I am increasingly persuaded that we find the best example of friendship in the Old Testament in the Book of Job (not in the stories of David and Jonathan). Job has three friends who, when they hear about his calamities, arrange to go together to him. They intend to be with him and to comfort, which is to say, strengthen him. (Never forget the “fort” in “comfort.”) But when they arrive and see the extent of his affliction, there is nothing they can do but sit there beside him. They sit with Job for a whole week; no one speaks a word.

This is an important thing about being a friend: You do not need to have anything to say. When times are rough, what matters most is showing up, just being there. You want to comfort—to strengthen—your friend. But even if in the actual situation comforting is beyond your capacity, being present is still invaluable.

In the event, it is Job who breaks the silence. Thereupon—and famously— Job’s friends start disputing with him. Even this is a proper element of friendship. A good friend will tell me when I’m wrong. One of the proverbs counsels: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful” (Prov. 27:6). A person who never speaks a hard, wounding word is not a friend. Real friends sometimes understand us better than we understand ourselves. So it is no mark against Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar that they challenge Job. Challenging him could be a proper aspect of their friendship. The mark against them, God says at the end, is that they were wrong.

Yet even this shows something important about friendship: Friends, even well-intentioned ones, can be in error. And we have it on divine authority that Job’s were wrong. Yet the possibility of being wrong should not keep friends from speaking potentially hard words. Note also that even though wrong, Job’s friends stuck with him. They did not leave him. You don’t have to know what to say, and when you speak you don’t have to be right. More important than your words is your presence.

One of the things that bothered his friends was Job’s lament that he had ever been born. He wished that the day he was born were torn out of the calendar, that it were erased from the universe altogether. He also, in his extremity, asked God to stop looking at him. Job wanted God to turn away his gaze, leave him alone, let him go out of existence.

These are very important things that Job says. They are things, dear reader, that you or I might say. If you are very old, perhaps severely afflicted with a disease, you might want to ask God, “Why am I going on living in such a wretched state as I am in?” Feeling this way does not signify a loss of faith; it could simply be reality. Furthermore, the book of Job suggests it is possible that in some cases there just is no answer.

Being pro-life does not mean having answers to suffering. Indeed, in some situations, it might mean agreeing that there is no answer, no humanly accessible reason as to why my life, in this awful extremity, is continuing. Rather than having answers, to be pro-life can require no more than following the example of Job.

For Job, even though he saw no purpose to his life, did not take any action to end it. Although Job asks God why he allows him to continue existing, Job does not bring his own life to an end. In a particular case of suffering, we may not see any meaning, but it is not our role to bestow or create meaning. Nor is it our role to put the period at the end of our life. All that is God’s business. Our faith is that in the end he will tell us what everything has meant. Expect to be surprised. “Oh, that’s what my life was about?!” Our humble job is nothing more, and nothing less, than sticking with one another as friends.

We could put it this way: When did Job’s friends go wrong? When they tried to give meaning to his suffering! They told their friend that the awful things that happened to him were signs that God was punishing him for something, and he should try to figure out what it was. Job’s friends were people who thought everything happens for a reason. So they tried as hard as they could to get Job to figure out why all those calamities had befallen him.

At the end of the book, God tells Job’s friends, “ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.” I have long pondered what it might have been that Job said rightly about God, which his friends had not. I think it was simply his desire to speak with God. His friends thought there was nothing to ask God about; Job eloquently disagreed. And in the remarkable voice from the whirlwind in chapters 38–41, Job got to hear God speak. This encounter with God opened his eyes to the awesomeness of the whole of creation, from the stars to the wild ass to the Leviathan. Creation is big. It is beautiful. It is magnificently varied. And, as Job sees, creation at large is not safe for man or woman.  Creation, as a whole, is not made for us.

What, then, is made for us? We see this too at the end—in the life Job enjoys when he is home again. He has more children. His neighbors and friends and family all come to visit him, bringing not only presents but what they could not bring at the beginning: comfort. It is a cozy scene, a sort of domestic communion. And it portrays, I think, what life is about at its best. Amid this vast world, amid so much we do not understand, we can be fully human with each other in a small place that God protects and provides for us, one that knows suffering yet nonetheless is beautiful—a place with food and drink and friends.