It's a dangerous thing to process publicly, but in some sense by keeping this blog I've chosen to share more with the world at large than I ever would with a room full of people. Blogs feel intimate but they are not, and that too is dangerous. Even so, NPR once ran a story that said most blogs are read by an average of six people. Six people may read, but six million could. But that's a topic for another day.
I'm really thankful to those of you who have chosen to share so much online, to tell the stories that I would bet most of your friends did not know to a room full of strangers (and potentially a larger room of lurkers). I wouldn't recognize you at the mall, but I know your secrets. Isn't that something? Your honesty has better equipped me to love and serve my face-to-face friends who share similar stories. I've heard theirs in the way your friends have surely heard yours - vaguely, sporadically, awkwardly. You've helped me understand a little more about the things they can't say. Thank you for that.
All of that is a backdrop for this weekend, when someone shared her story with me. I was no more prepared to hear it than she was for it to be true, but I did and it is, nonetheless. I haven't slept a full night since.
And here is the crux of faith in my life - to love and serve others, to walk with them in their suffering as Christ did, and to remember the love and redemptive nature of God, not just in distant, philosophical moments, but in the stories that keep me up at night, too - this is what it means to trust God. For me, this is what faith is. I can choose to ignore suffering, to live at arms length from pain. Or I can choose to forget that God is good and to be overwhelmed by hopelessness. But neither is true to who God is or who I am as His child. My calling is here, in the middle, to acknowledge suffering and God's desire to heal at the same time.
Mikkee, wise soul that she is, often says that anything that causes us to long for Heaven is a blessing. In light of that, the privilege of sharing in another's suffering is a blessing in my life. I long for the moment when there are no more stories to tell.
3 comments:
Thank you for writing this. I hope that in my daily life and interactions (both as a 'church guy' and as just a guy) that I too can be there to walk in the midst of those who are struggling and need to see God's face on earth.
Me, too, sister. Me, too.
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.
For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.
II Cor 1:3-5
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