Articles
Could You Be Job’s Friend?
I want to help, but I don’t know what to do. It is often difficult to know what to do in any
given situation. If you live long enough, you will have friends and family that face difficult,
often traumatic events in their lives. In the South we often face these times with food. Bringing
someone food when there has been sickness, a surgery, a death in the family, etc, is our default
setting. When we have someone in our life that faces a tragedy, we often find it difficult to know
what to do or what to say. We want to fix the problem. We want to do something. We want to
help, but the question is often “What can I do?”
The book of Job describes a tragedy and a group of friends trying to figure out what to do to
help. We sometimes give Job’s friends a hard time, but they do genuinely seem to care for Job.
“When Job's three friends, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite,
heard about all the troubles that had come upon him, they set out from their homes and met
together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. When they saw him from
a distance, they could hardly recognize him; they began to weep aloud, and they tore their robes
and sprinkled dust on their heads. 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” (Job 2:11-13).
When the friends hear of the tragedy that has fallen on Job, they leave what they are doing,
and go and provide him comfort. When they arrive, what do they do? They spend seven days and
nights sitting in silence just being with Job. How many of us would drop everything in our lives
to go spend seven days sitting with a friend in silence? We may not always know what to do, but
by just being there, we let them know we care. ~B. Tolbert
