Sometimes, the best thing we can do for people is shut up (Job, continued).

Glorify God and Enjoy him Forever.

Yes. If you are a follower of Christ, I assume you want to do that. You want to glorify God. Certainly you want to enjoy Him forever.

Then I start thinking, what does it mean to “glorify God?”

So I think – Let me go rehab houses in North Birmingham and deliver food to the hungry and those shut in. Let me go dig wells and bring clean drinking water to people in Southeast Asia. Let me go with a team of doctors and tend to the sickness of people high in the mountains of Honduras. Let me start a drive to collect shoe boxes that bring not only joy but the Gospel to thousands of children around the world.

But then I look at Job, and I wonder – what if glorifying God means losing everything I have – my job, my income, my children, my health? What it if means my spouse turning on me, or betraying me (think Hosea, a prophet who was given the dubious honor of marrying a beautiful woman who turned out to be incredibly unfaithful, but to whom Hosea was told to remain faithful so his life could be a living example of God’s relationship to Israel)?

Whoa. Wait a minute. Do I really want to glorify God like that?

Mother Theresa once said, “I know God won’t give me more than I can handle. I just wish he didn’t trust me so much.”

It’s like a youth director I had when I was in high school, a guy named Dan Dehaan who said, “If you are going to ask God to be humble, be prepared for him to humiliate you.” That has stuck with me. Truthfully, I want the kind of humility I can be proud of, you know?

And that kind of “glorifying God” is, to me, scary. But remember the C.S. Lewis quote on Aslan: “Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

So we see Job, having lost so much, sitting outside the city gates where he once sat as a leading citizen, trusted advisor, example to all who passed before him, now reduced to sobbing over his losses and scrapping himself with pottery shards in an attempt to get some relief for the sores that have broken out all over his body.

With all else gone, we see that Job has still got friends. Good friends, actually. They hear about Job’s problems and come to him as good friends do.

Job 2:11 - “Now when Job's three friends heard of all this evil that had come upon him, they came each from his own place, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They made an appointment together to come to console with him and comfort him. And when they saw him from afar, they did not recognize him; and they raised their voices and wept; and they rent their robes and sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven. And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.”

Think about that. The friends saw their friend lose everything – family, wealth, health, position, prestige – and while so many people would avoid someone like that (and we’ll see in Job 42 that apparently quite a few people did just that), these three are moved to compassion, to tears, to true sorrow over the plight of their friend.

One of the hardest things to do – at least it is for me – is to know what to say when a friend is going through something hard. We want to show we care, our hearts are in the right place. But we just don’t know what to say.

When I was a boy, I had an older cousin who was a missionary in Equador. She dedicated her life to serving God in South America, married a doctor, became pregnant, then came home to see her family and the baby died. Just months old – what we used to call “Crib death.” Our family was at the house, trying to do what we could, but I remember a pastor who came over and, looking for something to say, said something like, “Just know that your son is in the arms of Jesus.” And I’ll never forget what she said, “I’d rather my baby be here in my arms, where he belongs.”

I remember being so impressed with this kind of honesty. The pastor was right – at least, we hope he was – that the baby was in the arms of Jesus. But my cousin was hurting, and those words didn’t bring any comfort.

I know it’s hard to be with someone who is going through something difficult and not say something. I know we all feel like we have to say something, make an attempt to say something of comfort.

Is there anything worse than going through the receiving line at a funeral? We say things like “Doesn’t he look natural!” when we know a dead body is about the most un-natural thing in the world. We say, “He is in heaven now” and I think of my cousin and her response of, “yeah, well, he belongs here with me.”

We say, “Call me if there is anything I can do for you.” That’s not bad and it’s well-meaning and I’ve said it myself. But I had someone say to me, “What does that mean? Do they really think I’m going to pick up the phone in the middle of the night when I’m crying my head off and call so they can hear me cry?” I know my friends’ reaction seems a little extreme, but it was an honest reaction to all these people who she rarely saw when her husband was dying and now suddenly they want her to call.

I know a couple who went years trying to have a child, but to no avail. And a well-meaning friend actually said to them, “Well, maybe God just doesn’t mean for you to be parents.” Can you think of anything more un-comforting to say? Fortunately, this couple did eventually have children and are wonderful parents.

I read a story of a lady whose child was born with a condition that caused it to die rather quickly, and she tells of a friend who said to her, “Well, we prayed for our children every day of my pregnancy and they were all born healthy and with no problems.” The first lady, of course, was left wondering, “Did I not pray enough? Is this my fault?”

My own wife was in a terrible car wreck a few years ago, in a coma and we didn’t know if she’d live. Her recovery took months (and continues even now, years after the accident). I will never forget a well-meaning lady saying to her, “Well, you certainly look good. Look at all the weight you’ve lost!” Yes, this is what you call a “crash” diet: get hit by a car, be fed through a tube for a month …

We’re going to get critical of Job’s friends in a few minutes. But first – let’s give them credit for caring enough to stick their nose in Job’s business. They see a friend hurting, and they come to him, and sit with him for seven days, not saying a word. Do you know how hard that must have been? And yet we’ll soon see it was the smartest thing they did.

And you know what it says to me? Sometimes the best thing we can do for people is just be there. Don’t talk. Just be there. Your physical presence can mean more than anything you can say.

When my wife was in ICU and I was at the hospital day and night for a month, we had some wonderful friends who came by. But one friend, in particular, came and just sat in the waiting room. She never asked for me to come out of the ICU where I sat by my wife’s bed, she had no expectation of coming back to see us. She was just there for us.

Another friend called me and said, “Let’s go to lunch.” We walked to a fast food place across the street from the hospital. He said, “I don’t want to know how you are or your wife is or what is going on. Let’s just be normal for a few minutes.” He’ll never know how much I appreciated that. Our conversation was banal, ordinary, maybe even at times we didn’t speak, but it meant so much to me at that time.

It’s hard to be quiet. Particularly after a certain amount of time passes and we start thinking, “OK, you’ve suffered. It’s time to get on with your life.”

But then, very often we don't know the whole story. What we learn from the story of Job is that there was something more going on, greater than we could imagine, with cosmic consequences, and whatever Job's friends would say (and we'll get to that in the next blog) was just wrong. Oh, it sounded good. And in another situation, Job's friends might even be right.

Not this time, though. And that's a lesson for all of us.

Be careful - no, be thoughtful before you speak.

And there is nothing wrong with silence. Just being there can speak volumes.