One of the hardest aspects of suffering is having conversations. It’s there that we find how much human relationships depend on the ‘sameness’ between people—using the things we have in common to weave us together. But in suffering, so often we are so saturated in misery that this misery is all we see and feel about the world and it is difficult to connect with anyone at all. This in turn compounds our suffering. Suffering people are often lonely people. To find kindred comfort in a place of tragedy is unspeakably precious, but tremendously rare. Trouble shared really is trouble halved.
While we might treasure those rare people and our moments with them, how are we to approach the rest of humanity? People don’t go away just because we are in pain. And if we follow Jesus, we need to take up this cross of loving and serving others, an obligation that is shaped but not cancelled by our suffering.
Here are some thoughts that help me as I try and listen to others when I am suffering.
First, we know that we will mess things up. As Christians it’s one of the big certainties in our world: we are sinners and will sin, until Jesus returns and we are finally physically with him, eternally pure and incapable of sin. Until then, we will get all kinds of things wrong, all the time. We are sorry and wish we were different and ask forgiveness, but we know that we’ll be doing that. Every day. So, is it really surprising that we would mess up speaking to one another in suffering? If someone has done it to me and their words have made my pain worse, I’ve almost certainly done it to someone else somewhere. I have a tongue, which like everyone else’s, is set on fire by hell itself. What this person is doing to me right now, I’ve almost certainly done to someone else. It’s not a surprise. I shouldn’t choose scandalised horror to react to this person. It’s part of real life, and I need to choose mercy.
After the person (mercifully) leaves, I will continue to choose mercy and realise my desire to vent and inadvertently destroy this person in their absence is more about me than them. It is so easy to self-justify: They deserve my condemnation, after all—did you hear what they said? As a way forward when complete silence is impossible, I might speak to a couple of trusted friends who will not gossip about the person and hold that person’s unwise words at a distance, as they help me process these feelings. But my intention here is love. Love for the person who made the suffering worse. It’s hard and awkward and writhes like a drowning fish to hold, yet I will still clutch onto love. Because love is the one thing that I have: Jesus loves me, he died for me, and that is my life.
Second, surely we know that care is real if not perfect. Sometimes it’s clear that the person producing the platitude is annoyed by the impact my sorrow is having on the task they want accomplished or the group’s morale, or by the way it just takes some of the sunshine out of their sky. They say the words they think will fix it so that we can all move on, and I can get over it and just get back to normal. As though that were possible. And for these people, we struggle to forgive and live out our determination to forgive because Christ has forgiven us, despite what this abhorrent trivialisation deserves.
Yet mostly, people do care. They are so sad and want me to be happy, and they try with their words to patch it up and it just doesn’t work. Or they are deeply uncomfortable with tragedy and have a low tolerance for it, so need to say what helps them cope with my suffering as though that solution for them has anything at all to do with me in my situation. Or they desperately care and don’t know what to say, and blurt out words that trip over their tongue and sound hollow even to them. The love is genuine. It can’t find words, so it rips them from elsewhere, from the Bible even, and clumsily tapes them onto the wound, as effectively as sticking band aids on a broken arm. Grace sees past the words to the insecure, loving heart that utters them. Because we know that we ourselves don’t know how to love properly and well all people in all situations. So we apply to them the standard we want applied to us in this situation: we try to be gracious and merciful and ask God for help to love this loving, clumsy person back and try and help them cope with the grief of our tragedy.
There are few things more difficult than well meaning people spilling their words like salted water, on your wound. Self control and mercy under these circumstances come neither naturally nor easily. Being told of Romans 8:28 as though you’ve never before read the chapter, or being asked whether you’ve prayed about it, as though that thought had never crossed your mind is profoundly insulting, aside from everything else. But, if we are Christians, we see people, fallible like ourselves, trying to carry our load with us for a bit, dropping it and smashing our toes; but they are usually trying to care for us. So, as with everything else in our suffering, we look to our ever gracious Lord Jesus, who mended an ear of an outright enemy even as he walked towards a brutal crucifixion, where he died for the sins of his enemies. He can show us the way forward, remind us what genuine love properly expressed looks like and transform us by his Spirit to love like he does, more and more. And in the middle of it all, he understands completely the loneliness of suffering and comforts us by his Spirit.
Let’s take up our cross, despite this further pain and follow our Lord Jesus. Let’s forgive each other for our unloving, clumsy love and be merciful to those who take courage in hand and speak into our pain.
Image: William Strang, Christian and Hopeful in the Dungeon
