Most Fridays, I join a community of bloggers for Five Minute Friday. One word prompt, five minutes. Unedited. The prompt this week is: Pick.
Upon seeing the word prompt, I thought of the idiom, “a pick me up.”
After the news in recent days, it is what we need – a pick me up. We need something to encourage, or lift our mood. We need a change in our outlook, and to be more on our guard to what will tear us down.
Job is who comes to mind. If anyone ever needed a pick me up, it surely was him. When at his deepest despair, his friends come.
“Now when Job’s three friends heard of all this adversity that had come upon him, they came each one from his own place, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite; and they made an appointment together to come to sympathize with him and comfort him. When they lifted up their eyes at a distance and did not recognize him, they raised their voices and wept. And each of them tore his robe and they threw dust over their heads toward the sky. Then they sat down on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights with no one speaking a word to him, for they saw that his pain was very great.”
(Job 2:11-13, NASB)
These three came when they heard of Job’s despair. They sympathized and entered into his pain while they also grieved alongside him. They not only stayed with him, but they stayed without speaking a word for seven days.
Sometimes we do not need to enter into every conversation. Sometimes we simply need to come, and sit quietly nearby.
The gift of presence
can be the pick me up
we offer one another.
Image by Dirk (Beeki®) Schumacher from Pixabay
Today I may be joining: Five Minute Friday .
