How Is the Family, They Ask

The cape goes on and gets tucked at the back of his neck and the chair goes up two pumps, and the barber says the thing he says.

"So. How's the family?"

He has been coming here nine years. It is not small talk exactly. The man genuinely wants to know, and remembers things, and last time asked a follow-up question about somebody's ankle.

The clippers start.

"Good," he says. "Good, yeah. Everybody's good."

And the thing that happens next is the reason this article exists. He watches himself say it. There is a mirror right there, four feet away, and his own face is in it doing the whole thing perfectly. The eyebrows. The little upward nod at the end. It is a completely convincing performance of a man whose family is good, and he is the only person in that shop who knows he is watching a stranger do it.

Six days ago there was a conversation. He is not going to describe it here and I am not going to ask him to. What matters this afternoon is that the family the barber is asking about, the one from the follow-up question about somebody's ankle, does not exist in that arrangement anymore, and it stopped existing on a Tuesday.

The clippers keep going. There is a television bracketed high in the corner with the sound off. Two men are waiting along the wall and one of them is laughing at something on his phone. Somebody's kid is spinning slowly in the empty chair at the end and getting told to stop.

The barber does the neck with the little brush and the powder, and takes the cape off with that snap, and says see you in a month.

He says thanks. He pays. He sits in his car in the lot for a minute before he starts it.

You know this chair. Maybe yours is a checkout line, or the school gate, or a guy at work who says how's things and means it. Maybe it is a group message you have not been able to make yourself answer for nine days, because the true answer is four paragraphs long and nobody asked for four paragraphs. Somewhere in the last week or two your life came apart in a way that nobody around you has any idea about, and you have been out here in public, being fine, at a volume that is completely convincing.

Hear me first. This is not a failure of faith, and it is not a failure of nerve either. The performance in the mirror is not hypocrisy. It is what a body does when a kind question arrives at the wrong time and there is no version of the true answer that fits in a barber chair.

And I am not going to tell you that you are alone because you have not opened up enough, or handed you a small assignment about being more vulnerable. Your isolation is not your own doing and I am not going to imply that it is.

Sit still a minute. He is doing the back of your neck.

Comfortless is an orphan word

The line I want in that shop with you was said the night before everything came apart for the men who heard it.

I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.John 14:18

That word, comfortless, is not primarily about feelings. The Greek underneath it is orphanos. Orphans. He is not saying I will not leave you sad. He is saying I will not leave you without family.

Read the room He said it in. Eleven men who had walked off their jobs to follow Him, about to lose the one arrangement their whole lives had reorganized around, in the space of a night. He does not tell them it will not hurt. He does not tell them it is for the best. He tells them what will not happen: they are not being left without anybody.

You are inside a sentence that was said to people whose family was about to be taken apart, and it was said to them before it happened rather than afterward. That is not my reading of your Tuesday: John 14:18 stands in the middle of the last conversation before everything went, and it is the Holy Spirit that same paragraph is talking about, promised two verses earlier as the One who would be with them and in them.

Now watch what He does not do, because it matters in a barber chair.

He does not tell them to be more open with each other. He does not say the problem is that they have been too private about their fear. He does not hand a grieving man a small assignment about community.

He says: I am coming to you.

You have company in that chair that did not require you to be honest with the barber first, and it was already there while your face was doing the nod. What is written puts the coming entirely on His side of the sentence, with no precondition attached to the man being come to, and His Spirit is described in the same chapter as the One who does not visit but dwells.

And there is a phrase two verses up that I do not want you to walk past. Another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever. Abide. Not check on. Not swing by. The word is about staying.

You were not visited briefly in that shop and then left in the parking lot, and you are not on your own in the car either. John 14:16 to 17 promises abiding rather than visiting, in those words, and the Spirit of God is the One doing the abiding, which is a thing done continuously and not by appointment.

The room was never as empty as it looked

Let me say the hard part, because it is the part that has been sitting on your chest since Tuesday.

Nobody in that shop knew. That is true and I am not going to soften it. The two men on the wall did not know, the kid in the chair did not know, and the barber, who is a decent man and asked a real question, did not know. There was a room full of people and the actual thing about your life was invisible inside it.

Here is what I am not going to say. I am not going to say that God being with you means the people not knowing does not matter. It matters. The wanting to be known is not a weakness in you and it is not something to be talked out of.

You have both of those things true at once, and you were never asked to trade one for the other. Scripture never sets the presence of God against the ache for human company, and it is His Spirit who was called alongside precisely because being accompanied is something a person actually needs.

And if you are reading this and there is genuinely nobody, no name at all, nobody to send anything to, then hear this next part with your name on it.

The company in that chair was not a person you failed to call. It was not conditional on you having somebody. It was there because He came, which is what He said He would do, and He does not arrive on the strength of your address book.

You were accompanied in that barber chair whether or not one single human being in your life knows what Tuesday was. The written word makes the coming His act and not the fruit of anybody's social circle, and the same Spirit who was promised to abide is the reason a man is never actually alone in a room even when he is the only one who knows what is happening in it.