Walking with the Wounded (Aug. 26. 2007)
Walking with the Wounded
Text: Job 3-Job 37 (selected)
August 26, 2007
Big Idea: When people are suffering they need truths (not “explanations”) and tears (presence)….
When I was living in southern California, I became acquainted with a delightful young woman who was a first year student at the University of California (at Irvine). She ended up contracting cancer. She underwent chemotherapy which caused her hair to fall out.
I noticed that Jessica was so calm through this process.
I asked her, “What enables you to face your cancer with such poise?” And Jessica said, “One of the things that keeps me steady is my faith in God.
“Another thing that helped was that when I first got cancer, I kept thinking ‘Why me! Why me!’ and then someone in my life challenged me by simply asking, ‘Why not you?’ From that time forward I have taken the attitude, ‘Why not me?’”
When I think of a bubbly first year student at the University of California, I don’t associate that with a person having cancer…
But Jessica took on the attitude when cancer struck… “Why not me?”
And the fact is that hardship and suffering can inflict us or a loved when we don’t expect it.
This was certainly true of Job in the Bible.
As we saw last week, Job was living this “charmed life”, this “dream” life. He had a strong relationship with God. He was a person who was extremely wealthy, had a large family that loved getting together for BBQs and to simply hang out, Job was deeply respected, and considered the greatest man in the East.
Then a series of calamities struck Job. Job lost his businesses, the wealth of his entire investment portfolio wiped out in a single day, all his 10 children were tragically killed as a wind storm blew down their house where they were having a party… he was then overcome with a horrible, disfiguring skin disease, with open sores and boils all over his body, skin was falling off...” He responds (at first) with extraordinary strength of character.
When calamity befalls Job we read:
Job 1:20-21:
20 At this, Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head (a sign in the culture that he was in mourning) Then he fell to the ground in worship 21 and said: "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I will depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised."
Job lived with the understanding that all he had, had been given to him by the hand of God, and God had simply taken away what he had entrusted to Job in the first place. Therefore, God was not being unjust… God didn’t “owe” Job…. And therefore Job did not charge God with wrong-doing…
In the stunned moment of tragedy, Job was able to stand tall. And for a while Job was able to ride atop the waves of calamity, but when we pick up the story in Job… in Chapter 3, the waves that job faces take their toll… we see Job crashing under the waves of despair. In Chapter 3 Job says, “O, obliterate the day I was born; blank out the night I was conceived. Why didn’t I die at birth? Why wasn’t I stillborn and buried with all the babies that never saw light?”
Job falls into a deep pit of depression and he curses the day he was born.
Chances are if we live long enough, we OR someone in our world will befall significant suffering… (likely not as intense as Job, but significant suffering nonetheless).
Today we are going to look at how we can respond to people who are suffering around us…
We’re going to look first at a couple of common two responses that are typically not helpful…. Then an approach that has the potential to offer life…
A common response to people who are suffering is to simply withdraw. We may not want to be around people who are in pain. Perhaps we are not sure what to say.
We wonder, do I spend time with the person or give them space?
Do I talk to the person about a person’s suffering or should I avoid bringing that up?
Should I try to cheer them up…or console them …or neither?
Sometimes the uncertainty causes us to withdraw.
Betsy Burnham, in a book written shortly before her death from cancer, told about a letter she received during an illness. The letter went, as follows:
Dear Betsy,
I am afraid and embarrassed. With the problems you are facing, what right do I have to tell you I am afraid? I have found one excuse after another for not coming to see you. With all my heart, I want to reach out and help you and your family. I want to be available and useful. Most of all, I want to say words that you will make you well, but the fact remains I am afraid. Signed: Anne
And like Anne, some of us are afraid to be near someone in great pain because we don’t know what to do.
We are afraid, or perhaps we are too self-absorbed to move in the direction of others when they are in pain…
And so, for various reasons our inclination may to withdraw from people who suffer.
Typically this is not helpful…
Another tendency some people have when we are faced with people who are suffering is to try to explain “why” people are suffering—that’s what Job’s 3 friends, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar do for Job. They try to explain why Job is suffering.
