Six Messages She Deleted

The first one had a Bible verse in it and she deleted it before she got to the end of typing it.

The second was about how sorry she was, which was true and which read, on the screen, like a card from a garage.

The third one asked if there was anything she could do, and she deleted that one because she could hear how it puts the work back on the person who has nothing left.

The fourth was too long. The fifth was too short and had an emoji in it that she stared at for a while.

The sixth said: I do not know what to say. And she deleted that one because it sounded like she was making it about herself.

That was Sunday. It is now Thursday.

Her friend's father died on Sunday morning and four days have gone by and she has sent nothing, and every hour that passes makes the sending harder, because now anything she sends has four days of silence sitting in front of it.

She is not a cold person. She loves this woman. They have known each other since they were nineteen and she was at her wedding.

She has been so frightened of getting it wrong that she has done the one thing that is definitely wrong, and she knows it, and she has still not sent anything.

Sit down. There is a picture in Scripture of somebody doing this right, and it is not the part of the book people usually quote.

They sat with him for seven days

Here it is, and it is the last thing Job's friends did before they ruined everything.

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.Job 2:13

Those men are famous for what they said afterward, and they deserve most of what they get for it. But read what they did first.

They came. They sat on the ground. They stayed a week. And they said nothing at all, and the reason given is not that they had nothing to say. It is that they could see how bad it was.

That is the model, and notice how little content it requires. There is no verse in it, no explanation, no offer of help, and nothing that needed drafting six times.

You are being shown presence rather than words. Job 2:13 has seven days of nothing being said, and the Spirit kept that in the record as the one part of that story where those men got it right.

And what went wrong afterward is instructive too. They started talking. They started explaining. The moment they moved from being there to accounting for it, everything they did became damage.

The four days are not what you think

Now the four days, because they are doing a great deal of work in your head and almost none in hers.

There is a countdown running in your head and there is not one running in her house. A person four days after a death is not tracking who has and has not been in touch, because the days do not have edges and Wednesday is indistinguishable from Monday.

What she will notice is not the timing. It is whether you come at all, and that window is much wider than four days.

More than that: the messages people remember are almost never the ones sent on day one. Day one is a flood. What people remember is the person who was still there in week three, and the one who came back in month five, and the one who mentioned her father by name in the autumn.

You have a longer part to play than Thursday. Nothing written anywhere puts the whole of this in the first week, and the Spirit tends to use the person who is still there when everybody else has gone back to their own lives.

You have not missed it. Nothing written anywhere sets a window on this, and the Spirit is not measuring your love for a woman you have known since you were nineteen by a delay of four days.

What to send

Here is the practical part and it is three lines.

His name first. Then one true thing about him that is specific and small. Then what you are doing rather than what you are offering. That is the Job 2:13 shape reduced to a message, and the Spirit does not need more than that.

Something like: I keep thinking about your dad and the way he used to answer the phone. I am not going to ask if you need anything. I am bringing food on Saturday, and I will leave it on the step if you would rather not see anybody.

That is it. No verse, not yet. No explanation. Nothing that requires an answer, which is the important part, because a grieving person has about nine of those a day and is out of replies.

And nothing in that message has to carry the whole of what you feel about her, which is the weight that has broken all six drafts. It is one message in what will be a long year. What is written puts the value in the presence rather than in the wording, and the Spirit is not going to be defeated by a sentence about a telephone.

You have something to give that does not need to be perfect. What is written shows a week of sitting in the dirt as the right thing, and the Spirit is not waiting for you to compose something worthy before He will use it.

And send it in the next hour, badly, before the seventh draft arrives.

There is a reason the specific small thing matters more than anything else in it. Everybody in that house is currently getting sentences about a man in general: he was a lovely man, he will be missed, thinking of you all. What almost nobody sends is a detail, and a detail is the only thing that proves somebody actually knew him. The way he answered the phone. What he called the dog. The thing he always said when he was leaving. Her father is disappearing into a category this week and one specific sentence pulls him back out of it.