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Your Words
To
humans belong the plans of the heart, but from the LORD comes the proper answer
of the tongue. – Proverbs 16:1
I don’t know her. It
was one of those God things that brought us together. She wanted something I
had to sell. I certainly didn’t know she was four months into her season of
grief. And she surely didn’t know grief was something I understood. But God
brought us together for a moment and that turned out to be a good thing.
She was trying to move
on. Her friends were trying to be helpful, encouraging even. Get over it, they
advised. Start a new life, they said. Redecorate your house with something that’s
new and different, they told her. They wanted to help but all they did was pour
more anguish into her fresh wounds.
Everyone grieves differently.
There’s no right or wrong way. Some people have an uncanny knack for bouncing
back. Most of us linger in the pain for a while. She is one of those.
Some days are good, she
told me. Other days she can barely function. It’s all normal to me. It might
have been normal to her had she not had such well-meaning people in her life.
She thought she should push forward and pretend she was okay, even on the hard
days. She was beating herself up because she just couldn’t.
My advice? Give
yourself a break. Enjoy the good days and take care of yourself on the bad days. If you need to cry, go ahead
and cry. If you need to mope, go ahead and do it. Just don’t stay there. Grief
is a journey and there are no quick fixes.
Her friends mean well.
They do. They just don’t understand what they haven’t lived. That’s true in so
many areas of life.
I had a friend tell me
I didn’t know what it was like having children. She’s right. I don’t. But as I
reminded her, she doesn’t know what it’s like to not have the children you once
desperately wanted. The shock on her face still makes me chuckle. She had never
considered the other side.
I am in a Bible study
on Job. We talked about how well-meaning friends can say the absolutely worst
things. Friends can hurt us deeply without realizing the weight of their words.
They make assumptions. They speak from themselves without considering the
differences. They aim to fix what only God can heal.
Sometimes the absolutely
best thing you can say to someone hurting is – drum roll here – nothing. Just
give them a hug. Sit quietly beside them. Walk with them. You can’t fix it. You
can’t. But you can love them without hurting them.
That’s not to say that
we don’t sometimes need friends to speak truth into our lives. Notice earlier
that while I encouraged this woman to cry and mourn, I also told her not to
live there. I speak from experience. I spoke from a heart that has known deep
pain. And she heard that in my words.
Some seasons of life
are just hard. I know it’s something I say a lot but I do so because it’s true.
I also do so because there are just so many hurting people in this world. Don’t
add to their pain with careless words. Don’t try to fix them or their
situation. Just love them and trust God to heal them.
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