First, when they see how grossly disfigured their friend Job is from his skin disease, they simply sit with the “elephant man” in silence.... But when Job (in Chapter 3) breaks out into his complaints, his friends feel compelled to explain why Job is suffering.
Job’s “friend” Eliphaz in Job 4:7-9 argues that Job is suffering because he has sinned…
Job 4:7-9:
"Consider now: Who, being innocent, has ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed?
8 As I have observed, those who plow evil and those who sow trouble reap it.
9 At the breath of God they perish; at the blast of his anger they are no more.
Eliphaz says to Job you’re suffering, because you must have done something wrong… you must have sinned in some way…
Job’s “friend” Bildad (Chapter 8:4-6) explains to Job that the reason your children died was that they sinned. Bildad said that if you want the calamity against your family to subside seek God more passionately.
And Job’s “friend” Zophar also (Chapter 11:13-17) points out that if Job simply seeks God more earnestly, his troubles will vanish:
Job’s friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar… in the following chapters in the book of Job, try to argue with even more intensity that Job has suffered because he has acted wickedly and if he really seeks God he will prosper.
Does Job find all these explanations helpful? Job in Chapter 13, verse 4, calls his friends useless physicians and comforters. In 16:2 he calls his friends “miserable comforters.” Job friends were well-intentioned. They tried to explain to Job the “why” of his suffering, but their explanations did not comfort him. Instead, they antagonized him.
If we try to explain the reasons why they’re suffering chances are good we’ll antagonize them as well.
Part of the reason, of course, that trying to explain why they are suffering is often so unhelpful is because there is often no direct cause and effect relationship between how we live our lives and whether we suffer or not. There are times, of course, when suffering is result from sin… if “do drugs” we’ll likely suffer because of that… if we engage in high risk-sexual behavior—we will likely suffer because of that, but often is no hard and fast correlation between our suffering and what we’ve done…
And if we think consciously or unconsciously there is, then, like Job’s friends, that people suffer suffering can always be traced back to something they have or have not done--we will likely try to explain to people “why” they are suffering--and instead of bringing comfort, we’ll bring misery.
And so, when others are suffering around us, a temptation may be to withdraw, or to temptation to “explain” the why of suffering, but often when people are in pain this approach is not helpful…
Some approaches are unhelpful and some are helpful.
At this time, I want to invite Dalen Friesen, a member of this church who serves as a fellow board member here and was part of our Cambodia mission team to come and share.
Dalen in the last year or so, you experienced a very significant loss. Can you describe that? (he talks about his mom’s death)
2nd In terms of how people responded to you in this time—what was helpful and what was not helpful? (he talks about how a friend who avoided him was not helpful, how those who listened to were helpful, and how praise songs helped him to hold on to certain truths).
DALEN’s testimony HERE:
As Dalen shared, when people are suffering what they may well find most helpful is a person will be present, who can create space for them to talk and a person who will listen…
or depending on the nature of the suffering and the personality of the suffer what can most is just being with a person in silence…
Parker Palmer in his beautiful book Let Your Life Speak describes being in the snake pit of depression… he says those who said, It’s sunny outside, you should feel better were unhelpful because he couldn’t experience the beauty through his senses in his state of depression. Parker says those you should be down, you’re a good person made him feel worse because he didn’t feel like a good person—because of his depression. Parker says, there was a man Bill named who having asked my permission to do so, stopped by my home every afternoon, sat me down in a chair, knelt down in front of me, removed my shoes and socks, and for half an hour simply massaged my feet. He found the one place in my body where I could still experience feeling and feel somewhat reconnected with the human race. Bill rarely spoke a word; when he did, he never gave advice, but simply mirrored my condition. He would say, ‘I can sense your struggle today,’ or, ‘it feels like you are getting stronger.’ I could not always respond, but his words were deeply helpful. They reassured that me I could still be seen by someone--life-giving knowledge in the midst of an experience that makes one feel annihilated and invisible.”
One of helpful things for a person who is suffering is simple presence, creating a space for the talk or be silent which is most helpful… and to sensitively offer some through some truths (not “explanations”, but larger macro-truths), I see you… or God is good… or this will not go forever…can be helpful too.
