Filled at a Funeral

It was February and the ground had been hard and the diggers had had trouble with it, and somebody mentioned that at the graveside, which she thought was strange and has never forgotten.

Her father. Seventy nine. It had been coming and it was still not ready.

She was standing slightly apart from the others because that is what she does, and she was not praying, and she would want that understood. She was not doing anything. She was looking at a point about four feet in front of her shoes.

And something came over her that she has never been able to explain to another person. It was not comfort exactly, although there was comfort in it. It was not relief. What she says, when she is trying, is that she was filled up, and that she stood there in a February field being filled up while they put her father in the ground.

That was six years ago.

She has thought about that hour more than about almost anything else in her life. And what she has arrived at, without ever deciding to arrive at it, is a piece of arithmetic she would be horrified to hear said out loud.

It goes: that is what it cost.

Which means she does not ask on a Tuesday. She does not ask on a good week. Somewhere in her there is a rule that what she received in that field was priced at the worst hour of her life, and asking for it in an ordinary week would be asking for something she has not paid for.

You may have your own February. The thing you received in the worst hour and have never gone back for since.

The occasion is not the price

Take the arithmetic apart first, because it is running her whole spiritual life and she has never looked directly at it.

The reasoning goes: it came during grief, therefore grief bought it. That is a leap, and it is the most human leap there is, and it is the same one people make about lucky shirts and about the seat they were sitting in when the phone call came.

The two things are not connected the way she thinks. What is true is that in that field she had nothing at all in her hands. No composure, no arrangement, no plan, nothing she was bringing. That is a real condition and it is worth noticing, but it is a condition of emptiness, not a payment.

You were carrying nothing into that field and the empty hands were the whole of it, and Romans 15:13 puts the filling in God's hands and names hope as the outcome rather than suffering as the entry fee, and it is His Spirit who takes a line from the end of a long letter and lands it on a woman six years later.

Here is the sentence, and notice what it is made of.

Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost.Romans 15:13

Joy and peace. Not grief. That is a prayer for people who are not at a graveside, and it is written as an ordinary blessing to an ordinary congregation at the end of an ordinary letter.

What He fills with

Look at the contents named, because they are the exact opposite of what she has assumed the conditions to be.

All joy and peace. Paul is not describing something reserved for a crisis. He is asking that a whole church, going about a normal week in a normal city, be filled with gladness and quiet, and he attaches it to believing rather than to suffering.

Which means the filling in that verse is not priced in pain. If it were, the prayer would be incoherent, because he would be praying that a congregation suffer enough to be eligible for the joy.

You have been assuming a price on something Paul prayed over a whole city for free, because the written word asks for joy and peace to be poured into people with nothing bad happening to them, and the Spirit of God is what turns that from a nice benediction into a door she can go through on a Saturday.

And notice the last clause, which is where the machinery is. Through the power of the Holy Ghost. The filling is not produced by circumstance at all. It is produced by God, and circumstance is only ever the room it happens in.

You were filled by a Person and not by a February, and Romans 15 credits the whole thing to the power of the Holy Spirit rather than to anything in the situation, and the same Spirit who moved a man to write that closing prayer moves in a bright front room on a Saturday.

The graveside was not a transaction

Now the tender part, because this touches her father and it has to be handled properly.

Nothing here says that hour was not holy. It was. Something genuinely happened in a February field and it is not being downgraded by a single word of this.

What is being taken away is only the invoice. She has been carrying a sense that God gave her something and that the cost was drawn from her father's death, and there is a quiet horror in that arrangement that she has never let herself feel, because it makes the worst day of her life into a transaction.

God did not charge her for that hour. He met her in it.

You were met and never billed, because Romans 15:13 has God filling as an act of His own goodness with no cost recorded anywhere, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that a relief for a woman who has been quietly balancing a ledger she never agreed to.