Three Days Past the Sea

The table seats ten and Ari set it for one on the first Friday in April, and has set it for one every Friday since.

He left the family business in March. Seventeen years, and the leaving was not quiet, and there is no version of the story where it could have been. He does not regret it. If you sat him down and made him say it plainly he would say, without hesitating, that he would do it again on the same day for the same reasons.

He expected the leaving to be the hard part.

He had braced for the leaving for about four years. He had rehearsed the conversation. He had imagined the fallout, the phone calls, the cousins, his wife's face, all of it. And every one of those things happened more or less the way he had imagined, and he got through them, and by the second week of April he was out and it was done.

And then came the Fridays.

Nobody had rehearsed the Fridays. In that family, Friday evening was a table with fourteen people at it, and now it is Ari and his wife and their two, and his wife is wonderful and his children are fine and the food is good, and there is a sound missing that he has no name for.

He gets through it. He says the blessing. And every single week, at some point between the candles and the food, there is about four seconds where the loss of a thing he was right to leave goes through him like a cold draft under a door.

Here is the evening it caught.

His daughter, eleven, said, "Abba, why do you always look at the end of the table?"

And Ari said, "Do I?"

And she said, "Every week."

And he said something about being tired, and blessed the bread, and did not sleep much that night.

You know that stretch. You got out, and you were right, and you had prepared for everything except the thing that showed up three days later, which nobody warns you about because everybody is busy being glad for you.

Seventy-two hours after the song

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you whether to go back to that table. I cannot see your family and it is not a thing a page can decide. I am not going to give anybody a verdict, and I am not going to tell you how long the Fridays stay like this.

What I will do is show you where Exodus 15 goes immediately after the most triumphant moment in the Old Testament.

Chapter fifteen opens with the song at the sea. Miriam with a timbrel. The horse and the rider thrown into the sea. It is the loudest, gladdest passage in the book.

And then, in the same chapter, twenty-two verses later:

So Moses brought Israel from the Red sea, and they went out into the wilderness of Shur; and they went three days in the wilderness, and found no water. And when they came to Marah, they could not drink of the waters of Marah, for they were bitter.Exodus 15:22-23

Three days.

Seventy-two hours between the song and the bitter water. Not three years. Not a generation. Three days, and the same people who had been singing on the bank were standing at a spring they could not drink from.

You are exactly where the text says people are three days after a rescue, and it is not a sign that the rescue was a mistake. Exodus 15:23 puts the bitterness immediately after the song, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a dining room on a Friday evening in April.

Now, what happens at Marah is the part I want you to have. God does not rebuke them for finding it bitter. He does not say, you sang three days ago, what is the matter with you. Read it:

And he cried unto the LORD; and the LORD shewed him a tree, which when he had cast into the waters, the waters were made sweet.Exodus 15:25

He showed him a tree. Something that was already there, already growing at Marah, that they had walked past without seeing.

You have not been abandoned at the bitter place, and the remedy at Marah was standing there before Israel ever arrived. It is written that the Lord showed him a tree, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient showing a present one.

Nobody rehearses the Fridays

Now let me be careful here, because this is where somebody gets hurt.

I am not going to tell Ari that what he feels at that table means he should not have left. It does not mean that. Nothing about the four seconds under the candles is an argument about March.

And I am also not going to tell him it means he should go back and fix it, or that his family will come round, or any of the things people say to fill a silence at a table. I do not know what happens with that family and I am not going to guess out loud in front of a man's children.

You are not being asked to interpret the Fridays, and Marah is described without one word of explanation offered to anybody standing at it. Exodus 15:23 states the bitterness plainly and moves straight to the crying out, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an uninterpreted hardship survivable.

Here is what I do want to name. Everybody braces for the leaving. Nobody braces for the ordinary evenings afterward, and the ordinary evenings are where the actual weight turns out to be. You can rehearse a confrontation. You cannot rehearse the shape of a room with fewer people in it.

That is not weakness and it is not regret. It is what a person feels when they have lost something real that was inside something they were right to leave.

You are permitted to grieve the good things that were in a thing you had to walk away from, and Scripture does not once make a person choose between those. Exodus 16:3 has Israel remembering actual bread in Egypt without the text disputing that the bread was real, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps an honest memory from becoming a case against a person's own decision.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the Fridays have gone somewhere darker than heavy, or if the nights afterward have become something you dread through the week, do not carry that on your own. Tell somebody this week. Your wife, a friend, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you a thing about your family or that business. That is me refusing to leave you at that table by yourself.