Austin's Blog

You not only need your best theology when enduring suffering; you need your best shepherding. You need other people who are willing to enter into the pain you are experiencing in order to help pick it up. Bob Kellemen said, “Shared sorrow is endurable sorrow.” This is immensely difficult for various reasons. First, grief and suffering are unique and, as a result, often isolate. Jerry Sittser writes, “Each person’s experience is his or her own, even if, on the face of it, the experience appears similar to many others. Though suffering itself is universal, each experience of suffering is unique because each person who goes through it is unique. Who the self was before the loss, what the self feels in the loss, and how the self responds to the loss makes each person’s experience different from all others. That is why suffering is a solitary experience…No one can deliver us, substitute for us, or mitigate the pain in us.” You have to allow people in and let them help you carry it. Second, when heinous evil strikes someone at the very heart of what is precious, many people draw back, recoil, fall silent, stop calling, or avoid entering in because of what it represents and does within them. “If it could happen to them, it could happen to me.” The suffering person represents their worst fears and they often are simply unwilling to pick up such a burden. They draw back, fall silent, and move on.

What is needed though for the person experiencing deep loss? You need someone simply willing to be present and listen. Job’s three friends afflicted him deeply by talking more than listening. The most helpful thing they did was be with him in his suffering for that first week. They listened. They harmed him only when they began to speak. Charles Spurgeon writes, “People in deep trouble like somebody to hear them all through: even little children are comforted by telling mother all about it. We are in such a hurry with poor troubled spirits that we hasten them on to the end of the sentence, and try to make them skip the dreary details. But to them this seems unkind, for their story is sacred; and, therefore, they go slowly on with it, till we are quite tired. I have often hurried on a poor despondent creature till I have seen the uselessness of it: it is always best to let them spin on. It does them good.”

If you’re going to help someone in their grief and suffering, this will require some intentional choices on your part. If you’re entering in, you’re agreeing and assenting to the possibility of transformation and change within yourself. Again, Jerry Sittser notes of those who choose to enter in someone’s suffering and loss, “They must be willing to be changed by someone else’s loss, though they might not have been directly affected by it. Good comfort requires empathy, forces adjustments, and sometimes mandates huge sacrifices. Comforters must be prepared to let the pain of another become their own and so let it transform them. They will never be the same after that decision. Their own world will be permanently altered by the presence of one who suffers.” We are so grateful for the friends who have made the conscious effort to enter in our loss, grief, and suffering. They know our life will never be the same and they have decided that it would not be the same for them either. They recognize our cross is burdensome and heavy and they have come to help lift the beams, thus fulfilling the law. I think of the couple of men who have looked me with tears in their eyes and said they intend to limp with me until the day I see my son again. I think of the ladies who call, text, or invite Valerie over, just wanting to share memories of Gabriel, note milestones he would have had, or just serve her in whatever way they can. I think of the people who talk about him as if he still exists (he does, for he is in Heaven) and acknowledge the ache we now feel. We are so grateful for these brothers and sisters because shared sorrow is endurable sorrow.