Leaning In

I remember the phone call fifteen years ago, with news so devastating that it physically bent my knees.  "Should I go?" I asked, tentatively --fearfully.  "If not you, then who?" was the bald challenge.  Driving the ten minutes to a house of sudden bereavement I metaphorically dragged my feet each mile.  "God, I don't know what to do, don't know what to say, don't want to be this close to this kind of pain.  Help me, please.  Send someone else.  I cannot do this."

A group of us had studied a book together about a family that barely survived the death of a child, and we assiduously noted the practical ways community kept these heartbroken members alive by bringing food and making arrangements and moving them through their days until they could begin to take wobbly steps all on their own.  But now the intellectual discussion had abruptly become a call to action.  

So I went.  And I wasn't as much comfort as company.  I said the wrong thing, was the wrong thing, most of the time.  Others went as well; many wiser in their ministrations than I.  From them I learned to close my mouth, stop bustling about, have tissues at the ready.  Being there meant sorting clothes or reminiscing or talking about a new book/movie or companionably pushing food around a plate.  And possibly crying through all of it.

It feels I have lived a lifetime since those days of joining together, working out a round-the-clock schedule to come alongside loss that was beyond comprehension, carrying out a commitment to not leave someone alone in the deep waters of grief.  They were "desperate times" calling for "desperate measures."
But human need is the same, whether the trial is a fiercely raging inferno or a nagging dull despair: people who know God's great love and mercy humble enough to show up, to walk beside, to be companions through days that take every effort just to keep breathing -- even with the wrong words, or at the wrong moments, or in the wrong ways.  

A currently popular philosophy admonishes taking all there is from life, pursuing each advantage and experience to the utmost.  The premise, as I understand it, is that you have to "lean in" to the opportunities.
But what if the truly great calling is to step closer to the hardship and devastation in the lives of those around us?  Not begun in a reluctant, begrudging attitude, but with the assumption that something vital and life-giving could be accomplished by that momentum?

I have been blessed to have people in my life who love well.  They are faithful with their prayers and faithful with their presence, particularly when this world seems to be most broken.
Their courage has deepened my faith in God, whose love equips and emboldens and empowers us to bear one another's burdens.  To enter into the pain.
To do the things we cannot.

If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.