You can grieve a parting the book itself refuses to rank, and Scripture leaves Orpah her kiss. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a man whose children no longer know theirs.

Neither household is being judged here

Something has to be said very plainly, because a page like this could turn into a quiet verdict on two families who did nothing wrong.

They were not cowards and they were not deceived. They weighed something honestly, in their own homes, with their own children in view, and they went the way their conscience took them, and they have gone on being kind to your family for a decade with nothing to gain by it.

And you did not stay out of stubbornness either.

You are allowed to love them and grieve at the same time. Nothing about staying kind to two households has ever required you to pretend nothing went. Scripture says weep with them that weep (Romans 12:15), where grief is given a place inside a community rather than outside it, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps both of those alive in one man at once.

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 some of it was never within your reach, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a ruling on two households, who lets a man love them and still grieve.

And if these years have cost more than the people in that yard know, if sleep has gone, if the birthday texts have started to hurt in a way you cannot explain, 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.