Nobody fell out with anybody. That is what makes this so difficult to describe to anybody, including yourself.
There was no argument. Nobody said anything. There was a Friday in about the second year when you did not go, and then a Friday in the fourth month when you were not asked, and neither of those was a decision by anybody, and there is no moment you can point at.
Four people. Twelve years of four people, and now it is birthdays on a screen, and Beth still sends a thing at Christmas.
You are not going to sit here and pretend you did not change. You did. You went quiet about some things and you went loud about others and you stopped being available in the particular way you used to be available, and people notice that, and people are not obliged to keep pace with somebody who has gone somewhere they were not going.
And you would not undo it. That is the strange part. You would not go back and be who you were in order to keep them, and you have tested that thought properly, more than once, at two in the morning.
But nobody ever told you what it was for.
You were told what to leave, in a hundred small ways, from a hundred kind people. You have never once heard a sentence about the destination. And so what you have, on a Friday evening in the eighth year, is a quiet phone and a very clear memory of a table with five people at it, and no answer whatsoever to the question of what all that emptying was in aid of.
The instruction in Antioch has a purpose clause
There is a scene in Acts where the Holy Spirit gives an instruction to a church, and the instruction has two halves, and almost every sermon on it stops after the first.
The Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them.Acts 13:2
Separate me Barnabas and Saul. That is the half people quote.
For the work whereunto I have called them. That is the half that is doing all of the work in the sentence.
The separating is not the point of the sentence and it is not even the main verb's purpose; it is the mechanism. Something is being made available for something. And the sentence names the destination out loud, in the room, in front of everybody, on the same day.
Nobody in Antioch had to spend eight years wondering.
So take this now, on your quiet Friday. You are separated for something and not simply away from a table. The written word puts the purpose clause in the same breath as the separating, and the Holy Spirit is the one who said both halves, and eight years of only ever hearing the first half is a fault in the telling and never a fault in you.
The loss was real and I am not going to tidy it away
Now I want to be honest about the thing itself, because there is a version of this message that would hand you a purpose and use it to make the grief disappear, and that would be a cheat.
You lost four people. That is a real loss and it does not stop being a loss because there was a reason for it. Beth was funny in a way that almost nobody is funny and you have not laughed like that since, and I am not going to call that a small price or a fair exchange, because it was not an exchange, it was a bereavement that arrived slowly enough that nobody sent a card. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.
Grieve it properly. It is allowed. Nothing in what follows requires you to be fine about it.
And here is the second thing, which is also true and which does not cancel the first. What is on the other side of that is not primarily a replacement set of friends. It might include some. But the sentence in Antioch does not say separate them so that they will have better company. It says for the work.
You are separated for something. His word says so with the purpose in the same line, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the calling, and the quiet on a Friday evening is not the finished shape of your life.
What was preached in a plain hall
There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and one of the things preached in that plain room was being wholly set apart to God.
That teaching has often been handed on since as a list of things a person stops. Preached that way it does exactly what has been done to you: somebody gets a subtraction and is told it is a gift, and then is expected to be grateful for an emptier life.
It was not shaped that way in that room, and the reason is entirely practical. That hall had work going on around it every day of the week, in the streets outside it, and the people who came in having given things up were handed something to do by Tuesday. The doctrine had a destination attached because the building had one.
You have had the giving up without the sending, and it is not because God has not got a destination for you. It is because the people around you inherited half a sentence and passed the half on.
The written word says separate them for the work, and the Holy Spirit named the work in the same breath.
Ask for the second half of the sentence.
Not for the friends back. You would not go back and be who you were, and you have already tested that, so asking for a reversal is asking for something you do not actually want. The written word puts the work in the same breath as the separating, and the Holy Spirit said both halves.
Ask God for the purpose clause. Say it plainly: You separated me, and I have never heard what it was for, and I would like to be told.
And then go and look at the ordinary week you already have. In my experience the answer is almost never delivered as an announcement. It is usually already happening in the smallest and most repetitive thing in your life, the one you do not count, the one you would describe as filling the time.
You are separated for something. The written word puts the work in the same sentence as the separating, and the Holy Spirit is the one who called it, so this is not a request for a new life. It is a request to be told the name of the one you are in.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, standing, on a Friday if you can. The right to speak them was not earned by what you gave up and is not lost on an empty evening. It is Christ's own authority, delegated, and because you are in Christ it has been given to you whole, with the phone still quiet. Speak them under not my will, but Thine: He names and He sends in His own way and in His own timing, and eight quiet years are never the measure of what He has settled.
- Quiet phone, you are not the whole of what this change was about. The written word says separate them for the work and puts the purpose in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit is the one who said both halves of it.
- Half a sentence, get off my Friday evenings. Jesus separates people toward something and His Spirit named the work out loud in that room, so I ask to be told what mine is, in the name of Jesus.
- Lord, You set me apart for a work and not only away from a table, and Your word says it and Your Spirit does it. I name one thing I am for out loud today, and I go and look at the smallest thing in my week.
Acts 13:2
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