Struggling alongside:

What do you do when people you really care about are struggling?

I think there are several options:
1. You can give constant, unsolicited advice. This has the benefit of making you feel like you are superior in some ways. You get to (you think) help someone who could otherwise not help himself or herself. You relieve your conscience of some strange guilt you might feel otherwise. You end up pissing people off more often than not.
2. You can do nothing. This has the benefit of relieving guilt also, because in this way you are absolved of responsibility because you are saying that there is nothing you can do nor would the particular person really care for your help anyway (see #1). This has the added benefit of hindsight. "See, I couldn't have helped anyway."
3. You can be passive aggressive about it. You can drop little obnoxious hints from time to time. You can ask leading questions like "Is that something that you really want to do?" Or "you think that is beneficial to be like that?" Or any other type of permutation. This gives you the false sense that you are "doing what you can," to help this person that you are clearly superior to.

I honestly think all those options suck. The problem with caring, and especially caring about people when they mess up, is that it really hurts when they do. It also hurts because so often we can see things that people cannot see in themselves. But probably the worst part of all of it is that many times we struggle is because it reveals two things to us: that we might have been able to help it turn out different, and it reveals some of our own shortcomings as a companion.

Those are the two things I have really struggled with lately. The stories are not mine to tell, but my part is. I think there is a better way than the three I listed above. I think it is by far the most difficult, but it is the path that we are called to walk if we want to truly love. I will try my best to lay it out, but the real difficulty with this path is that is is not always the same.

I think the start of truly helping those that we care about is listening. Taking the time to figure out what needs a person has, how they think they can be met, etc. The difficult part of this is that listening takes time. There is no real drivethrough for this. Sometimes people aren't ready to be listened to, sometimes they don't feel like talking about anything, and sometimes they want to talk when it is incredibly inconvenient for us (the game is on, I am about to defeat the last boss, one more paragraph!). And that is why we suck at listening. Because we think that like a DVD we should just be able to pause our loved ones and have them wait for us to listen. But there is not pause button. People live life as it happens, and not as we are ready for it.

So after listening, the question becomes what should I do? Should I begin to nag incessantly? Should I judge that person and tell them that I can't be there for them until they cease their destructive behavior? Should I make snarky comments if they do something I don't approve of? I think not on all counts. I think we should come alongside. We should journey with the person. Listen some more! I think one of the best things to do at this point is to ask them what they would like you to do to help. The problem with this question, though, is someone may take you up on it. You may end up dumping a lot of time into something you wanted to put a band-aid on. You may end up having to adjust what you think "help" is. You may have to be a jerk sometimes. You may have to do nothing sometimes.

We have become a people obsessed with steps and procedures, protocol and lists. But we were made as people. Whole. One. But in community. Independent but needy. The difficulty about those things is that there is never an easy fix. There is not list of things to do. We have to work with people to discover, we have to be honest and direct, we have to be open to failure and hopeful for success. Because you can't save a life without the risk to lose a life. Sometimes it may be my life that I lose. I may miss an OU game, or playoffs of some sort. I may not be able to finish my sermon when I want, or complete my book per week. And if I want to fulfill the greatest command, I have to be ok with that. Because life happens all the time, and while I am not completely responsible for those I love, I do share some responsibility. Much of life is too heavy to bear alone, but very light with company.

All that to say, much of the time when my loved ones fail, or hurt, or fall down, I feel the weight as well. So when two people who I care for greatly have had very recent struggles, I feel partly to blame. I am sure both would say that I did nothing wrong, and I may not have. But I probably didn't do much right either. The biggest thing I love about the movie "About a Boy" is the constant repeating of John Donne's "no man is an island." So while I may not have been able to completely protect those I love from storms, I have to think I could have been a partial shield to help ride it out. So ultimately, I think God calls us to love well, to try to be an agent of change, to listen, and to throw our hands up and realize we can only do so much. Tough balance to walk, but if it isn't hard then I question whether we are really trying. The other thing to keep in mind is that I am in constant need of this type of grace myself. My hope is that those who care for me do a better job of listening than I sometimes do.



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