Every Gig We Played Was in a Bar

The case still has the sticker on it from the ferry, and Nalu has not opened it in nine weeks, and it is standing against the wall in the room where the ironing gets done.

They had a good thing. Six of them, and three of them had been playing together since school. Friday and Saturday, sometimes a Thursday, and every single one of those rooms had a bar down one side of it, because that is the only kind of room that pays a six piece band to play for three hours.

Load in at six. Sound check. Three sets. Load out at one. And in between, and after, and during, the thing that finally got too big to keep carrying, and Nalu made a decision in April and told them in May.

They were good about it. That is important and he wants it said. Nobody argued. Sione asked whether there was any way round it and Nalu said he had looked and there was not. They shook his hand. They found somebody. The band still plays.

And what nobody warned him about is that leaving the rooms meant leaving the people, and the people were not the drinking. The people were the ones who knew what he meant when he changed a chord without saying anything. Twenty years of that. He did not just lose Fridays. He lost the five human beings who could hear him.

The case is against the wall in the ironing room. It has been nine weeks.

You know that case. It might be a band, a team, a crew, a shift. You did the right thing and you would do it again, and what nobody said out loud is that the right thing cost you the people as well as the room.

You are taken up by God in the place where you were set down, and you were never left standing there with a case against a wall. The psalm says when my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up, and it puts the taking up in the exact spot the setting down happened; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a present fact in a room where the ironing gets done.

Then the Lord will take me up

Let me say the thing plainly, because in nine weeks nobody has said it to him and he has not said it to anybody.

You did not give up a habit. You gave up a habit and a room and a craft and five friends, all in one decision, and everybody around you has congratulated you on the first item on that list. Nobody has said sorry about the other four. And so the grief has nowhere to be, because saying it out loud sounds like regretting the decision, and you do not regret the decision.

Here is the verse, and it is more startling than people notice.

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.Psalm 27:10

David picks the two people who are least likely to set you down. Not colleagues. Not friends. The two who are supposed to be structurally incapable of it. He is not describing a likely event; he is establishing the outer limit, which is how you test a promise properly.

You are inside a promise built for the outer limit, and you were never going to fall out the bottom of it. That is what stands written in Psalm 27, and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies an outer limit promise to an ordinary loss that hurts more than anybody has acknowledged.

Now the word then. When they forsake, then the Lord will take me up. It is not eventually and it is not afterward. It is a hinge. The taking up is described as happening at the same point the setting down does, not weeks later once you have recovered.

You are taken up at the moment of the setting down, and you were never scheduled for a gap in between. Scripture puts a then and not a someday between those two clauses, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the timing of it real for a man who told them in May.

And take me up is a word for gathering in, the way you gather up something that has been left behind. It is what you do at the end of a night when the room has emptied and something is still there on a chair. It is not a grand rescue word. It is the word for the last person going round and picking things up so nothing gets left.

You are gathered rather than merely comforted, and you were never a thing left on a chair at the end of a night. The written word uses a gathering word, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the going round in an empty room.

And the plain thing, said the way this site always says it. Your friends are not villains. They did not throw you out, they shook your hand, and they still play on Fridays because that is their life. You lost the room, not the men. And you did not lose the music. That case has been shut for nine weeks for no reason anybody gave you. Open it. And if the friend, the counselor, the group that meets on a weeknight is what helps you carry the whole of what April cost, use it, because that is God's kindness with a face on it.