Everything They Said Made It Worse

I am not going to tell you what happened to Khalil.

That is deliberate. The moment I name a thing, you start measuring yours against it, and you decide either that his was worse and you have no business being in this article, or that yours was worse and I do not understand.

So: something happened to Khalil about four years ago, and it was the kind that divides a life into before and after, and he did not do anything to cause it.

What I want to talk about is the eleven things people said.

He has a list. Not written down, but he could give it to you in order, and he could tell you who said each one and where they were standing.

God has a plan.

Everything happens for a reason.

He does not give you more than you can handle.

One day you will look back and understand.

At least it was not. That one has a lot of endings.

Have you thought about what He might be trying to teach you?

Everything works together for good.

And two or three that were worse and that he has never repeated to anybody, including his wife.

Here is the thing that has taken him four years to be able to say without feeling like a monster.

Every single person on that list loves him.

Not one of them came to score a point. They came because they could not bear to stand in front of him with nothing, and every sentence they produced was a reflex to fill a silence that was frightening them.

He knows that. He has always known that. It has not helped even slightly.

Because what each of those sentences did, without anybody intending it, was hand him a small explanation for something that has no explanation he has been given, and every explanation made a shape that his life does not fit into, and so every conversation ended with him alone plus one more thing that was not true.

Ilyas came in the second month.

He is an old friend and he is not clever and he did not bring anything.

He sat in the courtyard and drank his coffee and he was there about two hours and he said, in total, maybe nine sentences, and none of them were about God.

When he left he put his hand on the back of Khalil's neck for a second at the door.

Khalil has thought about that visit more than all the others combined.

Now let me ask you which one you still hear.

Because if this is yours there is a specific sentence, said by a specific person, probably kindly, and it is still in your head years later and you have never told anybody that it did damage.

Who God was angry with

At the end of the book of Job, God speaks, and He is angry, and almost nobody notices who He is angry at.

Job has spent thirty-odd chapters saying things that would get him removed from most prayer meetings. He says God has wronged him. He demands a hearing. He says he would put his case in front of Him and fill his mouth with arguments.

His three friends have spent the same chapters defending God.

They are eloquent about it. They say things that sound entirely orthodox and some of them are quoted approvingly in other places. Their whole project is to find a reason, because a universe with a reason in it is a universe they can live in.

It came about after the Lord had spoken these words to Job, that the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, "My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends, because you have not spoken of Me what is right as My servant Job has."Job 42:7

Read that twice.

The wrath is not against the man who said God had wronged him. It is against the three who explained.

And the reason given is you have not spoken of Me what is right. The explanations were not merely unhelpful. God calls them false. Not false about Job: false about Him.

And then look at what God never does in that entire book. He shows up, and He speaks out of a whirlwind for four chapters, and He does not once tell Job why.

Job never finds out. He is in the room with God Himself and the reason is not given to him, and the book treats that as a resolution.

So hear this said over you, in a courtyard with the lamps just lit. You have not been given the reason and that is not a gap in your faith, it is the position the most-tested man in Scripture was left standing in by God Himself. That is written into the last chapter of Job in God's own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Comforter, and He is the one who does that work rather than a sentence somebody produced in a doorway.

Now let me be careful with the people who said those things, because I am not going to make them villains for you.

They were frightened.

Silence in front of somebody else's ruin is one of the most difficult things a human being is asked to do, and almost nobody can do it, and the sentences come out to make the speaker able to stay in the room.

Your mother said hers because she could not survive looking at you without one. Your friend said his because he had nothing and the nothing was unbearable to him.

None of that makes the sentences true, and you are allowed to know both things at once: that they love you, and that what they gave you was false.

And here is the thing I most want to take off you.

You have been carrying their explanations as though refusing them is a failure of faith.

It is not. God Himself refused them, in print, with heat, and He did it on behalf of the man who was suffering and against the men who were tidying it up.

You are permitted to say: I have not been given the reason.

That is not doubt. It is the most accurate sentence available to you and it happens to be the one God defended.

And underneath it, at the same time, sits the other thing, and this is the whole of what this tenant has ever believed. He is working. Not that it is good, not that it was needed, not that it was sent to teach you something. That He is at work in the middle of it, and that what He is doing has not been shown to you, and both halves of that are true at once and neither one cancels the other.

The word says that we walk by faith and not by sight, which is a sentence that assumes there will be things not seen. And the Spirit of God is the one who helps in our weakness and intercedes with groanings too deep for words, which is the only description in Scripture of a prayer that has no explanation in it and is received anyway.