One of My Regulars Went

One of your regulars has gone, and you have thought about almost nothing else for a week.

And you are embarrassed about that, which is why you have not said it out loud to anybody. It is one customer. Out of all of them. You are not in trouble, nothing has collapsed, and a grown adult should be able to absorb one person going somewhere else.

And yet you have been carrying it since Tuesday. It was there when you woke up. It was there in the car. It came back during a conversation about something else entirely and you had to pretend you were listening.

The size of it is the thing you cannot explain, and that is the part I want to talk about, because the size of it is not a flaw in you.

I am not going to help you get them back, because that would be strategy and there is none of it on this site. And I am not going to tell you it does not matter.

They walked no more with him

There is a verse in John that is recorded very plainly, and what strikes me about it is that it is there at all.

Jesus has said something difficult. And then this, in one sentence, with no attempt to soften it.

From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him. (John 6:66, King James Version)

You are not alone in this, and people leaving has never once been proof that the work was wrong. John 6:66 records a departure without explaining it away or treating it as a failure in the one they left, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that to a kitchen counter with a diary open beside the kettle.

Sit with who that happened to. Nothing was done badly there. Nothing was mismanaged. The best thing that has ever happened in the world was happening and people walked away from it.

Which means, at minimum, that somebody leaving is not automatically a report on the quality of what they left. Scripture puts that on the page and does not apologize for it.

You have something worth doing, and somebody walking away has never once been the measure of it. The Spirit of God is the one who makes one plain verse about a departure reach a person standing in a kitchen with a jacket still on, and John 6:66 records people walking away without one word of blame toward the one they left.

Why one person weighs this much

Let me say why the size is what it is, because the size is the bit that makes people feel foolish.

It is not the money and it is not the hours. It is that this was not a transaction to you. That person was in your week. You knew what they liked, and how they took things, and a bit about their mother, and the arrangement had the shape of a relationship even though both of you would have called it work.

You were in a relationship and not only a transaction, and that has never once been unprofessional. The Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person see the real shape of what ended, and the written word records a leaving plainly in John 6:66 without telling anybody to be bigger about it.

So what ended was not a line in a book. It was a person who was in your week and is not any more, and grief at the right size for that is not grief at the right size for a lost booking.

That is why it has taken a week. Not because you are fragile. Because you were not pretending it was nothing the whole time you had it.

You are not fragile, and minding this has never once been out of proportion. His Spirit is the one who gives a person the true size of a thing without making it bigger, and John 6:66 has a departure recorded as a real event rather than as a small administrative one.

The next piece of work

So here is the exercise, and it has a thing in it you must not do.

Do the next piece of work, and do it well. Properly, to your own standard, for somebody who is still here.

You are able to do the next thing well, and doing it has never once meant you did not mind. John 6:66 records the leaving and the work of Jesus continuing in the very next verses, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes one good piece of work possible on a week like this one.

And do not send the message. You have one, or the beginning of one. It is warm and it thanks them and somewhere in it there is a sentence that is really asking them to explain.

Leave it. Not because they are owed nothing, but because you would be sending it to get something back that they have already decided not to give.

You were never owed an account, and the absence of one has never once been a judgment on you. The Spirit of God carries a person past the need to understand before they can work, and the written word lets a departure stand unexplained in John 6:66.