10 Tips to Soothe Suffering

“Why would anyone say that to me?” Eyes pleading, perplexed and full of pain, friends facing extremely difficult circumstances and/or loss have posed this question to me after a well-meaning person added insult to injury with words meant to comfort. I’m not sure they even expected me to answer as much as they just couldn’t believe someone would utter something so insensitive.

To try and answer this “Why?” would be as unproductive as trying to answer the “Why?” of whatever has them in a vulnerable, grieving place in the first place. So what do we say when someone is suffering? How do we avoid inappropriate incidents where we think we’re doing good, but we end up wounding someone who’s already hurting?

Job has something to say about this: “Oh that you would be silent and it would be your wisdom!” (Job 13:5).

Sometimes saying nothing is the wisest thing we can say! As we saw in Isaiah 55:8-9, we simply don’t and can’t know the ways and thoughts of God. Our attempts to say the right thing might be met with Job’s sentiments: “Miserable comforters are you all!” (Job 16:2).

So how can we soothe the suffering?

1.       Pray first, and be led by the Holy Spirit in all we say and do. Ask the Holy Spirit to show us their needs and to give us comforting words that will relieve their grief.

2.       Sometimes, it’s best to say nothing at all; just be there. As a picture is worth a thousand words, our silent presence can be, too. 

3.       Listen. Let them talk, and don’t try to have the answers. 

4.       Don’t strive to say the right thing, simply tell them we love them and that we’re here if they need us. Proverbs 10:19 counsels, “In the multitude of words sin is not lacking, but he who restrains his lips is wise.”  

5.       As the saying goes, “Actions speak louder than words.” Take food, look for ways to physically help and serve them. Clean their house, watch their kids, run their errands. Do whatever we can to ease other burdens so they have time and strength to grieve. 

6.       Pray for them. Ask permission to pray for them when we’re with them, and pray without ceasing when we’re not. We can even write our prayers to them in a card, email, or text. Pray scripture over them and their situation. Pray with understanding and with the spirit. 

7.       ALWAYS point them to the cross, to the comforter Himself. To the source of peace that passes understanding. To our eternal hope. 

8.       Share God’s words of comfort. Assure them that as they place their faith entirely in Jesus, staying their minds on Him, He will give them perfect peace. He will not leave or forsake them. He is all-present, all-knowing, all-powerful, and in control. Encourage them to trust in Him, even in the midst of their suffering, that He is faithful, good, trustworthy, and always the only answer. Faith doesn’t always change our circumstances or bring about our desired result, but faith always is the answer in our circumstances, trusting Him to carry us through. 

9.       Be extremely discerning and sensitive (see number one). The right words at the wrong time might have disastrous results, whereas those same words spoken at the right time can be exactly what a person needs to hear. Someone who just lost a parent, spouse, or child might not respond well to sincere encouragement that God will work even that to good. It is true, and I have turned to that promise more times than I can count, but in the freshness of a grave loss, those words may be met with bitterness rather than relief. 

10.   Some of what we say may depend on whether we’ve walked in their shoes. Words spoken by someone who has been through the exact same circumstances might be received differently than the same words spoken by someone who has no idea what they’re experiencing.

In the last chapter of Job, the Lord commands Job's friends to go to Job and offer up for themselves a burnt offering. He tells them Job will pray for them, explaining, "For I will accept him, lest I deal with you according to your folly; because you have not spoken of Me what is right, as My servant Job has (verse 8).

All the things they accused Job of, calling him a hypocrite and insisting he deserved his suffering, and now he has to pray for them that their offering will be acceptable to the Lord?!?! Don’t you know that required forgiveness?!?!

Yet, after Job was obedient in this, “the Lord restored Job’s losses…Indeed, the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before…the Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning” (verses 10-12).

No matter what stupid, insensitive, or prideful things someone says to us in our suffering, we must forgive. We must not question our faith just because someone else does. We must pray for those people. And let us remain humble in Christ and guard against pride and stupidity in the things we say, always erring to the side of saying too little versus saying too much.

Lord, help us to know what to say and when to say it, surrendering our opinions and lips as we become more wholly Yours today.

Shauna Wallace

Holy His

The Agony of Victory

Questioning naturally follows suffering. “Why?” almost always comes first. Sometimes God answers us specifically, sometimes we find comfort in the possible explanations scripture offers (see "What Could Possibly Explain...?"), and sometimes we’ll never know. So the question then becomes, “What?” Or even “How?”

What do we do? How do we go on when we feel like we’re living Job’s story? What did he do as he endured devastation after devastation?

Let it be said of us what is said of Job, “In all this Job did not sin nor charge God with wrong” (Job 1:22).

When his wife challenges him, “Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die!” (Job 2:9), Job responds, “You speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?” (Job 2:10). When we receive the free gift of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, our sins are forgiven; we’re made right before God and given new life here on earth and for eternity. We can’t just take the good, and then doubt and curse Him when tragedy strikes.

Let it be said of us, even in our suffering, “In all this Job did not sin with his lips” (Job 2:10).

It’s natural to question. It’s natural to falter in our faith in ourselves, in mankind, in this world, in a particular outcome, and in our ability to get through anything in life on our own. What must remain steady no matter what is our faith in Him.

Let it be said of us that we never wavered in our faith in the power of God (I Corinthians 2:5).

God is God. Nothing will ever change that. Job accepts this truth and knows He has a right to do whatever He wants as he rhetorically asks, “Who can say to Him, ‘What are You doing?’” (Job 9:12). “For He is not a man, as I am, that I may answer Him, and that we should go to court together. Nor is there any mediator between us, who may lay his hand on us both” (9:32-33).

Let it be said of us that we have already settled in our hearts, even in our suffering, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).

