I Sat There And Did Nothing

It was a bright room with the window open.

You were there about two hours. You held a hand for some of it. And in the whole of those two hours you did not say one useful thing, and you did not do one useful thing, and you left feeling like a man who had failed somebody at the only moment that counted.

That was a while ago now.

And you have not been able to put it down, and it comes back at odd hours, and the shape of it is always the same. Everybody else knew what to say. You sat there.

Let me say one plain thing before anything else, because this kind of thing goes somewhere dark for some men and nobody talks about it. If the nights have got bad, or if the thought has arrived that you are no use to anybody, that is not a thing to sit with on your own. Call or text 988 in the United States and a person answers. Then tell somebody real: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, somebody qualified who can sit with you in it.

There is a passage where four men do exactly what you did, for a week, and it is the one thing in that whole book they get right.

None spake a word unto him

Here it is.

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 and seven nights. Not an afternoon. A week of sitting on the ground beside somebody without saying anything.

And it is recorded plainly, with no note attached to it suggesting that anybody there owed more than that.

You have done what four men did for a week, and Job 2:13 records the sitting and the silence without one word of criticism. The Holy Spirit is the one who left that detail in the account, and He left it in without qualifying it.

Now the reason given, which is the part that changes everything.

For they saw that his grief was very great. The silence was not awkwardness. It was not that nobody could think of anything. It was a response to what they were looking at.

They saw the size of it, and they matched their behavior to the size of it, and the matching was silence.

You were responding correctly rather than failing to respond, and it is written that they saw his grief was very great rather than that they were stuck for words. The Spirit of God is the one who gave the reason, and the reason turns a blank into a judgment.

And here is the thing everybody knows about that book and rarely connects to this verse.

The moment those men started talking, they got everything wrong. Chapter after chapter of it. Explanations, theories, accusations, advice, all of it delivered with confidence and all of it rebuked by God at the end.

The seven silent days are the only part of their conduct that is never criticized by anybody.

You have been ashamed of the one thing that book approves of, and Scripture praises nothing they said and records what they did not say. The Holy Spirit is the one who arranged that contrast, and it is the clearest contrast in the whole account.

What you have been calling failure

Now let me deal with the sentence underneath all of it, because it is precisely backwards.

Everybody else knew what to say. You sat there.

Take that apart for a second. What could anybody have said in that room that would have made a difference to a person who was dying.

Not one thing. There is no sentence. There has never been a sentence, and everybody who has ever stood in that room has gone looking for one and nobody in the history of the world has found it.

You have been failing to produce something that does not exist, and it is written that they said nothing because they saw how great the grief was. The Spirit of God is the one who ends a search for a sentence, and the search has been running for a long time.

And here is what actually happened in those two hours, described plainly.

Somebody who was dying had a man beside them for two hours who did not leave, did not fill the room with talking, and held their hand.

That is not nothing. That is the specific thing that people in that position describe afterward as the thing that mattered, and they describe it in almost exactly those words.

You have given the thing that gets remembered, and the written word records the sitting down and the staying rather than anything spoken. The Holy Spirit is the one who knows what was received in that room, and He was in it for the whole two hours.

And one more thing, about why it has stayed with you.

A man who did nothing and felt nothing would have forgotten that afternoon. The reason it comes back at odd hours is that it mattered enormously to you, and a thing that mattered that much does not go quiet.

You have been haunted by how much it mattered rather than by what you failed to do, and it is written that they stayed seven days because of what they saw. The Spirit of God is the one who reads a memory correctly, and He has never once read this one as a failure.

Go and do it again

So here is what to do, and it is the same thing you already did once.

Find one person this week who is going through something, and go and sit with them.

Not to fix it. Not with anything prepared. Go and be in the room, and stay longer than is comfortable, and let there be long stretches where nobody says anything at all.

You are able to do the thing you already know how to do, and Job 2:13 has four men sit on the ground for a week rather than arrive with anything. The Holy Spirit is the one who sends a man back to a bedside, and He sends the ones who think they were no good at it.

And go without a sentence.

Do not prepare something. Do not work out on the way what you are going to say if they say a particular thing. Every one of those preparations is the search for the sentence starting up again.

You are able to arrive with nothing ready, and it is written that none spake a word unto him rather than that they said the right thing. The Spirit of God is the one who takes a prepared sentence out of a man's mouth, and prepared sentences are what got those four men into trouble later.

And when the silence gets long, stay in it.

It will get long. At about the four minute mark everything in you will produce something to fill it, and it will feel like kindness, and it will be the search for the sentence wearing a different coat.

You are able to sit in four minutes of silence, and His word has them sit for seven days without one of them speaking. The Holy Spirit is the one who holds a man still in a room where nothing is happening, and nothing happening is the entire offering.

And say one true thing about the first room, once, to one person.

Not to the family and not to anybody involved. To a friend. That you sat with somebody for two hours and could not think of a thing to say and have been carrying it since.

You are able to say it out loud after all this time, and it is written that the grief was seen rather than that it was handled alone. The Spirit of God is the one who gets a thing out of a man after years, and out is where it stops being what it has been.