Sitting With the One Who Just Heard

The call came into the office at about a quarter past two.

Everybody heard it happen, which is the strange thing about an open plan floor. They heard the phone. They heard her say her sister's name in a voice that was not her voice. They heard the chair go back.

By half past two she was in the breakroom with the door shut, and the manager was standing in the corridor with no idea what to do, and somebody said, get Cora, she is good with this.

She is not good with this. She is the person who does not flinch, which is a completely different thing, and the reason she does not flinch is that her mother died fourteen months ago and something in her went quiet and has not come back yet.

So she went in. Of course she went in.

And she has been sitting on the floor of that breakroom with her back against the cupboards for two hours now, next to a woman she has worked beside for four years and has never once had a conversation with about anything other than work.

Nobody has made tea. The kettle is right there and neither of them has stood up.

And the whole time, under everything, there is one thing she is afraid of, and it is a very specific thing, and it has been in her chest since she came through that door.

She is afraid she is going to be asked what helped.

Because that question is coming. It always comes, sooner or later, and often quite early, because a person in the first hours reaches for anybody who has been in the country before. And when it comes, she is going to have to open her mouth, and what is actually in there is fourteen months of nothing very much, and a house she does not sit in properly anymore, and a great many Sunday afternoons that she got through by doing housework.

She has nothing. That is what she thinks she is holding.

If anybody has sat on a floor bracing for a question like that, stay with me. There is a passage at the end of the second chapter of Job that is the best description of comfort in the whole Bible, and it is going to change what she thinks she is doing on that floor.

Job's friends got it exactly right for seven days

Everybody knows how badly this ends. Almost nobody notices how well it starts.

Now when Job's three friends heard of all this evil that was come upon him, they came every one from his own place; for they had made an appointment together to come to mourn with him and to comfort him.Job 2:11

They heard. They came. They made an appointment with each other so that nobody had to walk in alone.

And then the next two verses. They lifted up their voices and wept. They tore their coats. They sat down with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and, the text says, none spake a word unto him, for they saw that his grief was very great.

Seven days. On the ground. Not one word.

That is the passage the whole Bible offers on how to be with somebody in the first week, and every single element of it is physical. Travel. Presence. Weeping. Sitting. Silence. There is no content in it anywhere. Nobody says anything true or false, because nobody says anything.

You are doing the thing Scripture actually describes when you sit on that floor and say nothing, and you were doing it from the minute you came through the door. Job 2:13 is the written word putting three men on the ground for a week in complete silence, and the Spirit who preserved that account is in a breakroom at half past four with two women who have not made tea.

And now the part everybody skips. Job's friends do not fail in chapter two. They fail in chapter four, when Eliphaz opens his mouth and starts explaining.

The exact moment the comfort stops is the exact moment somebody begins to account for the loss. Everything after that is thirty five chapters of increasingly confident men getting it wrong, and at the end God says to Eliphaz that His wrath is kindled against him because he has not spoken of Him the thing that is right.

Never against the silence. Only against the explaining.

You have permission from God Himself to stay in chapter two, and you were never asked to move on to chapter four. Job 42:7 has the Lord rebuking the friends for what they said and never once for the week they sat still, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over a breakroom floor waiting for somebody to produce a paragraph.

What helped is a question you may answer honestly

Now let me take the fear apart, because it is built on an assumption that is not true.

She thinks that when she is asked what helped, she has to have an answer.

Here is what happens if she tells the truth. She says, honestly, not very much. She says, I did a lot of housework. She says, fourteen months and I still cannot sit in my own front room in the evening.

That is not a failure to comfort. Watch what it does in that room.

It takes the timetable off the woman beside her. Every kind visitor for the next month will leave behind a faint impression of how long this is meant to take, without ever meaning to. And one person, on the first day, on the floor, will have said out loud that fourteen months later she is still not sitting in her front room, and that woman will carry that sentence around like a coat.

The honest answer is the gift. It has always been the gift. It is the fluent answer that costs people something.

And there is a mercy underneath it. She does not have to have found the thing that works, because there is no thing that works, and pretending there is one is the whole of what went wrong with Eliphaz.

You are more use to her honest than you would ever be prepared, and you were more use on that floor before you said one word. Proverbs 12:22 says lying lips are abomination to the LORD but they that deal truly are his delight, and the Holy Spirit does not need a good answer in order to work a room.

Being unfinished is not a disqualification anywhere in this

Now the thing under all of it, and I want to say it plainly.

She thinks fourteen months of nothing very much means she has nothing to bring.

Turn it around. What does that woman on the floor actually need in the first hours?

She does not need somebody who has come out the other side. A person who arrived visibly restored would be, at half past two on the worst day of her life, almost unbearable. It would say, quietly and without meaning to, that there is a state she is supposed to reach and she is not in it.

What she needs is somebody who is not frightened of her, and who is not in a hurry, and who is not going to be shocked by anything she says in the next two hours.

And there is exactly one person on that floor who qualifies, and she qualifies because of the fourteen months, not in spite of them.

You are able to sit in that room without flinching because of what you carry, and you were made able to do it by months you would never have chosen. 2 Corinthians 1:4 says the comfort a person receives in trouble is what gets handed on into any trouble, and the Spirit of God has never wasted a single quiet month of anybody's life.