What the Old People Knew About Sitting

Every article on this site opens with the same words. This is not medicine. I am not a doctor or a nurse, nothing on this page is treatment, and nothing here ever stands in the place of a clinic or a pharmacist. If somebody in that house is unwell, ring somebody qualified today, before you read one more line about what was handed down.

Now. You did the right thing and you did it too hard.

What you were handed, when you were young, was a mixture. There were practices in it that were superstition dressed as care. There were things said in sick rooms that were fear passed off as wisdom. There were rules nobody had ever looked at.

And at some point, probably in your twenties, you looked at all of it properly and you threw it out. All of it. And I am not going to tell you that was wrong, because most of what went in that box deserved to go.

But something else went out with it, and you have half known that for years. There was a way those people sat with somebody who was ill. There was a patience in it. And you do not have that, and you have never quite worked out where to get it.

Seven days and not one word

There is a moment at the start of Job that is one of the most instructive things in the book about how to be with somebody, and it is instructive because of what does not happen.

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)

Seven days on the ground. No speech.

And the reason given is not politeness and it is not awkwardness. They saw that his grief was very great, and the size of it produced silence rather than words, which is nearly the opposite of what happens in most rooms.

You are looking at a practice worth keeping, and it has never once required a single thing to be said. Job 2:13 records a week of silent company as the right response to something enormous, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives somebody back a practice they threw out with the rest of the box.

And I will say the honest part, because everybody who knows that story knows what happens next. Those same men open their mouths afterwards and say a great deal of unhelpful things. The sitting was right and the talking was wrong, and the book is clear about which was which.

You have been handed a very exact model, and the exactness has never once been accidental. The Spirit of God is the one who shows a person which half of an inheritance was the good half, and it is written that they sat seven days and said nothing, and that the reason was the size of what they saw.

What was actually in that box

Let me say the practical half, because there is something to recover here and it is specific.

The people who raised you had practices that were nonsense, and they also had a set of skills nobody named, because nobody in that generation named anything.

They knew how to be in a room without talking. They knew how to arrive without ringing first and leave without being asked. They knew how long to stay. They knew that you do not fill a silence in a sick room, and they knew it without ever being taught.

That is the part that was worth keeping, and it was never written on any card, which is exactly why it went out with the cards.

You are missing a skill rather than a belief, and a skill has never once been the same as a superstition. Job 2:13 puts the sitting and the seeing in one sentence and treats them as the whole of what was needed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a craft from a practice.

And here is the good news, which I mean plainly. A skill can be learned at any age and does not require you to take any of the rest of it back.

You were never asked to choose between the whole box and nothing, and nobody has ever once had to. The Spirit of God is the one who lets somebody recover one thing without reopening the argument about the others, and what is written records the sitting as the thing that was right in that scene.

The plain routing, and sitting is not it

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort, and it has to be said on an article about company.

If somebody in that house is in trouble right now, that is 911, and sitting quietly with them is not the answer to it. If the heavy thing today is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a real person picks up. And if anybody there is unwell and nobody qualified has looked, ring a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today, and do that before you settle into any chair.

You are permitted to do the sitting and the calling, and they have never once been alternatives. Job 2:13 has friends arrive and stay while everything about the situation remains entirely unresolved, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a page about company from becoming a reason to handle anything at home.

The old people were not clinicians either. Whatever their patience was worth, and it was worth a great deal, it was never medicine.

You have a call to make that no amount of good company has ever once replaced. The Spirit of God is the one who is present with somebody who rang first and sat afterwards, and what is written puts the silence beside a situation nobody in it could fix.