Job 6:14: When the Stream Stops Running

Anyone who withholds kindness from a friend forsakes the fear of the Almighty.

Job 6:14 (NIV)

When the Stream Stops Running

The tea room two blocks from the hospital has mismatched chairs and a case of scones that come out at four. The woman from three doors down takes the table where she can watch the sidewalk. She asks how the tests came back, and whether the son moved home, and about the house on the corner with the tarp over half the roof, and while the answer is still coming she’s reading whatever just lit up her phone.

Anyone who withholds kindness from a friend forsakes the fear of the Almighty. Job says it to men who had traveled to comfort him and had sat beside him seven days without speaking a word. By now he’s asking them what strength he has that he should still hope, whether his flesh is bronze, whether he has any power to help himself with success driven out of his life.

Then he tells them what they are. Undependable as intermittent streams. The picture is water in a dry country: the channels overflow when the ice thaws and the snow melts, loud and full, and in the dry season they stop, and in the heat they vanish altogether. Caravans turn off their routes toward them, go out into the wasteland, and perish there. The water was real in the spring. A caravan turns off a good route in July because of what ran there in March.

So kindness held back from a friend gets tied to the fear of the Almighty. How a man treats his friend is something he answers to God for. I can tell when a friend has gone dry on me, and I’ve never worked out how a man checks whether he’s the dry one.

The men Job is talking to had already done the hard version once. They came, and they stayed a week, and they said nothing, and whatever happened between that week and this speech happened to people who had meant it.