I was with a friend who was telling me that when he was in a dark season, it felt like… everything was charcoal grey… and it felt like everything in the past had been charcoal gray (though it hadn’t been) and everything in the future would be charcoal gray… A friend called him on that and said, no it may be charcoal gray now… but it won’t always be this way… My friend that was a truth I needed… When I hear others say that I will be in this black, I bring in that truth…
As a mentor of mine says, when people are suffering they truth and tears… big truths, loving presence, truth and tears… People in suffering need both… they some truths to hang to and compassionate presence, truth and tears…
How do we become people who offer this kind of presence and this kind of comfort?
Where does the power come from to offer this kind of comfort to others?
By centering our lives on the one who eventually came face to face with Job as we’ll see next week…. offering grace and truth… By centering our lives when we were spiritually suffering because we were cut off from the one true source of life in the universe, did not simply send us a e-card but became one of us, became a human being, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.
His name is Jesus Christ—and also Emmanuel, which means God with us.
And it is, as Paul points out in 2 Corinthians, 1:3-5:
3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. 5 For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.
God, in coming to us, comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort those in trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. And it is as we receive the comfort of God through his presence in our lives through Jesus Christ, we can comfort others just as we ourselves have been comforted…..
As some of you have heard, I went through a rough time of as I begin my pastoral work in the mid-nineties… A woman that been dating for a couple of years and I broke up… and I felt I was in the black pit of despair… I was a person who loved life, loved to get up early run each morning along Kits Beach and False Creek but in that season, I could barely get up out of bed. A friend reached out and walked and talked with me through that time… He gave me a book called the Inner Voice of Love by Henri Nouwen, which poignantly describes a painful relationship loss that he had experienced and offers some big truths about God and the world that I needed to hang on.
During a time when God felt mostly distant, there when God’s comfort was so sweet, that it eclipsed the high points of the romance…
I feel that because of the comfort I receive from this friend and from the Spirit of God, I in turn have been more able than I would otherwise be to be with people in that kind of loss…
So, it is when we receive the comfort of God. If receive the comfort from God in our pain, we turn and walk with others in their pain and thus show people the face of God.
Pray.
Text: Job 3-Job 37 (selected)
August 26, 2007
Big Idea: When people are suffering they need truths (not “explanations”) and tears (presence)….
When I was living in southern California, I became acquainted with a delightful young woman who was a first year student at the University of California (at Irvine). She ended up contracting cancer. She underwent chemotherapy which caused her hair to fall out.
I noticed that Jessica was so calm through this process.
I asked her, “What enables you to face your cancer with such poise?” And Jessica said, “One of the things that keeps me steady is my faith in God.
“Another thing that helped was that when I first got cancer, I kept thinking ‘Why me! Why me!’ and then someone in my life challenged me by simply asking, ‘Why not you?’ From that time forward I have taken the attitude, ‘Why not me?’”
When I think of a bubbly first year student at the University of California, I don’t associate that with a person having cancer…
But Jessica took on the attitude when cancer struck… “Why not me?”
And the fact is that hardship and suffering can inflict us or a loved when we don’t expect it.
This was certainly true of Job in the Bible.
As we saw last week, Job was living this “charmed life”, this “dream” life. He had a strong relationship with God. He was a person who was extremely wealthy, had a large family that loved getting together for BBQs and to simply hang out, Job was deeply respected, and considered the greatest man in the East.
Then a series of calamities struck Job. Job lost his businesses, the wealth of his entire investment portfolio wiped out in a single day, all his 10 children were tragically killed as a wind storm blew down their house where they were having a party… he was then overcome with a horrible, disfiguring skin disease, with open sores and boils all over his body, skin was falling off...” He responds (at first) with extraordinary strength of character.
When calamity befalls Job we read:
Job 1:20-21:
20 At this, Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head (a sign in the culture that he was in mourning) Then he fell to the ground in worship 21 and said: "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I will depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised."
