Comfort

I always felt bad for Job, not just because he loses all of his stuff, but because his friends won't shut up about how he must've done something terrible to deserve this tragedy. Some friends!

But then I think, although we don't tend to offer quite the same message to our grieving friends today, we do have a tendency to try to fill the silence with cliches. "Just trust God." "God has a plan for you." "Just pray about it."

It's not that any of those phrases are incorrect. It's just that sometimes, things suck so bad that you just don't have it in you to trust God or hope in his plan. Sometimes, you can't even muster the strength to pray. And cliches and Christianese aren't going to change that. Sometimes those cliches make you feel like a worse person, because you don't want to trust God at that moment. So now you're grieving and you've got a guilt trip.

I was going through a bad break-up in college and facing these kinds of comments from my well-meaning friends. It was certainly better than Job's friends, but I just wanted someone to commiserate, not try to fix it.

And then one day, I wandered into the room across the hall. To be frank, I can't even remember who lived there now. But she knew what I was going through, at the time. I sat down on her bed, crying, and she just got a box of tissues and sat down next to me. She didn't try to fill what was probably an uncomfortable silence for her. She just put her hand on my back, handed me a tissue, and let me cry.

That was the most comforting thing anyone has ever done for me. That was the thing that made me feel like I could get over this. (That and a full-sized carton of Edy's ice cream that had to be eaten in one sitting since I didn't have a freezer.) Not the cliches, not the Bible verses, but the silence of someone who would just let me express my grief without making me feel like I was a bad Christian for being sad.

Sometimes the most comforting thing you can do is nothing. Don't spout out Bible verses and Christian cliches. Just grab a box of tissues and let the griever cry it out.

Nine Years

I keep thinking about what I was doing nine years ago today. Packing up all my stuff. Sleeping in my bed at my parents' for the last time before college. Getting ready to say goodbye to Buttercup for a semester. Eagerly thinking about what it would be like to meet my roommate. Anxious to get to Wheaton, settle into my new room, and be on my own for the first time. Nervous about doing my own laundry.

The 18 year-old kid dreaming of what college would be like is long gone. She's mastered the laundry, gotten rid of those hideous mom shorts (what really makes me sad is you know I picked out my very coolest outfit for the first day of college...), formed a great friendship with that pocket-sized roommate in the picture, and learned a whole lot about the "real world." The Cheez-It stash on that shelf has been replaced with Xtra Cheddar Goldfish.

(Tangent: Oh man, I just realized how much I miss those shoes. I adored those shoes. So cute, so comfortable...)

If I could go back and tell that kid in the picture one thing, I don't think she'd have listened. (Betcha didn't see the end of that sentence coming!) I know this because the advice I would give comes straight from a Bible verse I hung on the wall a couple months into college. "Above all else, guard your heart - for it is the wellspring of life." (No, I'm not going all Kasey Kahl on you...I'm going King Solomon on you!) It's so true, and so much of my vibrancy has been lost by not guarding my heart...but there's no way I could've understood that nine years ago.

This is the problem with giving advice. Sometimes it works, but most of the time, you just have to learn from your own mistakes. People say all the time, "If I could go back and tell myself xyz..." But the fact is, the you from back then probably wouldn't have listened either.

In nine years I've learned a lot. And sure, some of it has been through the wisdom of great Wheaton professors or sage bosses. But a lot of it has just been through life experience. And there's no amount of advice-giving that could've taught me the same things.