This pandemic has brought various kinds of suffering to our loved ones, neighbors, and communities. Suffering might come in the form of a death. It might be the loss of a job or home. It might be getting sick, a stay at the hospital, fear of what if my body can’t recover? While you may or may not be personally experiencing that kind of suffering right now, you likely know people (or are even close to people) who are. And unfortunately, unhelpful (and even pain-producing) responses and interactions with those who are suffering are almost as common as suffering itself. How can we respond to people who are hurting in ways that help and heal? How can we love others who are suffering?
A couple of years ago, we asked Alex Galloway (who leads SentWell, Novo’s missionary care team) for advice on this exact question. His guidance is simple and yet profound. In a time when many people are hurting, these principles will help us live out the good news in our communities. We trust that Alex’s perspective will be helpful as you encounter opportunities to support those who are deeply hurting during this time.
WATCH THE VIDEO.
READ THROUGH THE CONVERSATION.
Q. In your work you have helped support a lot of people through tremendous suffering in their lives. It’s one thing to go through our own suffering. It’s a very different thing to be supportive and helpful for others—to offer real comfort. So I’m wondering if you could give us some guidance on how to walk with others who are suffering?
A. Yeah, I’d say three things.
The first thing is to have dealt with your own suffering. Those times when people are struggling with suffering—they don’t know what to say, or they’re anxious about what to do—sometimes the discomfort is really on us, not on them. And our inability to say anything for fear we’re going to say something wrong or mess up with them is because we haven’t done some of the hard work ourselves, for what we believe about suffering, and how we experience suffering. Or we feel guilty because we haven’t suffered as much as these people have. All of us have experienced difficulties. If we haven’t weathered those well for ourselves then sometimes it makes us really uncomfortable when other people are suffering around us. So watch the first two videos (part 1 and part 2) and grapple with your own suffering first.
The second thing is the one thing that Job’s friends did right: nothing. They didn’t offer advice. They didn’t give all these wonderful Bible verses, platitudes. They just sat with Job. They were just with him. And people tend to underestimate the power of that. We don’t need to look beyond ourselves: when we’ve had something really difficult happen to us, we want people to just be around us and be available. There is something that gets transmitted—I believe even in spiritual realms—when someone is physically present. When we don’t have to fix it or say something to make everything better—because there isn’t really anything we can say to make it better. It’s really just about the power of your presence. You show your love and concern, and even your honoring of the gravity of the situation, by not trying to fix it... with some simple thing you saw on Facebook or something.
And the third thing is to not be afraid of their emotion. I think people get overwhelmed with other people who are just sobbing or angry with God or all these things that come up when you’re grappling with horrible things that have happened to you. It can be frightening for us to see people who are absolutely devastated and seem out of control. People have asked, “When would this be psychologically wrong, when would this be categorized as something that is unhealthy grieving?” And there really isn’t anything with the initial shock of it. You actually can only diagnose things after six weeks or two months or so of weird behavior. But we all get a bit weird when we encounter various sufferings and trials. So I think trying to not be afraid of that, and moving into it instead of being really freaked out by it, is another important way to support those suffering.
Ultimately we recognize that we aren’t the ones who are to fix it. It’s actually in spite of ourselves that God shows up and will do the work he needs to, if people are honestly struggling with the realities of their loss or their pain that they’ve experienced. So it’s just coming alongside people as they do that, being able to go to those scary places alongside of them, with them, without being afraid of them or where that might lead. And somehow, with lots of prayer, God shows up and does marvelous things that I could have never imagined or thought of. It’s exciting and a privilege to be able to be part of that process with people.
ABOUT
Alex Galloway and his wife Amy have been with Novo since 2003. They live in Malaga, Spain, where they run a hub for missionaries that provides counseling, training, leadership and transition coaching, and spiritual direction. Alex serves as the director of SentWell, Novo’s staff care and development team.