I Keep Turning It Into A Case

He has read eleven books since February and he is worse than when he started, and last night he worked out why.

It began with a sentence in a documentary. Something ordinary about how the church and the older faith it came out of had gone their separate ways over the first few centuries, and he had sat up and said, out loud, to nobody: they what?

He is forty. Twenty two years in this. Nobody had ever mentioned it, and the fact that nobody had ever mentioned it was the second shock and possibly the bigger one.

So he read. Of course he read, he is that sort of man. And within about a fortnight the question had settled into a shape, and the shape was: whose fault.

And that is the shape it has kept for six months.

He can now tell you who said what and when and which century and what got decided where. He has opinions. He has become, in a small way, quite good at this.

And he is angrier every month and no closer to anything, and last night, at about one in the morning, with a book open on his chest, he thought: what am I going to do when I have the verdict?

Because there is nothing to do with it. There is no court. Everybody involved has been dead for a very long time, and if he arrived at a conclusion tomorrow he would have nowhere to take it and nobody to hand it to.

He said out loud: I have been building a case where something else was supposed to go.

You know that stack of books.

Maybe you did the same when you found out. Maybe you went looking for who started it. Maybe you have a position now and you can defend it and it has made you tired and slightly hard, and you cannot work out how a piece of history managed to do that to you.

Nobody misled you. This is what an intelligent person does with a wound they have not recognized as one. You reach for the tools you have, and the tools you have are reading and reasoning, and neither of those was ever going to do this job.

The seven days before anybody spoke

Here is a verse people skip on their way to the argument, and it is the most useful thing in the whole book for a man with eleven books on the floor.

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

Seven days. Not a word.

That is the last thing those men do right in the entire book. Everything after this is speeches, and the speeches are where it goes wrong, and God's own assessment at the end is not kind about them.

But this part they got. They sat down on the ground and they said nothing for a week, because they could see the size of the thing and they knew it was not a question yet.

You are allowed to sit with this without producing anything, and the not speaking is the part those men got right. That is what Job 2:13 records before a single speech begins, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Comforter, the one who comes and sits alongside, which is a description of somebody who arrives without an explanation in their hand.

And notice why they stopped talking. For they saw that his grief was very great. They recognized the category. That is the whole skill and it is the one you have not been using.

What this page is not going to do

Let me be plain, because you have read eleven books and you can smell a position at forty paces.

Nothing here is going to tell you who was at fault. Not a century, not a council, not a party, not a people, not a side. Not by implication, not by tone, not by which detail gets mentioned and which gets left out.

That is not a dodge and it is not cowardice. It is that assigning it is not the job this page exists to do, and every version of that job has been done for centuries by people with better sources than either of us and it has never once produced a healed thing.

You are not being handed a verdict, and nothing here settles anything about anybody. Scripture says judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts (1 Corinthians 4:5), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a relief rather than an evasion, because a man who is not required to reach a verdict can put a book down.

What it is actually for

Here is what the reading has been standing in for.

A thing that was one thing came apart. That is all. It is a real loss, and it is old, and it is not yours to have caused and it is not yours to fix, and it is still allowed to make you sad.

That is what your body has been doing since February and your head has been converting it into research, because research has a shape and grief does not.

You are grieving something, and you have been prosecuting it because grief has nowhere obvious to go. Scripture says to every thing there is a season, a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance (Ecclesiastes 3:1-4), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes room in a person for a mourning that has no action attached to it, which is the hardest kind to permit yourself.