Help Me Be Still

I’m reading the book of Job. It is not my favorite because it’s hard to accept that God allows a faithful and righteous man to lose everything. I don’t like to think about that, but Job is the first of the books of wisdom in the Bible, so I read it because there is stuff in there that I need to know. Also, as hard as it may be, it never hurts to take a good look at myself and admit that I don’t measure up to Job’s faithfulness. 

I’m only six chapters in this time, but it struck me this morning that Job has some serious wisdom for friendship and ministry. As the story goes, God points out Job’s faithfulness to Satan and Satan challenges God like, “Yeah right, of course he’s faithful, you bless everything he does.” Then God allows Satan to plague Job so that Satan can see that Job is always faithful, in good times and in bad times (that’s a whole lesson in itself, but not the one that struck me today). Satan takes everything from Job, his livestock, his property, his family, and his health. 

Job is s.u.f.f.e.r.i.n.g.

This is when Job’s friends come to visit. They also know the Lord, and they begin to question Job’s behavior. They suggest he has sinned and that God is correcting him for something. You can go read the whole conversation for yourself in chapters 4 and 5, but Eliphaz, the first friend to speak, really piles on. He says smart things, but that is not what Job needs to hear in his grief. His words are hurtful and Job has the guts to tell him so in 6:14-15, “To him who is afflicted, kindness should be shown by his friend, even though he forsakes the fear of the Almighty. My brothers have dealt with me deceitfully like a brook”. In my words, Job said, “Hey, my friends should be comforting me, not lecturing. You looked like a cold drink of water coming to refresh my soul, but really you are a dried up stream in the desert, leaving me thirsty and hopeless.”

THAT is what struck me. How often do we respond to grief with questioning and correction and solutions? Humans like to fix things. I know I do. I like to know all the answers and tell what I know, and I like to fix things. But, I also know that in the deep, dark grief that has threatened to swallow me whole, I didn’t want correction and solutions and answers. I wanted someone to sit with me and just let me be hurt for a minute. I wanted someone to say, “I love you and you are going to be okay” and “You have a big, beautiful life and you don’t have to live in this grief forever.” 

I wanted comfort. 

I’ve thought about friends who have comforted me - friends who sat through quiet lunches while I was traumatized by Dave’s cancer diagnosis and treatment and just let me be quiet, friends who listened without judgement to how hard it is to go on with life after cancer changes everything, friends who prayed with us and cared for us when hard, soul-wrenching things happened at King’s Home, friends who know my deepest, most personal wounds and just love me without telling me what to do. That is friendship. That is ministry. See, I know that God is always with me because His spirit lives in me, but His spirit lives inside other believers, too, and sometimes a soul needs another physical soul to sit with it in its grief. Sometimes we need to feel God’s presence in the quiet of another soul who is willing to just sit and listen without fixing, to reassure us that we are loved and we have worth. 

Job needed a friend to be compassionate, to care for him, to comfort him, and thank goodness he had the guts to say just that because I needed to be reminded that sometimes I need to stop trying to fix things. Sometimes, my job as a friend is just to be still and let my friend feel God’s presence in their grief. 

The Shovel and the Sword

“Those who built on the wall, and those who carried burdens, loaded themselves so that with one hand they worked at construction, and with the other held a weapon.”  Nehemiah 4:17

One of the things that I often pray over my family is Nehemiah 4:17 - that we would be aware and on guard, protecting our family in prayer even as we do the daily work of life.

For months I’ve been praying for families. I’ve been asking God to restore broken and hurting families, to restore Godly leadership at home. To draw fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, back to Himself and teach them how to lead and live in a way that glorifies Him and heals this hurting world. I know that He does these things because I’ve watched Him restore my own, little by little, year by year since cancer snatched us right to the bottom of a deep, dark pit. 

I’ve been reading Nehemiah this week because that just happens to be where I am in my current trek through the Bible, and I cannot help but see some parallels with what is happening in the world right now. Nehemiah, a Jewish man and the cupbearer for King Artaxerxes, went to work sad one day because some of the Israelites who had returned to Jerusalem from captivity were in distress. The city walls had been torn down and burned so there was no protection for them. After talking to God about it, Nehemiah shared his worry with the king and the king sent him to Jerusalem to repair the wall. 

When construction started, their enemies began to harass and threaten them and the workers became afraid that they would be attacked. Nehemiah did two things: he reminded them that God had sanctioned the work and would protect them and he stationed armed guards around the work. His response was both faithful (“Remember the Lord, great and awesome...” v. 14) and practical (he set a guard v. 16). When the walls were finished, more Jewish people returned from their captivity. All the people gathered to celebrate the completion of the wall, and Ezra, the priest, read the book of the Law. The people  stood up, recognizing the importance of the reading of God’s word in their holy city after their return from exile. 

Now, it wasn’t all easy-peasy after that; the people had spent years in captivity in a pagan culture and developed some practices that went against all of God’s plans for them. Nehemiah had a big job of reinstituting the Jewish culture, retraining God’s chosen people to be holy before God, but he kept up the work, hard conversation by hard conversation. 

While I read and think on this story, I can’t help but reflect on this forced return to our homes, the cancellation of extra-curicullar activities that keep us busy and separate from our families. I’m not knocking the extra things we do to make our lives full - the Lord knows we spend 4 nights a week out of the house during soccer season and I firmly believe sports are good for my kids. 

But y’all, we’ve been given a chance to rebuild the walls around our families, to shore up the weak spots and rehang the gates, to protect them from a world that never stops trying to kill, steal, and destroy. We have an opportunity to retrain ourselves to be a holy people, to seek and trust God. Will you? Will you do the work, with a shovel in one hand and the Sword of the Spirit in the other?