Everybody Tells Her To Reach Out

Have you tried reaching out.

She has been asked that, by her count, somewhere north of twenty times in the last year. Kindly, every single time. By people who love her and who would be horrified to know the effect.

Here is what none of them know.

She reached out in March. She reached out again in June. She reached out the following January, and once more on that woman's birthday, because a birthday felt like a door.

Four times.

And what came back the fourth time she has not repeated to a single living person, and she is not going to, and this article is not going to ask her to.

So the position she is in at every gathering is this.

She is being advised to do a thing she has already done four times, by people who are certain they are helping, and the only way to stop the advice would be to read out loud something she cannot bear to say in her own kitchen, let alone in a church hall with tea urns going.

So she says, yes, maybe I should.

And she looks at her hands. And they squeeze her arm and feel that they have helped, and off she goes to the car, and she sits in it for a minute before she starts the engine.

If that is you, pull a chair into this circle. Nobody here is going to ask whether you have tried reaching out.

The sentence God left in the book

There is a man in Scripture who was surrounded by people offering him counsel while he was in the worst suffering recorded in the Old Testament.

They were not villains. They came a long way, they sat with him in silence for a week first, and by any ordinary measure they were the good friends in his life.

And here is what he said to them.

I have heard many such things: miserable comforters are ye all.Job 16:2

God let that stand.

He did not soften it, He did not have it withdrawn, and He did not append a note explaining that Job was overwrought and should not be taken literally. It is in the book, in the mouth of the man who was actually suffering, about the people who were actually advising him.

And at the end of that book, it is the comforters who are told they have not spoken rightly, and Job who is told he has.

You are inside a Scripture that took the sufferer's word over the counselors' word and put it in writing. Job 16:2 records miserable comforters are ye all without correction, and Job 42:7 says they had not spoken of God the thing that is right, as Job had, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved both, which means the advice arriving at you does not get to be the ruling on your situation.

Why kind people give bad counsel

Let us be fair to the women in that hall, because they deserve it.

They are not being lazy. They are doing what a person does with an unbearable situation they cannot fix, which is to hand over the one action that seems available, so that they have given something.

Advice is what love does when it has no facts and no power.

That is why it keeps coming, and that is why correcting them will not stop it, because the impulse is not informational.

You have been receiving love in a form that injures, and knowing what it actually is takes the sting off without requiring anybody to be blamed. Proverbs 25:20 says as vinegar upon nitre, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart, and it describes cheerful comfort landing wrongly without calling the singer wicked, and it is the same Spirit who is named the Comforter Himself, which means there is one source of comfort that has the facts.

Nobody is being summoned

Let us say plainly what this page will not do, because enough pages have already done it.

Nobody here is telling you to reach out. Not a fifth time, not once more, not in a different way, not on a better date.

You have done it four times. That is finished business and nothing here reopens it.

You are not being instructed to reach anybody, and four attempts already made are not being treated as insufficient. Romans 12:18 says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men, and it puts both limits into one short sentence rather than issuing a command without them, and it is the same Spirit who bears witness with your spirit, which means what you have already spent is being counted rather than overlooked.