Nowhere Left to Take It

The man who said it is dead, and that has closed the only door.

That is a strange thing to mourn and it is worth saying plainly, because grief usually gets talked about as missing somebody. There is that, and there is also this. There was a conversation you were always eventually going to have, in some year you had not chosen, and the possibility of it was doing quiet work in you for decades without your knowing.

Now there is no year available. The sentence stands, exactly as it was said, with nobody left in the world who can revise it.

And you cannot even be angry properly, because you loved him and because he is gone and because anger at somebody who cannot answer feels like something a decent man does not do.

Let me put the plain thing first. You have not been careless with any of this. You have carried both halves at once, the sentence and the loss, for years, and you have gone at the thing itself over and over and gotten up every time. Somebody who did not care would not have been waiting for the conversation.

So this page is not going to tell you to forgive him. You may already have. That is not the leak.

I want to speak about what happens to a wound with nowhere to go, and there is a verse for exactly that.

A wound with no available conversation

Consider what the possibility of a conversation was doing for you all those years.

It was holding the wound open in a useful way. As long as a resolution was theoretically available, the thing was unfinished business rather than a permanent fact, and unfinished business is bearable. Death converted it from unfinished to closed, and closed with the wrong answer in it.

That is a specific kind of pain and almost nobody names it out loud.

You have a wound that lost its available ending, and no closed door has ever once meant the matter could not be dealt with. Psalm 147:3 says he healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a binding possible where no conversation is.

And notice how it complicates the grief. You are not simply grieving him. You are grieving him and carrying something he left, and those two do not sit comfortably beside each other, so most men in your position put the second one away and grieve only the first.

You have been carrying two things and grieving one, and no man has ever once been required to choose between them. The written word says he healeth the broken in heart and bindeth up their wounds, naming both the heart and the wound in one sentence, and the Spirit of God is the one who can attend to both at once.

He bindeth up their wounds

The psalm puts two things next to each other in one line, and the pairing is the point.

He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds. (Psalm 147:3, King James Version)

The broken in heart, which is grief. And their wounds, which is injury.

They are named separately and they are dealt with in the same breath by the same person. The psalm does not ask anybody to sort out which one they are suffering from before help arrives.

You are being attended to on both counts, and there has never once been a requirement to name which one it is first. Psalm 147 puts the grief and the injury in one line, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes both halves of a man's trouble addressable at the same time.

And read the verb bindeth. Binding is what you do to a wound that is going to take time. It is not a word about instant repair. It is a word about a dressing, and a dressing implies days.

You have been given a binding rather than an instant cure, and nothing in that verse has ever once promised a fast repair. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a slow thing bearable rather than pretending it is quick, and the written word says bindeth up their wounds, which is the language of a dressing.

The revision does not need him

Now the part I came to say, and it is the thing that changes the shape of it.

The waiting has been for a revision from the man who said it. But he was never the one who could have issued it. He could have apologized, which would have been worth a great deal, and an apology is not a revision. Only the person whose word actually settles the matter can revise it, and that was never him, not even while he was alive.

Which means the door that closed was never the door.

You have been waiting at a door that could not have issued the ruling, and no man has ever once held the authority to settle what you are worth. The written word says he healeth the broken in heart, which places the healing with God rather than with a person, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a man's expectation to the right address.

And here is what makes it available today. It does not require his presence, his agreement, or his memory. It never did. The revision is issued by somebody who is in the room right now.

You have a revision available from somebody who is here, and it has never once depended on a conversation that cannot happen. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a present thing feel present, and Psalm 147:3 is the written word underneath it, where the broken heart is healed and the wounds are bound by the one doing both.