TO SUFFER WITH...

It was a request made online and made in person by my much loved, respected, and appreciated, spiritual leader, “Please come back this afternoon and be family to a family whose 14-month-old daughter had lost the battle of living a week earlier. I had heard a similar request before and failed to respond. I felt a compelling urge to answer this request.

My husband and I arrived a few minutes before the service started only to be met at the entrance and warmly embraced by the mom and dad. We walked to the front of the room and was greeted by a miniature pecan brown wooden casket covered with a small spray of beautiful flowers and thus began a joy filled hour plus lesson in compassion.

Compassion simply means to “to suffer together.” I, nor my husband, had ever met the parents of the little girl. You would not have known that by the warm embrace that we received when we arrived. The dad stood to share his family’s fourteen-month journey and “non-verbally” invited us to “suffer together” for a while. As he spoke and showed pictures of his little girl, compassion settled over the room like a dense fog – it was palpable. We experienced some of their highest peaks and lowest lows as he shared a snapshot of their road from birth to death travelled entirely in a pandemic world. We cried and laughed as he cried and laughed. His body and his words worked in tandem to usher us, the listeners, to a time of suffering and celebration with him, his wife and two sons.

The grief-stricken father gave us the gift that Sunday afternoon of experiencing joy amid suffering…suffering together. He ended his testimony by asking, “What will you do?” I heard, “What will you do with this gift -this example of a room filled with people suffering together in another’s pain?

Here’s my current answer. My boundary to love and be loved has been widened. I am more able to love others as they wish to be loved not as I wish to love them. My ideas of what love and compassion ought to look like has shifted. Love and compassion is a smorgasbord with infinite choices. I choose to sample the smorgasbord more freely than ever before. The father unknowingly mentored my spiritual growth in compassion and loving others.

WHAT WILL YOU DO?

2 Cor.1:4

PONDER THIS THOUGHT---To suffer with another is loving them as they need to be loved not as you wish to love them.