Movement 1: Disruption (The Unnamed Moment)
It’s 2:00 AM, and the house has settled into a heavy, breathing silence. I should be sleeping but as it often is, my mind is too active to allow my brain to do its daily data dump. Instead, I’m horizontal, under the covers with eyes closed, my thoughts churn within the static – between what happens to us and what we say to make sense of it.
Nothing specific “happened,” at least not today. Nothing urgent. Nothing that would make headline news in my life. Just something that doesn’t sit right. And yet, the atmosphere feels different. Maybe, like me, you may not be able to point to any one event but there’s a cumulative weight of “unsettled” things.
There’s an old story about a man from a place called Uz who sat in the dust while messengers arrived one after another. At first, they sat and shook in silence with him. This may sound odd to us but sitting in silence with a shivering posture for seven days is ancient Hebrew pastoral care. It was good etiquette not to speak until the sufferer spoke first. So, before these friends spoke – before anyone mentioned the word “loss,” there was a period of pure, stark disruption in the “mourning ward.”
We know what it’s like. Something’s happened – it arrived unwelcomed and unlabeled.
Make it Make Sense
As humans, we’re fundamentally sense-makers. Part of what it means to be human is the reflex to put the event and experience into words. We need a story and our biology demands order. When the static gets loud, our first instinct isn’t to pray or to ponder – it’s to contain. We feel the jagged edge of an event and right away we reach for a label to smooth it over.
I think of Job’s wife. While the story is about Job’s suffering, she suffered greatly also. We can’t know what went through her mind when she seems to mock Job’s integrity and tells him to “curse God and die.” However, before Job speaks, Mrs. Job cracks the silence. She’s not an outsider like the friends; she’s a co-sufferer with Job. This seems like her way of reaching for a lever; to make the suffering stop and to settle her shaking world.
I share this thought about Job’s wife to acknowledge this truth. It’s a normal human desire to reach for a lever to make the pressure or the pain stop. When pain stretches on long enough, even resolution starts to feel like mercy.
Disruption Without a Name
Meanwhile, in the darkness, I try to resist the rush to explain things. To notice the disruption means admitting that the world is currently “unnamed.” It’s standing in the gap I call “the messy middle,” between the event and the explanation; desperate to assign meaning to it. In this space, there’s no “blueprint” to follow.
In the initial moments of something that presses in on us, we may recall a “fix-it-fast” cliché. That can act as a psychological floor to help us catch our breath while giving a measure of initial comfort and stability. Sayings may ease the mind at first but they don’t usually settle the soul. As real as they might be, we need to notice we’re still in the dark with the raw experience – being human and vulnerable.
We’re taught that faith is the ability to provide an answer when the world asks a question. I invested my life as Larry the Minister Guy attempting just that. But now as a retired Pastor From the Pasture, I think maybe at first, faith is simply the honesty to sit in silence (without reaching for a smartphone asking the Oracles of Gemini or ChatGTP for quick, polished pretexts) before manufacturing an answer.
Undoubtedly, the messengers are on their way. But in the dark of night, explanations are already forming in the back of my mind. These transporters of truth stand eager to stabilize my nervous system and tell me that “God is in control.”
But for now, I stay in the gap – searching for something deeper than a clever catch-line. Language takes time but in this messy middle, the body needs a quiet, stabilizing space to breathe. It’s the physiological pause that helps to settle the midnight static so our mind can find footing. Eventually, at least for me, exhaustion wins and I fall asleep.
Something has changed. I don’t know what it is but I noticed the shift in the atmosphere. Later I awake, to hold the tension another day.