You know exactly what happens because you have watched yourself do it.
Four steps of quiet. Then something in you cannot bear it, and out comes a question. How was school. What are you doing on Saturday. Is that thing with your friend sorted out.
And it is not nosiness. That is the thing. Every one of those questions is love arriving in the form it has learned to arrive in.
And they are all closing the door.
Because the thing you are walking out there hoping for is not an answer to a question. It is a sentence that starts on its own, and a sentence like that needs about forty seconds of nothing before it can get going, and nothing has been available on these walks for about two years.
And none spake a word unto him
There is a moment in Job that gets skipped past because the speeches afterward are so long.
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, King James Version)
And none spake a word unto him.
Seven days. Three men who had come a long way specifically to comfort somebody, sitting on the ground and saying nothing at all, and the text gives their reason: they saw that his grief was very great.
Not because they had nothing to say. They had a great deal to say, as the rest of the book demonstrates at length. They chose not to say it for a week.
You are looking at silence chosen deliberately by people who came to help, and it was never emptiness that they were offering. Job 2:13 records the seven days of nothing as the thing they did rather than as a failure to speak, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as a skill rather than as a passive act.
And then the sad part, which is worth knowing. The moment they open their mouths, the trouble starts. Everything that goes wrong in that book goes wrong in the speaking, and the seven days of silence are the only unqualified good thing any of the three of them does.
You have been shown which part actually helped, and it was never the well meant sentence that did anything for anybody. The written word puts the silence before the speeches and lets the comparison stand, and the Spirit of God is what makes a quiet mother more useful than a talking one.
What a question does to a walk
Now let me name the mechanism, because it is not about being interested.
A question converts a walk into a conversation, and those are different rooms.
A conversation has turns in it. Somebody asks, somebody answers, somebody asks again. It is orderly and it is fine and it happens at tables all the time, and it is entirely unsuited to what those walks were for.
What those walks were for is the other thing, which is a person deciding to say something that nobody asked about. And that only arrives in a room with no turns in it, because the moment there are turns, whatever was rising has to wait, and waiting is the same as gone. A silence is not an absence of anything, and the room a question fills was the room somebody was going to speak into.
You are not failing to draw them out, and it was never a shortage of good questions that kept those walks quiet. Job 2 has three men sit for a week without speaking and calls that the comforting, which is exactly why the Spirit of God asks a mother for less rather than for better.
And there is one more thing about the four steps. Four steps is nothing. Nobody has begun a thought in four steps. The sentence you are hoping for is usually somewhere around minute nine, and you have never once got there, because there has been a question at every fourth step for two years.
Ask nothing for ten minutes
So the practical part, and it is a fast rather than a technique.
Walk with one of them and ask nothing for the first ten minutes.
You are able to say nothing for ten minutes, and it has never once been coldness to walk beside somebody quietly. The passage has three men keep silence for seven days as an act of care, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman who has just swallowed her fourth question.
Not fewer questions. None. The word ten is doing real work: it is long enough to get past four steps, past the discomfort at about ninety seconds, and into the part where something can actually begin.
You may talk. Say things. Point at something. Make a remark about a dog. Those are not questions and they do not require anybody to produce anything.
And if the ten minutes pass and nothing is said by anybody, that is a completely successful walk and it must not be treated as a failed one.
You are able to come home with nothing said and count it, and it has never once been the talking that made a walk worth going on. Job 2:13 records seven silent days as the good thing those men did, and the Spirit of God is the one who is out on a street with a mother saying nothing on purpose.
So here is what I believe is going out over a woman who cannot let four steps go by.
You are not a nosy mother, and you were never doing anything except loving somebody in the only form you had practiced. I am not promising you that she talks. Job 2:13 records three men sitting on the ground for seven days without a word and gives their reason, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my saying so who calls a silence a form of care.
And this, which is the word I came with:
You have ten minutes of quiet available on the next walk, and offering it has never once been the same thing as having nothing to say. The written word puts the silence before the speeches and lets the reader see which one helped, and the Spirit of God is the one who is beside a woman walking and not asking.
Ten minutes. No questions.
Declare this over yourself
- Question that arrives at the fourth step every time, you are love in a form that closes the door and I am putting you down. Job 2:13 says they sat down with him seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him, so by the Holy Spirit I ask nothing for ten minutes in the name of Jesus.
- Fear that a silence between me and my daughter means something has gone wrong, you were never true and you have cost two years of minute nine. The written word puts a chosen silence ahead of every speech in that book, and by the Holy Spirit I am done converting a walk into a conversation.
- Father, You had three men sit on the ground for a week and say nothing, and called it comfort. Your word in Job 2 gives the reason plainly and lets the silence stand, so by Your Spirit I walk quietly today and I do not grade what comes of it.
Job 2:13
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