Job lived with the understanding that all he had, had been given to him by the hand of God, and God had simply taken away what he had entrusted to Job in the first place. Therefore, God was not being unjust… God didn’t “owe” Job…. And therefore Job did not charge God with wrong-doing…
In the stunned moment of tragedy, Job was able to stand tall. And for a while Job was able to ride atop the waves of calamity, but when we pick up the story in Job… in Chapter 3, the waves that job faces take their toll… we see Job crashing under the waves of despair. In Chapter 3 Job says, “O, obliterate the day I was born; blank out the night I was conceived. Why didn’t I die at birth? Why wasn’t I stillborn and buried with all the babies that never saw light?”
Job falls into a deep pit of depression and he curses the day he was born.
Chances are if we live long enough, we OR someone in our world will befall significant suffering… (likely not as intense as Job, but significant suffering nonetheless).
Today we are going to look at how we can respond to people who are suffering around us…
We’re going to look first at a couple of common two responses that are typically not helpful…. Then an approach that has the potential to offer life…
A common response to people who are suffering is to simply withdraw. We may not want to be around people who are in pain. Perhaps we are not sure what to say.
We wonder, do I spend time with the person or give them space?
Do I talk to the person about a person’s suffering or should I avoid bringing that up?
Should I try to cheer them up…or console them …or neither?
Sometimes the uncertainty causes us to withdraw.
Betsy Burnham, in a book written shortly before her death from cancer, told about a letter she received during an illness. The letter went, as follows:
Dear Betsy,
I am afraid and embarrassed. With the problems you are facing, what right do I have to tell you I am afraid? I have found one excuse after another for not coming to see you. With all my heart, I want to reach out and help you and your family. I want to be available and useful. Most of all, I want to say words that you will make you well, but the fact remains I am afraid. Signed: Anne
And like Anne, some of us are afraid to be near someone in great pain because we don’t know what to do.
We are afraid, or perhaps we are too self-absorbed to move in the direction of others when they are in pain…
And so, for various reasons our inclination may to withdraw from people who suffer.
Typically this is not helpful…
Another tendency some people have when we are faced with people who are suffering is to try to explain “why” people are suffering—that’s what Job’s 3 friends, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar do for Job. They try to explain why Job is suffering.
First, when they see how grossly disfigured their friend Job is from his skin disease, they simply sit with the “elephant man” in silence.... But when Job (in Chapter 3) breaks out into his complaints, his friends feel compelled to explain why Job is suffering.
Job’s “friend” Eliphaz in Job 4:7-9 argues that Job is suffering because he has sinned…
Job 4:7-9:
"Consider now: Who, being innocent, has ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed?
8 As I have observed, those who plow evil and those who sow trouble reap it.
9 At the breath of God they perish; at the blast of his anger they are no more.
Eliphaz says to Job you’re suffering, because you must have done something wrong… you must have sinned in some way…
Job’s “friend” Bildad (Chapter 8:4-6) explains to Job that the reason your children died was that they sinned. Bildad said that if you want the calamity against your family to subside seek God more passionately.
And Job’s “friend” Zophar also (Chapter 11:13-17) points out that if Job simply seeks God more earnestly, his troubles will vanish:
Job’s friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar… in the following chapters in the book of Job, try to argue with even more intensity that Job has suffered because he has acted wickedly and if he really seeks God he will prosper.
Does Job find all these explanations helpful? Job in Chapter 13, verse 4, calls his friends useless physicians and comforters. In 16:2 he calls his friends “miserable comforters.” Job friends were well-intentioned. They tried to explain to Job the “why” of his suffering, but their explanations did not comfort him. Instead, they antagonized him.
If we try to explain the reasons why they’re suffering chances are good we’ll antagonize them as well.
Part of the reason, of course, that trying to explain why they are suffering is often so unhelpful is because there is often no direct cause and effect relationship between how we live our lives and whether we suffer or not. There are times, of course, when suffering is result from sin… if “do drugs” we’ll likely suffer because of that… if we engage in high risk-sexual behavior—we will likely suffer because of that, but often is no hard and fast correlation between our suffering and what we’ve done…
And if we think consciously or unconsciously there is, then, like Job’s friends, that people suffer suffering can always be traced back to something they have or have not done--we will likely try to explain to people “why” they are suffering--and instead of bringing comfort, we’ll bring misery.
