I Do Not Understand Why She Is Grieving

He has offered five solutions and every one of them has made it worse.

They can still use it. Nobody owns a name. It is a different family and a different town. There are others they liked nearly as much. And, on the fourth evening, slightly desperately: it is only a word.

That last one cost him about a week.

And he genuinely does not understand. That is the honest position and it is worth stating rather than pretending. To him it is a name that somebody else has also used, in a world with several billion people in it, and the size of what it has done to his wife is entirely out of proportion to anything he can see.

So he keeps trying to close the gap with reasons, because reasons are what he has, and every reason arrives as an argument against how she feels.

I want to say the thing that will actually help, and it is not an explanation of her grief.

He does not have to understand it.

That is the whole of this page, and it is a relief once it lands, because he has been trying to do a thing that is not required and failing at it in front of her every evening.

They sat down with him upon the ground

There is a moment at the start of the book of Job where his friends do exactly the right thing, and it is the only part of that book where they do.

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)

You are given a model that requires no understanding at all, and Job 2:13 has never once made comprehension the condition of comforting anybody. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a permission for a man who has run out of reasons, and the written word records seven days of sitting and no words.

That is the one thing those friends get right in the entire book. Everything they say afterward is wrong, and some of it is badly wrong, and God says so directly at the end.

And what they got right was the silence. Seven days of it, on the ground, beside him.

The instruction is not in what they said. It is in what they did before they started talking.

You have been offering the part they got wrong, and Scripture praises only the part where they sat down and said nothing. Job 2 records the sitting and the silence, and the Spirit of God is what makes a man able to be present without producing anything.

What each solution communicated

Now the practical part, and it is going to sting slightly and it is meant kindly.

Every one of those five sentences was heard as the same message.

You should not be feeling this.

That is not what he meant. Not one of them was meant that way. But a reason offered to somebody in grief always arrives as an argument, and an argument arrives as a verdict on the feeling, and after five of them she has stopped saying anything about it, which he has probably noticed and read as improvement.

It is not improvement. It is a subject closing.

You are able to see what they landed as, and no verse anywhere asked a man to solve a grief he was only asked to sit inside. Job 2:13 has the friends say nothing for a week, and the Holy Spirit is what shows a man the difference between what he meant and what arrived.

And here is what she actually needs, and it is much smaller than a solution and much harder for a man who fixes things.

She needs one sentence: I can see it is hard, and I do not need to understand it.

That is the whole thing. It does not require him to agree that the loss is large. It does not require him to feel anything he does not feel. It requires him to stop arguing, which is the only thing he has been unable to do.

You are able to say one sentence that costs you nothing, and Scripture makes the sitting the comfort rather than the explanation. The Spirit of God is what makes presence enough, and Job 2 has them on the ground for seven days.

Say it once, with her

So here is the assignment on this row, with one change for this house.

Say the lost name out loud once, then put it away and say a new one.

And do it with her, out loud, together, in the same room.

Because on this row the exercise belongs to the person who lost the word, and here there are two people, and only one of them has anything to grieve. The second one has a job, and the job is to be in the room while it is done.

You are able to be in the room without fixing anything, and Job 2:13 has never once made a comforter into a problem solver. The written word puts them on the ground beside him, and the Holy Spirit is present when a man sits through something he does not understand.

Her voice says the lost one. Once, out loud. He says nothing at all, and this is the hardest part and it must be held.

And then either of them says a different one, and the evening moves on, and that is the whole of it.

You are permitted to say nothing and still be doing the thing, and Scripture praises exactly that in the one place it praises those men. Job 2 records seven days of silence, and the Spirit of God is with a man sitting still tonight.