In Job 19:25-27, Job reveals his hope, the reason he can respond as he does, and it’s our hope, too: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and He shall stand at last on the earth; and after my skin is destroyed, this I know, that in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!”

Let it be said of us, as we see in Job, that our view of the earthly is heavenly. Like Moses, who by faith chose “to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin, esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt; for he looked to the reward. By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king; for he endured as seeing Him who is invisible” (Hebrews 11:24-27).

Job, Moses, and other Hebrews 11 giants of faith all have an eternal perspective on their temporal circumstances. It’s all about God and not about us. Are we willing that He be God no matter what that means for us? Our answer will determine the attitude of our hearts and our response when we’re suffering.

Let it be said of us that we determined in our hearts what Job determined in his:

As God lives, who has taken away my justice, and the Almighty, who has made my soul bitter, as long as my breath is in me, and the breath of God in my nostrils, my lips will not speak wickedness, nor my tongue utter deceit…till I die I will not put away my integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go; my heart shall not reproach me as long as I live (Job 27:2-6).

As Hebrews 12:1-3 puts it, “let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who endured such hostility from sinners against Himself, lest you become weary and discouraged in your souls.”

Like Jesus, we can cry out to the Father in our gut-wrenching agony, but let us never lose our faith, for “without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him,” even when we’re suffering. This is the agony of victory.

As my pastor succinctly summed it up Sunday: “By faith is hard. Not by faith is harder.”

Lord, increase our faith even in adversity and give us whatever we need to stand firm in You. Help us to overcome any unbelief and to believe that You are and You are a rewarder of those who diligently seek You.

Shauna Wallace

Holy His

Why Would God...?

-->

A little more than a year has passed since I sat across the table from two of the strongest, most courageous women I know. They both were undergoing treatment for cancer, fighting the good fight of faith. Today, I would be the only person at the table. Both received the total healing for which they believed; it came in the form of heaven. For one, it came just this past Friday.

These women endured major tragedies, even as they fought for their own lives. One lost her daughter to a car accident. The other faced a devastating loss months before her passing, and as her family grieved her death, they were dealt another debilitating blow. Unrelated, that very day, a two-mile wide tornado left a path of death and destruction in Moore, Oklahoma.

I lay in bed that night, and the only emotion I could muster was shock. Numbness. Is there so much death and sorrow that my heart is now unfeeling? Can compassion run so deep that to experience its emotion would drown me? I can’t tell the difference between a hard heart or one that feels so much it can’t feel at all.

I cried out to the Lord: “How? How do you endure such great loss? How do you shoulder such deep grief? How do you lose more than one immediate family member in a short period of time? How do you lose a child and keep going? How do you face piles of rubble that were once your home and everything you owned and stay standing? What are we supposed to do with all this loss and sorrow, Lord? How much can a person take?”

And yes, “Why?”

I thought of Job. I’m not sure anyone in history has suffered more than he did, and for no apparent reason.

Job was a righteous man. He feared God and shunned evil (Job 1:1). God watched over him, and “by His light (he) walked through darkness…the friendly counsel of God was over (his) tent” (Job 29:3-4). God was with him. He did everything according to God’s laws, and God blessed him (verses 5-25). He had a huge household: ten children, eleven thousand livestock, and servants to tend to it all (Job 1:2-3).

In one single day, he lost it all. As one messenger reported news that raiders stole his oxen and donkeys and killed his servants who were plowing, another came to tell him fire fell from heaven and burned his sheep and the servants tending them. Still another came to tell him other bands of raiders stole his camels and killed those servants, while another reported the death of all ten of his children as they feasted in one’s house (Job 1:14-19).

After losing everything he held dear and everything he owned, Job was struck with “painful boils from the soul of his foot to the crown of his head” (Job 2:7). He became unrecognizable. Even sleep did not comfort or bring him relief. He regretted the day of his birth.

All this happened to Job, “although no violence is in my hands, and my prayer is pure” (Job 16:17).

Finally, his wife tells him to curse God and be done with it, and when his friends show up to comfort him, they do more harm than good. One friend suggests his calamity must be because of sin in his life (4:8-9). He concludes Job must deserve his suffering.

Another friend takes the angle that it must be God’s chastening. “Happy is the man who God corrects,” he states, “Therefore, do not despise the chastening of the Almighty” (Job 5:17).

Yet another essentially tells him to suck it up and repent, because surely his sin or his sons’ sins brought this upon them, and “if you would earnestly seek God and make your supplication to the Almighty, if you were pure and upright, surely now He would awake for you, and prosper your rightful dwelling place” (Job 8:5-7).

His friend Zophar self-righteously asserts, “If you would prepare your heart, and stretch out your hands toward Him; if iniquity were in your hand, and you put it far away, and would not let wickedness dwell in your tents; then surely you could lift up your face without spot; yes, you could be steadfast, and not fear” (11:13-15).

Something we might hear (and surprisingly Job’s friends didn’t cover) is that our suffering must be the result of unbelief. If we only had more faith, this or that wouldn’t have happened. Maybe things would have turned out different somehow if only we had believed harder or more.

Are any of these legitimate possibilities? What can possibly explain a chronic unraveling of the things around us?

What do we do when we find ourselves feeling like Job?

What do we say when someone we love seems to be reliving Job’s misery?

We can learn a lot from Job, as I’ll share in coming blogs. Join me again?

Lord, thank You for the comfort Your word offers when we don’t understand what’s happening around us. Help us to overcome any unbelief as we look for answers, and to trust You even in the midst of our questioning as we become more wholly Yours today.

Shauna Wallace

Holy His

Other blogs on this topic:

Maybe the Shoe Is a Hand

Untimely Death. