He Made A Weight For The Wind

The ridge is the place because you can see three counties from it and because the wind comes up the valley in the evening and hits you in the face, which is either the best or the worst thing about it depending on the day.

Three of them up there with coats and a flask.

He is sixty-nine.

Six years of something that nobody has been able to name. Four specialists, all decent, none of them a fool, and the words that keep coming back are not diagnoses, they are placeholders. Nonspecific. Idiopathic, which he looked up and which means, more or less, we do not know. Functional, which he also looked up and which he did not enjoy looking up.

He is not angry about it. He has never been an angry man and the doctors have been honest.

But out on the ridge, with the wind doing what it does, there is a thought he has never said to either of the men next to him, and it is this: if there is no name for it, there is no weight to it. A thing with a name gets a category and a form and a chair in a waiting room and a face when you say it. A thing with no name gets a shrug and a change of subject. So whatever this is, it is not on any list anywhere, and I have carried it for six years and it does not officially exist.

If you carry something nobody can name, you know that thought, and you know how reasonable it sounds up on a ridge with the wind in your face.

He assigned a weight to a thing that cannot be held

Weigh it first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph runs before the good one and it is never trimmed to get there.

What this costs is not the symptoms, or not only. It is the absence of standing. It costs you the ordinary human right to say what is wrong in one word and have a room understand it. It costs six years of forms with a blank on them, and of explaining, and of the small pause after you explain. It costs you the honest answer to how are you, permanently. And it costs you a conclusion up on a ridge, that a thing without a name has no weight, which follows perfectly from everything you have experienced.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your six years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if six years of no name has taken you somewhere darker, as far as thinking the two men on that ridge would have easier evenings without a third coat, tell one living person today. Your doctor, either of the two with the flask, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who climb up with you and do not need it explained.

Now, Job 28, which is a whole chapter about where wisdom is and which contains one of the strangest lines in the Bible.

To make the weight for the winds; and he weigheth the waters by measure.Job 28:25

To make the weight for the winds.

Sit with that. Wind is the standing biblical example of a thing you cannot hold, cannot see, cannot pin down and cannot bring into a room and put on a table. It is the thing people reach for when they want to describe something real that has no body.

And God is described as having assigned it a weight.

Not measured it after the fact. Made the weight for it. He is the one who determined what the unhandleable thing weighs, and He did it as part of the same work as fixing the measure for the rain.

You are inside a verse that gives a weight to precisely the kind of thing nobody can hold. Job 28:25 says He made the weight for the winds, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line from the strangest chapter in Job and lays it on a ridge at the end of the day.

Now, who says it and where. This is Job, in the middle of a book where four men spend thirty chapters trying to name his condition and every one of them gets it wrong. The entire book is a demonstration that a thing can be real, and enormous, and impossible for anybody in the room to categorize correctly.

And in the middle of that book somebody says: He made the weight for the winds.

You have a weight that was determined before anybody tried to name it. That is written into Job 28:25, and His Spirit in you is the one who makes a line about wind land on a man who has read the word idiopathic.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because six years of honest sentences have already been said in consulting rooms.

It does not tell you a name is coming. There may never be one, and I am not going to promise a diagnosis, because I do not know and what God does there is His, in His own way. It also is not medical advice and it is not a suggestion that any of this is spiritual rather than physical, which would be a cruel thing to say and an untrue one.

And it does not explain why. This site does not explain suffering. There is no reason offered here, no purpose named, no lesson extracted, because the book this verse is in refuses to do that too, at length, and God at the end of it endorses the man who would not accept the explanations.

You were never required to have it named in order for it to weigh what it weighs. Scripture has Him making the weight for what cannot be held, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who carries that into a wind on a ridge.