The Community of Death

It wasn't a good week.
It began with the news that the 22-year-old son of two of my best friends died, and ended with a late night phone call on Saturday with the news that another friend was driving to dinner with his wife when a tree fell on their car, crushing his side and killing him instantly, while the wife walked away barely scratched.
Even though the deaths were very different in nature - the young man's death was the result of a poor choice on his part, while it is hard to explain how a car driving down a city street and a tree falling across that street should meet at that exact moment - both events had one thing in common:
Community.
In both instances, as soon as the word got out, friends gathered at the homes of the affected families. Because both families go to the same church, many of the people who gathered on consecutive weekends were the same people.
We gathered, not knowing what to say.
We gathered, knowing that whatever we said wouldn't - couldn't - be enough.
But we gathered just the same, to sit together, and take turns holding a mother who'd lost her "baby" boy or a wife who'd lost her husband.
We prayed, and we talked, and we comforted each other as much as we could.
 But mostly we just sat together - in the later case, from 10:30 at night until after 4 in the morning. And even then, some stayed on all night just ... because.
This was no "Facebook" social network.
There was no instant messaging or texting or tweeting.
This was true community: real people, sharing the same space, breathing the same air, touching each other on so many levels - physically, emotionally, even spiritually.
As I sat quietly in this house, I thought of three men: Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite.
Friends of the Old Testament character we know as Job.
When what seemed like inexplicable trouble befell Job; when he lost his family, his fortune, and eventually his health for no humanly explicable reason; when his shame and suffering forced him into the outskirts of the very city in which he once walked the streets as a respected leader, a judge; the Bible says these three friends of Job "... set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him ... Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was."
Seven days and seven nights, without a word; just sitting there, keeping Job company.
It is a powerful image of what it means to "share each others' burdens."
I realize that later on Jobs' friends have plenty to say, and some of it is pretty judgmental. Some of it sounds like good, solid, even Biblical advice, but we can see that it is not because Job's friends do not know what we, the reader, know: the real reason for Job's trouble.
And as much as I love talking about the book of Job (the Trophy Wife accuses me of having been obsessed with it, and she's probably right), I'll save that for another day.
Because the point of this is that in these most senseless and inexplicable tragedies, I was blessed to witness the true "fellowship of the believer."
And in a world where we can "friend" and "de-friend" people with a simple key stroke, these were friends bound by something more.
Faith.
Hope.
And Love.