Suffering & Hardship
People keep telling me everything happens for a reason. It makes me angry, and I do not know whether that is fair of me.
“I have heard many such things: miserable comforters are ye all.”
Job's friends had sat with him in silence for a week, and then they began explaining. His verdict is that he has heard plenty of this sort of thing and they are miserable comforters. Their theology was largely orthodox and their timing was catastrophic. Scripture preserves his irritation with them, which suggests that anger at unhelpful comfort is not a spiritual failing.
“Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.”
Paul's instruction to the Roman church is startlingly plain: weep with those who weep. No explaining, no silver lining, no reframing of the situation. The Christian obligation toward a suffering person is to join them in what they are feeling rather than to resolve it for them. Most people who say clumsy things have simply never been told this.
A path forward
Give the well meaning people a line they can use. Telling someone plainly that you would rather they just sat with you can spare you months of this.
Choose two or three people who can handle the unresolved version, and take the real conversation to them. You do not owe everybody your grief.
Take the anger itself to God rather than letting it settle on your friends. He can hold both the unfairness and your fury about the way people have talked about it.
Closing verse
“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
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