The Touchline, Three Days After

The grass is wet enough to soak through her trainers in the first ten minutes, and the under-nines are in orange bibs, and the whistle keeps going.

She has the flask. She always has the flask; it is one of the things she is known for on this touchline, tea for whoever forgot theirs. Somebody's dad is telling her about the new goalkeeper. Somebody's mum is laughing about a birthday party. Her son gets the ball, loses it, gets it back, and she cheers, and the cheer comes out of her at the right volume and at the right moment and it is a perfectly good cheer.

Three days ago she found out.

That is all I am going to say about what she found, and it is all I will say for the whole of this message, because you know what you found and it does not need me to give it a shape. What I want to talk about is this: she is standing on a touchline on a Saturday morning with the same flask and the same people, and everything is exactly where it was on Wednesday, and there is nowhere in the whole wet field to put what she knows. She cannot say it to the dad talking about the goalkeeper. She cannot say it to the woman with the birthday party. She has not slept, and she has not eaten anything that was not standing up at the counter, and she has looked at the man she loves across the kitchen and not been able to find the floor.

And you know that touchline. It might be an office or a school gate or a pew, but you know it: the first days, when the world has not been told and keeps behaving normally, and you are holding a flask you cannot feel your hand around, and there is nobody on your right.

The floor has gone, and that is not your fault

I am not going to rush you to anywhere. The first thing I want to do is stand next to you on the wet grass and say the true things slowly. You have had the floor taken out from under you. That is not weakness; that is what happens to a human being when they find out something like this about somebody they love. Your body is doing what bodies do. The not sleeping, the not eating, the cheer that comes out at the right volume while the rest of you is somewhere else. None of that is a failure. It is a wound, and wounds behave like this.

And now the sentence you need most, said plainly and early, so that everything else can stand on it: this did not happen because of you. Not because of your body, not because of anything you did or did not do, not because of anything you were or were not. I am not going to hand you a reason, and I am not going to hand you a share of the responsibility, because you do not have one. What another person did is theirs to carry and God's to weigh, and I am not weighing it here, and I am not asking you to. I am only taking the weight off you, because it was never yours, and the Holy Spirit, whom Scripture calls the Comforter, is saying that with me.

I cry to you, O LORD; I say, "You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living."Psalm 142:5

David wrote that in a cave. Read the verse just before it and you will find the touchline: I look to the right and see, but there is no one who takes notice of me; no refuge remains to me; no one cares for my soul. That is a man surrounded by people, in a hole, with nobody on his right. And in the very next breath, without leaving the cave, he says: You are my refuge. You have somewhere to stand this morning, and it is not the discovery and it is not the marriage and it is not the future; it is Him. That is not my sentiment; it is Scripture, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a cave-verse into ground under a woman on a wet field.

God is in this room, and He is looking at you

Here is what a wound like this does to a person's sight, and I say it carefully because the whole of this site is about sight. It makes you feel looked through. Everybody on the touchline is looking at the pitch. The person you love has been looking away from you. And in the first days a terrible sentence tries to move in: nobody is actually seeing me.

Hear me: God is. He is in this room, He was in the kitchen on Wednesday, and He is on this touchline in the wet, and He is not looking at the field. He is looking at you. You are seen, right now, in the whole of what you are carrying, and what you are worth has not moved by a single degree in three days. Scripture says He is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:18), and it is His Spirit, whom Jesus called the Comforter, who is the nearness and not a nice idea about it.

I am not going to tell you what to do about the man. I do not know your kitchen, and anybody who tells you from a distance to stay, or to go, or to forgive by a date, is speaking about a room they cannot see. Those decisions are yours, in their own time, with people who love you and can see your face. You are under no timetable that God has set, and no verdict on your worth has been handed down. That is written; the Spirit is the one who keeps a person company while a decision is still a long way off; and I will not put a clock in your hands.

What I will do is say the thing that David did, and hand it to you: not alone. Not because the touchline has changed. Because He is on it.