Billy Crystal recently said he has stopped talking to God. “No, ’cause I don’t trust Him,” he told CBS correspondent Tracy Smith. His home burned in the Pacific Palisades fire, and his longtime friend Rob Reiner and Reiner’s wife, Michele, were murdered.
Suppose you were sitting across the table when he said it. What would you say?
We arrive at someone’s sorrow with conclusions before we’ve heard their story. We deliver our answers and leave. They’re still grieving, and now they may also feel guilty for struggling.
I asked that question on my radio program because someone we know may eventually trust us enough to say the same thing. A neighbor who buried a child. Someone who prayed beside a hospital bed and went home alone. Would we hear their anguish or immediately start preparing our answer?
I’ve spent 40 years caring for my wife, Gracie. Her suffering began before I met her. Over her lifetime, she has endured 98 operations and the loss of both legs. Along the way, people have told us what we should believe, how we should feel, and what God was evidently trying to accomplish. Some never acknowledged the weight of what we carried.
Rush Limbaugh used the phrase “drive-by media” to describe reporters who rushed into a story, stirred things up, and moved along, leaving others to deal with the damage. Are we in danger of engaging in drive-by ministry?
We arrive at someone’s sorrow with conclusions before we’ve heard their story. We deliver our answers and leave. They’re still grieving, and now they may also feel guilty for struggling. It costs considerably more to pull up a chair.
Job’s friends managed that at first. They sat silently beside him for seven days because they saw how greatly he suffered. Most of us struggle to give someone seven uninterrupted minutes.
Scripture makes room for anguish. David asks in Psalm 13, “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?” Those words are in our Bibles. We ought to be able to hear them from someone sitting in our living rooms. David ultimately recalls God’s steadfast love, but the psalm lets us hear his sorrow along the way.
I learned something about the cost of coming near in a dusty prosthetic clinic in Ghana. Through Standing With Hope, the ministry Gracie envisioned after losing her legs, we’ve provided prosthetic limbs in Ghana for more than 20 years.
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Photo by Peter Rosenberger
On an early trip, a young Nigerian man arrived wearing a prosthesis. Our team was occupied, so I sat down with him. We didn’t share a language, and I couldn’t find an interpreter. With gestures, I asked him to remove his prosthesis and the liner covering his residual limb.
The smell hit me like it had reached out and slapped me. My eyes watered, and a friend sitting several feet away backed up. I feared an infection, but I found no visible wound. He hadn’t properly washed his limb and liner, and my attempts to explain what he needed to do weren’t getting us anywhere.
I understood that he was Muslim. This was not terribly long after September 11. For all I knew, he could have been an enemy of my faith or my country. I didn’t know. What I knew was that he was missing a leg, needed help with his prosthesis, and had come to our clinic.
So I found clean water, soap, and a towel and demonstrated how to wash his limb and liner. At first, my eyes watered from the smell. As I washed his limb, I began to weep over what Christ had done for me.
My own stench was far worse. And mine wasn’t coming off with soap and water. It required His blood.
I could barely keep myself together. I had come to help put legs on people, and there I sat, overwhelmed by the mercy Christ had shown me.
Sitting with someone in anguish can leave us feeling helpless. Physical or emotional trauma makes us uncomfortable. We want to explain something, fix something, or give them something to do. Their grief may outlast everything we know to say.
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Jesus stood at Lazarus’ grave and wept. He knew He was about to raise him, yet He wept. That ought to shape how we approach someone whose sorrow has spilled into words that trouble us.
I want grieving people to know Christ. I want them to know the Savior who bore our sin and rose from the dead. And when I speak of Him, I want to remember how patiently He has dealt with me.
I cannot make sense of why Billy Crystal’s home burned or why his friends were killed. But hearing his words makes me want to pull up a chair and ask, “Tell me about your friends.” Then listen long enough to hear the answer.
That takes time. It may cost us more than we expected. Forty years beside Gracie have taught me that some suffering will still be there when the conversation ends. But Christ has given us ample reason to keep showing up.
He didn’t drive by. He entered.