Last weekend I went to visit a friend who was in the hospital with chest pains. He went in on Friday and wasn’t scheduled for the angiogram until Tuesday. Four days he was in the hospital doing nothing but waiting as he his heart was being monitored. When I visited I didn’t stay that long – maybe 30 minutes. What do you talk about with someone that you know is hurting? It made me think of this passage in Job. Job’s friends came to visit Job because of his suffering and they sat with him for seven days. Seven days of silence. My friend and I talked. We weren’t silent. But we talked about peripheral stuff. We talked about stuff to read or watch. We talked about how to get movies onto a PSP. We talked about his family. We even talked a little bit about his health and how his family was holding up. As I left his room, I couldn’t help but realize that it is hard to share in someone’s burdens. We’re not very good at it. We’re not very good at sharing someone else’s suffering and we’re not very good at sharing our own with others. And while it may not cause the suffering to go away to have someone share it with you, somehow it makes it easier. We don’t want to face it alone.

Paul put it simply when he wrote, “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” In Job, especially the book as a whole, we can see the necessity of sharing each other’s burdens. And as we consider Job’s case, we find that to be a good friend means that we must learn to listen in the silence of suffering.

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