Suffering

What do you say to someone who is suffering?  “I know what you are going through.”  Well maybe not, but I could not think of anything else to say. 

My personal favorite is the words spoken to a parent whose child has died, “Now that they are in heaven they will not have suffer any of the pain we know in this world.”  Well that may be a bit extreme.  Very few folks are so coarse. 

         I am tempted to say, “You are in God’s hands.”  That’s not bad, but it comes close to blaming God for suffering.  There are those who blame God, but I understand that suffering is the very thing God is against.   Suffering has many causes:  greed and selfishness, exploitation, poor mechanics like when an engine fails on an airplane.   Sometimes people build homes on faults and suffer the wrath of an earthquake.  Disease, well that is a hard one. 

But what do you say to someone who is suffering.  Nicholas Wolterstorff at Yale University writes, “Your words don’t have to be wise.  The heart that speaks is heard more than the words spoken.  And if you can’t think of anything to say, just say, ‘I can’t think of anything to say.  But I want you to know I am with you in your grief.’ . . . To comfort me, you have to come close.  Come sit beside me on my mourning bench.”  Thanks Nicholas for the wisdom.

         Our Christian faith understands that in Christ, God has come to sit beside us on our mourning bench.  John Buchanan wrote, “When a child asks, as every child does sooner or later, why everyone has to die, my experience has been that the best answer is not a lengthy attempt to explain human mortality, but a hug.