A Visit With a Length in My Head

You knew before you got there.

Not exactly, not to the minute, but you knew. Forty minutes, probably. Enough to be real and not so much that the rest of the day fell over.

And you did not decide that out of coldness. You decided it because the day had other things in it and because you have learned the hard way that an open ended visit is a visit you stop making. A person who cannot budget an hour ends up sending a message instead, and you would rather turn up with a limit than not turn up at all.

So you drove over with a length in your head, and you sat down, and you were good. Warm, present, unhurried on the outside.

And somewhere around minute thirty two, something in you started getting ready.

That is the part I want to talk about. Not the leaving. The getting ready to leave, which starts long before the standing up and which the other person can feel with total accuracy even though nobody in the room has said a word about time.

They will never mention it. They will thank you, and mean it, and be glad you came.

But they knew, and they knew from about minute four, because a person who is grieving or ill has almost nothing to do except read the room they are in.

Seven days, and nobody said anything

There is an account in Job that people usually remember for what the friends said afterward, which was mostly wrong. Almost nobody remembers what they did first, and what they did first was extraordinary.

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. Seven nights. On the ground.

And not one word.

I want to put a fence around this before anybody feels the weight of it. Nobody reading this is being asked for seven days. That is not the instruction and it never was. Those men had a different life and a different calendar and it is not the point of the verse.

The point is the last clause. For they saw that his grief was very great.

The length was not decided in advance. It was decided by what they saw when they arrived. The visit was shaped by the man in front of them rather than by anything the three of them had agreed in the road on the way over.

You are able to let a room set the length, and no visit has ever needed a decision made in the driveway. Job 2:13 has the sitting follow the seeing rather than a plan, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets somebody arrive with their hands open rather than with a timetable.

What the other person is actually reading

Let me be specific about how this gets felt, because it is not vague and it is not mystical.

A person sitting with a serious thing has an enormous amount of attention and almost nothing to spend it on. They are not distracted. They are the least distracted person in the building.

So they read you. Not deliberately. They notice the shift in your weight, the way your answers get slightly shorter, the moment your hands come off the arms of the chair, the two seconds where your eyes go somewhere else. They are reading a book with very few pages in it, and every page is you.

And what they conclude is not that you do not care. They conclude that they are a lot, and that even the people who love them have to ration it.

That is the cost, and it lands on somebody who has very little left to absorb costs with.

You are the person they were glad to see, and the caring has never once been the thing in question in that room. Job 2:13 records friends who came and stayed rather than friends who were assessed and found wanting. The Spirit of God is the one who can take a true observation and keep it from becoming an accusation.

I want to say the encouraging half plainly, because a person who visits at all is already unusual. Most people do not come. They mean to and they do not, and the fear of not knowing what to say keeps them away entirely, for months, and then it is awkward and then it is too late.

You are already doing the hard part, and the turning up has never once been the easy half of this. The written word gives the three friends credit for coming and sitting long before it records anything they got wrong, and His Spirit is entirely able to build on somebody who is already in the room.

Take the clock out, not the limit

Now the practical part, and it is not what people expect, because I am not going to ask you to stay longer.

Keep the limit. Genuinely. The limit is what makes you a person who visits.

Take the clock out of the room.

Leave the phone in the car. Do not put it face down on the arm of the chair, because a phone face down is still a clock and everybody in the room knows where it is. Leave it in the vehicle.

Then let the visit end when it ends. It will probably end at about the same time it would have, because a visit has a natural shape and most of them find it. The difference is that the last eight minutes will not have been spent by both of you managing the exit.

That is the whole change. Same forty minutes. No countdown running underneath them.

You are able to keep a limit without carrying a clock, and the two have never once had to be the same thing. Job 2:13 shapes the visit around what was in front of them rather than around what they had planned. The same Spirit who recorded those seven days is well able to hold somebody in a chair without a timer running.