And so, when others are suffering around us, a temptation may be to withdraw, or to temptation to “explain” the why of suffering, but often when people are in pain this approach is not helpful…
Some approaches are unhelpful and some are helpful.
At this time, I want to invite Dalen Friesen, a member of this church who serves as a fellow board member here and was part of our Cambodia mission team to come and share.
Dalen in the last year or so, you experienced a very significant loss. Can you describe that? (he talks about his mom’s death)
2nd In terms of how people responded to you in this time—what was helpful and what was not helpful? (he talks about how a friend who avoided him was not helpful, how those who listened to were helpful, and how praise songs helped him to hold on to certain truths).
DALEN’s testimony HERE:
As Dalen shared, when people are suffering what they may well find most helpful is a person will be present, who can create space for them to talk and a person who will listen…
or depending on the nature of the suffering and the personality of the suffer what can most is just being with a person in silence…
Parker Palmer in his beautiful book Let Your Life Speak describes being in the snake pit of depression… he says those who said, It’s sunny outside, you should feel better were unhelpful because he couldn’t experience the beauty through his senses in his state of depression. Parker says those you should be down, you’re a good person made him feel worse because he didn’t feel like a good person—because of his depression. Parker says, there was a man Bill named who having asked my permission to do so, stopped by my home every afternoon, sat me down in a chair, knelt down in front of me, removed my shoes and socks, and for half an hour simply massaged my feet. He found the one place in my body where I could still experience feeling and feel somewhat reconnected with the human race. Bill rarely spoke a word; when he did, he never gave advice, but simply mirrored my condition. He would say, ‘I can sense your struggle today,’ or, ‘it feels like you are getting stronger.’ I could not always respond, but his words were deeply helpful. They reassured that me I could still be seen by someone--life-giving knowledge in the midst of an experience that makes one feel annihilated and invisible.”
One of helpful things for a person who is suffering is simple presence, creating a space for the talk or be silent which is most helpful… and to sensitively offer some through some truths (not “explanations”, but larger macro-truths), I see you… or God is good… or this will not go forever…can be helpful too.
I was with a friend who was telling me that when he was in a dark season, it felt like… everything was charcoal grey… and it felt like everything in the past had been charcoal gray (though it hadn’t been) and everything in the future would be charcoal gray… A friend called him on that and said, no it may be charcoal gray now… but it won’t always be this way… My friend that was a truth I needed… When I hear others say that I will be in this black, I bring in that truth…
As a mentor of mine says, when people are suffering they truth and tears… big truths, loving presence, truth and tears… People in suffering need both… they some truths to hang to and compassionate presence, truth and tears…
How do we become people who offer this kind of presence and this kind of comfort?
Where does the power come from to offer this kind of comfort to others?
By centering our lives on the one who eventually came face to face with Job as we’ll see next week…. offering grace and truth… By centering our lives when we were spiritually suffering because we were cut off from the one true source of life in the universe, did not simply send us a e-card but became one of us, became a human being, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.
His name is Jesus Christ—and also Emmanuel, which means God with us.
And it is, as Paul points out in 2 Corinthians, 1:3-5:
3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. 5 For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.
God, in coming to us, comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort those in trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. And it is as we receive the comfort of God through his presence in our lives through Jesus Christ, we can comfort others just as we ourselves have been comforted…..
As some of you have heard, I went through a rough time of as I begin my pastoral work in the mid-nineties… A woman that been dating for a couple of years and I broke up… and I felt I was in the black pit of despair… I was a person who loved life, loved to get up early run each morning along Kits Beach and False Creek but in that season, I could barely get up out of bed. A friend reached out and walked and talked with me through that time… He gave me a book called the Inner Voice of Love by Henri Nouwen, which poignantly describes a painful relationship loss that he had experienced and offers some big truths about God and the world that I needed to hang on.
During a time when God felt mostly distant, there when God’s comfort was so sweet, that it eclipsed the high points of the romance…
I feel that because of the comfort I receive from this friend and from the Spirit of God, I in turn have been more able than I would otherwise be to be with people in that kind of loss…
So, it is when we receive the comfort of God. If receive the comfort from God in our pain, we turn and walk with others in their pain and thus show people the face of God.
Pray.
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