Last weekend I had the opportunity to go to a wake and a service of a young man I kind of knew (I know his family better). I knew about when it would be and I knew where it was being held, but when the time came to head there I changed my mind.

It’s not that I am not uncomfortable with being in the presence of suffering and those who suffer, on the contrary I think I am pretty good at BEing in the present. However, I am prone to overthinking and overanalyzing things, and I talked myself out of going because what if I was told to say something, what if I were to provide verbal comfort?

Where I am at in my journey of life and journey of faith, I cannot bring myself to verbally comfort someone who is suffering. I can sympathize, I can empathize, I can BE, I can be silent…but words, words escape me if someone wanted verbal comfort because I find a lot of comfort words in times of suffering to be trite, cliche, and even the exact opposite of comfort.

To extend myself a bit of grace, I will say this; the words I select are deliberate much of the time, I am careful in self-examining myself in what I am to say a good deal of the time. It is probably because of this I come across as being quiet, but on the contrary, provided I think things through I have quite a bit to say!

But saying anything in times when people are hurting strikes me as taking away from what’s going on, and I rather be than to do, I deliberately choose silence paired with comforting.

***

In hindsight, I wish I went. I wish I went to be present with the brothers, the parents, the extended family, the friends, et al. because if I were able to get out of my head and BE, that’s all that would matter and it would matter immensely as a lot of the time we need someone to listen to us without having anything to say.

Lesson learned,

~Nathanael~