Sitting Down Beside Without Fixing It

The window is open two inches because his father likes the air, and the sound coming in is next door's wind chime, which his father has never once complained about, which tells you something about his father.

Afternoon. The good chair by the window. The blanket that stays on the arm whether or not anybody uses it. A cup of tea on the little table with the ring mark on it that predates everybody.

His father says maybe six sentences a day now. Not because anything has gone wrong exactly, and the doctors have all had their say, and he is not going to repeat any of it here. It is just that his father has gone quiet in the last while, and the quiet is bigger than the sentences.

So the son tidies.

He straightens the pile of post. He takes the cup out to the kitchen before it is finished. He notices the bulb in the hall and says he will bring one. He asks whether the physio came and whether they said anything and whether the appointment moved. He goes out to the car for a thing. He comes back in.

He has been here two hours and he has not sat down once.

And walking to the kitchen with a cup that was not empty, he catches himself, and the thought lands with real weight: I am not visiting my father. I am servicing him.

Come and stand in the hallway with me a moment, cousin. Because there is a famous group of men in Scripture who got one week exactly right, and then got everything afterward wrong, and the week they got right is the week you need.

The seven days everybody skips

Job's friends are a byword. Every preacher uses them as an example of what not to do, and rightly, because once they start talking they say some of the worst things in the book.

But read what they did before they opened their mouths.

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

Seven days. On the ground. Not speaking.

That is not failure of nerve. That is the correct response, and the text presents it without a hint of criticism. They came, they sat, they stayed, they said nothing. Everything that goes wrong in the next thirty five chapters goes wrong the moment somebody decides that presence is not enough and starts to explain.

You are not required to improve anything in that room, and the men who got Job right got him right by sitting down. That is not an excuse for doing less; Job 2:13 records seven days of silence and reports no fault in it at all, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an ancient scene of three men on the ground and stands it up in a front room with a wind chime going next door. Sitting down is not the lesser option. It was the correct one.

Now let me say the second half, and I want to be careful because I am not accusing you of anything.

The tidying is love. I know that. Every errand you have run this afternoon is a real thing done by a real son who means it. But there is something else in it too, and you have just felt the edge of it in the hallway with a full cup in your hand.

Tasks give you somewhere to put your hands. And when the thing in the room is bigger than you can fix, hands with a job in them are a great mercy to their owner.

You have permission to be in that room with nothing in your hands, and nothing is going to come at you in the gap. Psalm 46:1 says God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes very present mean actually in the room rather than generally in the universe. You are not alone with what is bigger than you. You never have been.

What presence actually gives a person

One more thing, and it is worth knowing because it will change what you do at four o'clock.

When somebody has gone quiet, an errand run for them is received as care. But an errand also, without meaning to, says something: it says the situation is a problem and I am working on it.

A person sitting down beside you says something different. It says I am not in a hurry and I am not frightened of this and I am staying.

That is what Scripture keeps showing us God doing. He does not always fix the thing in front of the person. He does always come and be with them. The whole name Immanuel is that and nothing else: God with us. Not God fixing it. God with.

You are able to give the one thing that cannot be delegated, and it is your presence rather than your usefulness. Matthew 1:23 gives the name Immanuel, which is interpreted God with us, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes with a stronger word than for in a room where nothing can be mended. Being there is the gift. It was always the gift.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than ask about the physio.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed a person plants. Not the strength of what you feel beside a chair. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.