So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.
John 16:22 (NIV)
I Will See You Again
She comes on the second and fourth Thursday, and she can’t sing. She knows it. The words are all there and the note is always a little under, every line, and she does it in front of eleven people in a day room that smells like the supper cart. An old woman parks her walker at the singer’s elbow, close enough to share the page.
Tonight there are four songs on the sheets. A man by the window keeps time on his knee, a half-beat behind. Two people are asleep by the second song. A man three chairs in tells her she’s wrecking it and to give the page to the woman who used to lead it. Nobody answers him, and he says it again over the next verse. The aide comes through with the cart without lowering the wheels for it. Nothing in the room lifts. It’s a Thursday evening in a building where the hour after supper is the long one, and somebody is singing about joy, badly.
A woman in labor has pain because her time has come, and when the child is born she forgets the anguish for joy that a child has come into the world. So with you, Jesus tells them: now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take that joy away from you.
He calls the grief by its own name first. Now is your time of grief, he says, and he gives it the hour it has and doesn’t argue them out of it. He is the one who ends it, and the rejoicing rises in them once he’s in front of them again.
If tonight is your now, then the thing promised to you arrives with him, and he picks the hour. He treats the grief as real, and he names how it stops: himself, back in front of them. A good mood can be put together on a bad night. The joy he promises takes longer, and it arrives when he does.
At the fourth song the old woman at her elbow puts a finger on the page and asks for a different one. “The one about the river,” she says, and it isn’t printed on any of the sheets. The singer doesn’t know it. The old woman sings it herself, badly, and gets through about half.
A Prayer to Remember
God, I’ve been treating this grief as a delay. I don’t have a better attitude to offer you tonight, and nothing in me is rising on its own. Keep the promise the way you made it, in your own time. Come back the way you said you would.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
