Good Grief

Should they decide to accept your invitation, your second task is to listen and to avoid giving advice or reassurance. I don’t think it is an accident that God gave us two ears and one mouth. It is especially im-portant when we are inviting a grieving person to share their feelings with us. Our goal is not to fix them or save them and make them feel better. Our goal is to be with them as they share.

Of course, that is no small task. Sharing another per-son’s pain or sorrow can be a painful thing. But it can also be a very special gift that we call the minis-try of presence. The gift of being there.

I had an experience years ago in St Joseph Hospital in Phoenix Arizona that taught me the truth of such a gift. I was doing a year of internship at First United Methodist Church there and on this particular day I was visiting members of the church in the hospital. As I walked down the hall of the hospital, I saw two people coming toward me. One supporting the other as they walked. As they came nearer, I saw that it was a man helping a woman who was probably re-covering from hip surgery. She was walking and you could tell by her body language that it was very pain-ful for her. As we approached each other I noticed that she was crying because it hurt so badly. And then I noticed that her friend who was helping was also crying. Not because his legs hurt, but because his heart hurt to see the one he loved in such pain.

That’s the risk we take when we share another’s grief. But when we take that risk and when the griev-ing person mourns well his or her loss, then we un-derstand why Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”