A Gift To Be Asked

You are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household.

—Ephesians 2:19

When you’re mourning, when something terrible has happened, it’s on your mind and right at the top of your heart all the time. It’s genuinely shocking that the sun is still shining and people are still chattering away on Good Morning America. Your world has changed, utterly, and it feels incomprehensible that the bus still comes and people on the highway just drive along as if nothing’s happened. When you’re in that place, it’s a gift to be asked how you’re doing, and most of the time the answer comes tumbling out, like water over a broken dam, because someone finally asked, finally offered to carry what feels like an unbearable load with you.

We hadn’t known our friends Darren and Brandy for very long when they asked about the church we left and the jobs we left. I started with the short version, not wanting to bore them, wanting to move on quickly to a lighter topic. Then Brandy said, “We actually want to hear the whole story. We want to understand who you are because of that season.” I’d never bring that season up, but it’s part of our history, and it meant something to me that they wanted to understand it.