Everybody Is Watching To See How I Am

You will walk in and eleven people will look at your face.

They will do it fast and they will think they are doing it invisibly, and every one of them will have finished the assessment inside two seconds. And then the whole room will settle or not settle depending on what they found.

That is the job you have been given and nobody gave it to you out loud.

It happened because you were the steady one at the funeral. You did the things that needed doing, you spoke to the people who needed speaking to, and a family under that much pressure takes the first stable surface it finds and builds on it.

So now you are the barometer. If you are all right, the day is all right. If you are not, several people in that room will come apart, and you know exactly which ones.

Let me say the first thing plainly. That is not a role. It is a load, and it was handed to you at the worst possible moment by people who were not in a state to be choosing anything, and it has never been reviewed since.

And before anything else: if the months since have taken you past what one man can hold, 988 is a crisis line and it is answered, and a doctor, a counselor or a pastor you trust is the right room for it. Nothing written here stands in for a qualified human being.

They sat down with him upon the ground

There is a scene about three men that everybody remembers for the wrong part, and the right part is the first seven days.

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, and none spake a word.

Those men are famous for what they said afterward, and most of what they said afterward was wrong. But this verse is before any of that, and what they did here was correct, and it is the only thing in the entire book that God does not later take apart.

They sat down. On the ground, where he was. And they said nothing at all for a week. And the reason given is that they saw that his grief was very great. They looked, and they saw the size of it, and their response to the size of it was to sit down and be quiet.

You are allowed to be seen at the size you actually are, and Scripture records a week of company with no words in it at all. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in a week where nobody says anything, and it is written into Job 2:13 that the seeing of the grief produced silence rather than management.

And notice what they did not do. They did not assess him and then decide how the room should feel.

You were never the barometer, and the Holy Spirit does not ask a man to regulate a room with his own face. The written word puts them on the ground rather than watching from a distance, and Job 2:13 has three men take the grief as the fact and arrange themselves around it.

What the job is actually costing

Now let me be exact, because a man in your position will otherwise conclude that this is just how it is.

Being the barometer means a man cannot grieve in company. Every room becomes work. The face is running, the assessment is being made, and some part of him is monitoring the effect he is having on everybody else.

So the only place you can actually grieve is alone. In a truck, or at four in the morning, or in a yard in the dark. Which means that your grief has become a solitary activity, permanently, by an arrangement nobody made deliberately.

You have been grieving alone by an arrangement rather than by choice, and Job 2:13 makes company the first response rather than the last. The Spirit of God is present in the truck and in the yard and also intended to be present in a room with other people, and Scripture puts three men on the ground beside a grieving man for a week.

And here is the part that will matter most to you, because it is about them and not about you.

The people being protected are not being protected. They are being managed. And several of them know, at some level, that the man they are looking at is running a face, because people can tell, and what that produces in a family is not comfort but a low unease that nobody can name.

The steadiest thing you could give that room is not a better performance. It is one crack, in one place, in front of one person.

You were never holding that family up, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the actual steadying in a room where a man has stopped trying to do it himself. The written word puts the grief in the open and the company on the ground, and Job 2:13 has the friends respond to the visible size of a grief rather than to a managed version of it.

One person, told in advance

So here is the assignment, and it is one person and it is said before the day.

Tell one person the truth about how the day will go for you, and name the chair you would like them near.

Not the whole family. Not a speech. One person, chosen because they can hear it without needing to fix it.

Something like: I am not going to be all right on that day, and I would like you to sit near me.

You are able to ask for company rather than for help, and Scripture makes the sitting the whole of what those men did well. The Spirit of God is with a man saying a sentence he has not said since the funeral, and it is written into Job 2:13 that the right response to a great grief was to sit down and say nothing.

And the sitting near is the specific request, because it is the only one that works. Do not ask them to check on you, which makes them a monitor. Do not ask them to help, because there is no help. Ask them to be physically near you at intervals during the day, which is what Job's friends did and which is the one thing the Bible commends in that entire story.

You are asking for a chair beside you rather than for anything to be fixed, and the Holy Spirit carries a man better through a day where one person knows the truth than through a day where eleven people are being reassured. The written word records seven days of exactly that, and Job 2:13 gives the company no job except presence.