The Thing He Said That Made It Worse

They were both at the fence and it was about a gate hinge and neither of them wanted to talk about the gate hinge.

His neighbor's wife had died three weeks earlier. Sixty one years old, quick, and the whole road had gone through the business of casseroles and cards and nobody knowing where to look.

And in the middle of the not-talking about the hinge, he said it. Everything happens for a reason.

He heard it come out. He has replayed it since and he is clear that it was not a thing he believes particularly, it was a thing that arrived in his mouth to fill a silence, and the silence was the problem and he could not stand in it.

The man's face closed. Not angrily. It just went, the way a door goes when somebody shuts it politely because they do not want to have a conversation about why it is shut.

They finished with the hinge.

That was five weeks ago and he has crossed the road four times since. Once he saw him at the end of the aisle in a shop and went the other way with a basket in his hand like a man in a film.

He is fifty two. They have lived opposite each other for nine years. He is not a coward about anything else in his life.

Sit on the bumper of the truck. There is a place in Scripture where a grieving man tells his comforters exactly what they got wrong, and it is worth reading before you go back over.

Miserable comforters

Here it is, and it is Job talking to three men who had done it wrong.

I have heard many such things; miserable comforters are you all.Job 16:2

That is a suffering man reviewing the performance of his visitors out loud, and Scripture keeps it, which is remarkable when you think about it. There is a record in the book of what bad comforting sounds like from the receiving end.

And look at what they had actually been doing. Explaining. Accounting for it. Producing reasons why this had happened to him, at length, with sincerity, out of a genuine belief that a reason would help.

Everything happens for a reason is the compressed modern version of their entire argument.

You said something that book already identifies as the failure mode. Job 16:2 has a grieving man naming it, and the Spirit kept the whole exchange in the record so that nobody would have to work it out from scratch.

That is not a reason to feel worse. It is a reason to stop treating your sentence as a personal disaster and start treating it as an extremely common error with a known correction.

You are in good and ancient company in getting it wrong. Job 16:2 exists because three men who genuinely loved a suffering friend produced exactly this failure, and the Spirit kept the record so that a man at a fence two thousand years later would not have to think he was uniquely clumsy.

What the five weeks have cost

Now the road, because the sentence was one afternoon and the avoidance is five weeks.

The three syllables were a mistake and they landed badly and his face closed. That is real. It is also, in the scale of what that man is carrying, a small event, and it is not the thing he lies awake about.

What he will have noticed is the road. Not analytically, and probably not with resentment. But a man three weeks widowed who then watches a neighbor of nine years start avoiding him is receiving a second message, and the second message is worse than the first one.

The first said: I do not know what to say. The second says: you are now a person I go around.

And he will not have taken it personally, which somehow makes it worse rather than better. A newly widowed man is not building a theory about his neighbor. He simply notices, in the low way a person notices things in that first stretch, that the world has got smaller by one house, and he files it with everything else that has got smaller, and he does not expect it to come back. Nothing written anywhere required him to come and find you, and the Spirit moves the person who is able to move.

You are the one holding this open. Nothing written anywhere makes a clumsy sentence unrepairable, and the Spirit is not the source of five weeks of a man going down a different aisle with a basket in his hand.

What to say when you go over

Here is the practical part, and it is short.

Go over. Say sorry for what you said at the fence and that it was rubbish. Do not explain why you said it, because that turns it into your event and puts him in the position of comforting you.

Then say her name. Then say one specific true thing about her that has nothing to do with her death.

Then stop talking, and stay standing there, and let it be uncomfortable for a bit.

That is the whole repair and it takes about ninety seconds, and the reason people do not do it is that the ninety seconds are unpleasant rather than that the words are hard to find.

And do not wait for a natural opportunity, because five weeks of avoiding a man has removed all of them. There is no version of this that arrives conveniently. Walk over on a Saturday morning while he is doing something in the drive, which is the easiest possible setting because he will have something to do with his hands, and say it standing up before either of you has settled into a conversation about anything else.

You have something to bring across that road. What is written shows exactly what bad comfort looks like and it also shows that the right thing was available the whole time, which was a week of sitting on the ground before anybody opened their mouth, and the Spirit uses a man who comes back more than He uses a man who got it right the first time.