How you choose to respond to someone’s negative emotions determines if you will end up connected or separated. Often when someone is grieving, complaining, anxious, or concerned, it can make us feel similar things! So, in an effort to feel better ourselves, or perhaps to help someone we care about feel better, we often try to give them a more reasonable perspective, provide logical solutions to their problem, or try to minimize their negative feelings and amplify the easier feelings.  

It has often been said that Job’s friends were great at caring for him in his grief until they opened their mouths. Here Job’s “friend” Eliphaz is not just minimizing Job’s expressions of grief. He believes the prescription for Job’s issues is a dose of truth and humble pie. He also believes he is the one who should do it. So in essence, he tells this grieving father how his problems are due to his wickedness. Not only is this untrue about Job (Job 1:1), but it shows Eliphaz has forgotten that in our sadness and grief, we usually first need connection with another person who will allow us to express our disorientation and pain.

Job responds with a word that we know is true from when people poorly care for us, saying, “I have heard all this before. What miserable comforters you are! Won’t you ever stop blowing hot air? What makes you keep on talking?” (Job 16:2-3)

So what makes you keep talking when someone you know is struggling? Remember when your Mom used to say, “You have two ears and one mouth, so you should listen twice as much as you talk.” While that is not always the case, it certainly is when caring for someone. You might have the right answer, but it doesn’t matter if you take the wrong approach.

Fortunately, God allows us our grief and gives us Scriptures like Job and the Psalms to give us the script for expressing our pain, even if we are in the wrong! His Spirit expresses groans and sighs in our soul to our Heavenly Father that are too deep for words in a prayer. (Romans 8:26)  So as believers filled with the same Spirit, we can weep with those who weep.

Questions for reflection:

  1. Think of a time someone tried comforting you but it was a bit offensive instead. What do you wish they would have said to you?
  2. Who is someone in your life who could use some comfort? How can you approach them with God’s loving care?