They Keep Asking When I Will Sort It

Every Sunday, somebody asks.

Not the same person. It rotates, which is worse in a way, because it means there is a general awareness and it comes at you from a different direction each week.

And you have developed an answer. You know the one. Something light, something about getting to it, and then you change the subject and everybody lets you.

And on the way home you think about it, every single week, for about twenty minutes.

Here is what I want to look at: the fact that you have to produce something.

Somebody asks, and a sentence has to come out of you, and the sentence is never true, and producing it costs you something small that you do not get back.

Over two years that is about a hundred small untrue sentences about the most painful room in your house.

I want to give you permission to have nothing. That is the whole article. Not a better answer, not a script. Nothing, as a legitimate response, backed by one of the most striking pieces of behavior in the whole book.

They sat with him and said nothing at all

There is a moment at the start of Job, before the arguments begin, where his friends get it exactly right.

So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great. (Job 2:13, King James Version)

Seven days. On the ground. And not one word spoken.

That is the part of that book people skip on the way to the speeches, and it is the only part where those men are commended by their behavior rather than corrected. The moment they opened their mouths, everything went wrong.

You are entitled to the silence those men kept for seven days, and no answer has ever once been owed by the person grieving. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a man who produces a light sentence every Sunday, and Job 2:13 records seven days of deliberate wordlessness as the right response.

And notice the direction of it.

They were the ones who said nothing. Job was not required to explain himself, describe his state, or give anybody an update, and the account is entirely comfortable with that.

You have never once been required to give an update, and the requirement has never once existed in the text. The written word sits people down in silence and asks nothing of the one in the middle, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a man thinking about it for twenty minutes in the car.

Why they keep asking

Let me be fair to them, because they are not doing anything wrong either.

People ask because silence about a thing feels to them like abandoning you. Asking is how they signal that they have not forgotten. That is the intent, every single time, from every one of them.

And it lands as a request for progress, because the question is shaped like one. Nobody in your family means it that way and everybody in your family asks it that way, because there is no other sentence available to them.

You were receiving affection and hearing a deadline, and the affection has never once been what tired you. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a man who loves every person who asks him, and Job 2:13 has the friends keep silence because they saw the grief was great.

And here is the specific cost of the answering.

Each light sentence is a small performance of being further along than you are. Do that a hundred times and a man starts to feel like a liar in his own family, and then the visits themselves acquire a weight they never used to have.

You have been performing progress on a hundred Sundays, and not one of those performances has ever once been a lie about your character. The written word lets a man sit in silence for a week with his friends beside him, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a man who has started to dread Sunday lunch.

One door, and no answer

So here is today, and it has nothing in it that could be reported.

Open the door of the room. Look. Close it again.

You are doing something with no progress in it, and nothing today has ever once had to be reportable. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man standing outside a closed door in his own hallway, and Job 2:13 records seven days with nothing to show and calls it right.

And here is what you can say next Sunday, if you want something.

Nothing about it yet. Four words, entirely true, requiring no performance. Or say nothing at all, which is also available, and which the men in Job managed for a week.

You are allowed four true words or none at all, and neither one has ever once been rudeness. The written word makes silence the correct response to great grief, and the Spirit of God is the one present with a man who no longer has to produce a sentence in his sister's kitchen.