Blessed Be the Name, Said by a Man Who Had Just Lost Everything

There is a woman on our island who did not say God's name out loud for two years and four months.

She counted. That is the part that tells you what kind of silence it was. It was not drifting and it was not neglect. She knew the day it started, because it was the day of the funeral, and she knew what she was doing, because she had thought about it carefully.

She told me she was not angry, and I believe her, though I would not have minded if she had been. What she said was stranger and harder. She said: if I say His name, then either I have to mean it or I have to lie, and I do not have a third option, and I am not ready for either one.

So she went quiet. She went to church. She sang the parts that were about other things. And when the name came around in a song she would close her mouth and wait for the next line, and nobody noticed for two years and four months.

I want to say at the start that nothing in what follows is going to hurry her, or you. This site does not do that.

Where the funeral sentence came from

There is a line said at almost every graveside, and most people have never seen the floor it was spoken from.

A man has lost his property, his workers, and then, in the same hour, all ten of his children. The messengers arrive one after another and the last one has not finished before the next one starts. And then this.

Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, And said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD. (Job 1:20 and 21, King James Version)

Look at what the text puts before the sentence. He tore his clothes. He shaved his head. He fell down. Those are not the actions of a composed man and the writer records every one of them before he records a single word.

The sentence comes out of a man on the floor. Not from a man who had made his peace, and not from a man in week six with some perspective. From the ground, in the hour, with his hair on the floor beside him.

You have never been asked to say that sentence from a place other than the one Job said it from, and Job 1 is where that stands rather than in anybody's advice at a graveside, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps the verse fastened to the floor it came from rather than letting it float.

What the book does two chapters later

Here is the part almost nobody quotes, and it is the reason I trust this book more than I trust most comfort.

Two chapters on, the same man opens his mouth again.

After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day. (Job 3:1)

The same man. The same book. Thirty-eight chapters of complaint follow, some of it addressed to God in terms that would get a person removed from a prayer meeting, and God's verdict at the end is that Job spoke of Him what was right.

So the book does not present chapter one as a performance to be repeated. It presents it as something that happened, once, on a particular afternoon, and then it lets the man fall apart for thirty-eight chapters and calls that right too.

You were never required to hold the first sentence steady for two years, and the book itself does not hold it steady for two chapters, which is what Job 3 makes plain in the text, and the Spirit who preserved both chapters is not asking you to be more consistent than Scripture is.

What the silence is actually protecting

I have sat with enough people in this to say the next part carefully.

The silence is almost never rebellion. It is almost always integrity. A person who will not say the name is usually a person who refuses to say a thing they cannot yet mean, and that refusal is a form of respect that gets mistaken for its opposite.

So I am not going to argue anybody out of it, and if that is the place tonight finds you in, nothing here is a rebuke.

You have been protecting something honest and it was never rebellion, and Psalm 34 puts His nearness beside the broken hearted without asking what they have been able to say, and the Spirit is the one who tells the difference between a refusal to lie and a heart gone cold.

But I will say what the silence cannot do, because it is worth knowing. The silence protects you from saying something false. It does not protect you from the distance, and after a while a person cannot tell the two apart anymore, and the not-saying starts to feel like the not-being-heard.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. (Psalm 34:18)

Nigh. Near. Not near to the ones who have recovered enough to speak well of Him. Near to the broken hearted, in the present tense, while they are broken.

You have been close to Him for the whole two years and the closeness never once depended on your speech, because Psalm 34 puts His nearness on His side of the sentence, and His Spirit has been the one keeping you in the building on the mornings you sat out the chorus.