“How can you comfort me? All your explanations are wrong.”
“All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us.”
“But may all who search for you be filled with joy and gladness in you. May those who love your salvation repeatedly shout, ‘The Lord is great!’”
‘A prudent person foresees danger and takes precautions. The simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences.”
I don’t do well with silence. Usually, some strange compulsion drives me to offer opinions and solutions, requested or not. Ofttimes, this requires more than a little creativity (as in when there are no good answers, and I don’t have enough knowledge to provide legitimate opinions). Like a basketball referee whose view of the play is blocked, I confess to occasionally making up the call. Or, as my father was fond of saying, “He calls ‘em like he doesn’t see ‘em at all.”
Probably as a result of my own failures and limitations in the area of advice suitable for others, I’m beginning to appreciate more and more than there is a time and place when the absolute best thing to do is do little or nothing at all. There are times when life just doesn’t make sense, and we can drive ourselves and others crazy trying to make sense of it. In our drive to force some semblance of order onto chaos, we rationalize ourselves into conclusions about situations that may not be accurate or fair to those involved. In a rush to come up with a simple answer, we blow past the tough questions, opting instead to engage in a bit of revisionist history to conform the past into our image of what should be or should have been, instead of conforming our answers to the real facts.
There’s a big danger here. As we draw conclusions that best suit our preconceived notions and answers, we risk doing more harm than good. This is exactly what Job’s friends ran into. For seven days, they were content to just sit with Job, commiserating with him in his misery, understanding there are some tragedies too great for words. But eventually, like most humans do, they got impatient with Job and decided it was time to fix him. Problem was, they had no better answers than they'd had at the first. Not content with simple compassion and empathy, though, they fell into cliché and mischaracterization in order to fit their facts into their theology. God preserves the good and destroys the wicked. He is fair and just and knows the hearts of men. Job has been destroyed. Thus, God must have judged him wicked. Thus, he must be wicked and simply denying or blinded to his own sinfulness. Ergo, he must search himself and exorcise his sinfulness so God can restore him.
What a brutal, unkind approach to friendship such counsel is! Yet, when Job resists, suddenly the friends take his willfulness and rejection of their diagnoses as a sure sign of the correctness of their position and castigate him even more violently until their friendship itself faces destruction. Again, the obvious point is don’t judge. We just cannot handle it, or exercise it properly, as prone to fallibility as we are ourselves.
A true friend has got to be comfortable with silence. Sometimes, there are no answers – at least, none that we can discern – and our efforts to manufacture them can do a lot more harm than good. Instead of trying to fix each other, or explain away senseless, if not altogether unjust, tragedy, we do well to better understand the blessings of silence. This in no way means we should leave our grieving friends alone. Far from it. There may be times our personal presence is all that stands between them and some very poor choices. But it does suggest there are times when the best kind of friend to be is silent.
Christ promised His presence only when two or more are gathered in His name. When I am lost, I usually require a friend or two to help me find the way. But I don’t need or want their quick fix solutions; I just want kindred, loving and empathetic souls which, in union with mine, will bring the Holy Spirit into the situation and make His presence and wisdom real. Seldom do I need (or even have the ability to discern) the specific answers to life. What I need, like Job, is a deeper communion with the Author and Perfecter of life. If I am still long enough, and willing to submit once more to the Lord’s sovereignty in all things, I can usually, eventually figure things out on my own. But for situations which absolutely defy explanation or understanding, most times, it’s enough to know we have friends beside us who share our bewilderment but are willing nonetheless to come as Christ’s ambassadors to reassure us of His love.
Life throws at us any number of situations that surpass our ability to make sense of them. Let’s not waste time or risk damaging our friends further by trying to make sense of that which can make no sense. Instead, let’s just take it on ourselves to be Christ for our friends. Shield them where we can, and where we can’t, just love them through the storm. Sometimes, the best answer to a problem is no answer at all.
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