The Neighbor Who Meant Well

There are two mailboxes on that stretch of road and they are eleven feet apart, and she now goes down for hers at about a quarter to two, because Judy goes at three.

Her husband died in August. Fifty one years. He went out to move a hose and did not come back in, and she found him in the side yard about forty minutes later, and the first person up that road was Judy, who ran the whole eleven hundred feet in flip flops and stayed until the ambulance came and then stayed after it went.

Judy has been her neighbor for twenty six years. Judy fed her cattle for a week. Judy did her laundry, in Judy's own house, without asking, because that is what she does.

And in September, at the mailboxes, Judy said: honey, he is better off than we are.

She said it with tears in her own eyes. She has said the same thing about her own mother for eleven years and it is what holds her together.

And ever since, that widow has been going down at a quarter to two.

She could not tell you exactly what it did. She has tried. The closest she can get is this: it moved her husband. For fifty one years he had been in this house and this yard and this road, and that sentence took him somewhere else and set him up there and left her down here, and now the whole thing has a shape she cannot stand.

She does not want to be told he is better off. She does not want to be told where he is at all. She wants him at the kitchen door with his boots in his hand.

And Judy would lie down on that road for her.

If that is a mailbox anybody has been timing, come and sit on the tailgate. There is a line in Job that says the whole thing, and Job says it to men who came a long way to help him.

Comfort in vain

Here is the verse, and it is Job talking to friends rather than to enemies.

How then comfort ye me in vain, seeing in your answers there remaineth falsehood?Job 21:34

Comfort ye me in vain. That is the exact phrase for what happened at that mailbox.

Not comfort withheld. Not comfort refused. Comfort offered, sincerely, at length, in tears, and empty when it arrived. And the reason he gives is not that they were cruel. It is that there was something not right inside the answer.

That is a very careful complaint and it is worth noticing how narrow it is. He does not say they are liars. He says there remaineth falsehood, which is a way of saying the thing has something wrong in it that they have not seen.

You are naming an emptiness rather than an offense, and you were never bitter for finding a kind sentence hollow. Job 21:34 is the written word putting sincere comfort and something false in the same breath without convicting anybody of malice, and the Holy Spirit is the one who preserved a complaint that precise.

And here is what was not right in the answer at the mailbox. Not the theology. Judy's sentence assumed the problem was his condition, and the problem was never his condition. The problem is that he is not in the yard.

That sentence answered a question nobody had asked.

You have been missing him rather than worrying about him, and you were never asking anybody where he is. Job 21:34 names an answer that does not fit the question, and the Spirit of God is not requiring a woman to be reassured about something she was never anxious about.

What that sentence is for, and who it is for

Now let me stand up for Judy, because she has fed those cattle and run eleven hundred feet in flip flops and she is the nearest human being for four miles.

That sentence is her sentence. She has been saying it about her own mother for eleven years, and it works for her, and it is what gets her through February every year.

So what she handed over at the mailbox was not a lecture and not a correction. It was her own crutch, offered to somebody with a broken leg, and it did not fit, and she has no way of knowing that.

That is what most bad comfort is. It is a person handing over the thing that worked on them.

And here is the part that will cost you if it goes on. Judy is not going to stop going to the mailbox at three. She is going to keep going there for another twenty years, and she is going to keep wondering, quietly, why the timing changed, and eventually she is going to decide it was something she did.

She will be right, and she will never know what, and she will carry it.

Right now, as you read this, you are free to keep her and to leave nine words on the gravel, and you were never given a choice between the two. Job 21:34 charges the answer rather than the friend, and His Spirit is not asking anybody to hold something against a woman who ran that road in flip flops.

Nobody has to move him

Here is the last piece and it is the one that actually took the ground out from under you.

A sentence that places a person moves him. That is what it does, however true or untrue it is. It takes a man out of a side yard and puts him somewhere, and it does it in the ear of somebody whose entire body still expects him at the kitchen door.

Scripture, interestingly, does not do this at gravesides.

Watch it. Jesus arrives at Bethany four days late. Both sisters speak to Him. Nobody in that whole account, including Him, tells anybody where Lazarus currently is. Not one word about it. He asks where they have laid him, which is a question about a stone and not about a state, and then He weeps, and then He says a man's name.

The most informed person who has ever stood at a graveside declined to place anybody.

You are met by a Christ who did not move anybody at a tomb, and you were never owed a location. John 11:34 has Him asking where they laid the body rather than announcing where the man is, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that side yard since August without a syllable about it.