Suffering is difficult to understand from the outside. Watching someone suffer is like waiting on the steps of a church while a funeral goes on in the sanctuary. Sometimes you hear crying over the dirge of the organ. Other times, the silence lasts for minutes, and you wonder if it’s all over. But you can never go inside to see how things are proceeding, much less peer into the coffin to stare at the face of the loss.
It’s possible you know someone right now who is facing this kind of loss, and you find yourself stuck outside of it, wishing you could go in and help. I applaud you for your desire. I also remind you that no human can enter the sanctuary of another person’s suffering. (As Job learned, only God Himself can step inside.)
At the same time, your involvement in your friend’s suffering is essential. So what does your role include?
First, it includes remembering. It is now your friend’s turn to suffer, but I’m sure you’ve had yours. Remember?
Remember when you realized that to suffer is to be alone? That no matter how hard people tried they would not be able to enter your suffering completely? That they would never be able to say, in all honesty, “I understand?” Remember that pain isolates.
Remember when you realized that being a sufferer means becoming a receptacle for suffering? That not only do you have to carry it inside, but you must watch it continually spill out on the people who try to comfort you? Remember putting your pain away after a few weeks because you realized that it’s no fun to sit with someone who won’t stop crying, day after day? Remember that people avoid pain even when pain is a person.
Remember when you realized that no human could really answer your suffering? That the mystery of your suffering was so great, so astonishing, so overwhelmingly huge, that to try to explain it would be mockery? Remember the moment of stillness when a still, small voice whispered — “Only something as mysterious as suffering could answer this” — and your heart whispered back, “God?”
Remember that human answers are always too cheap.
This act of remembering brings understanding — mostly of how little you can explain and how wrong it would be to try to. But remembrance is not the end of your contribution to your friend’s need. From the empathy grows the second element of your role: a necessary willingness to stay with, to sit on the steps of the church until the funeral is over and not try to hurry it on.
With is difficult work, especially when it is purely with and nothing else: not with so I can fix you, not with so you can heal up faster, not with so I can pat you on the back long enough and whisper the right platitudes in your ear so you perk up and get on with life. With is only meaningful when it’s all you bring.
If you’re willing to give this gift and resist the giant temptation to give other gifts that seem to lead to a fast track for recovery, your friend will be truly helped. When you realize that you can’t enter the sanctuary of their suffering but you choose to stand outside the door anyway, your presence will pave the way for your friend to meet God Himself undistracted. And when God does show up, prepare to get a glimpse.
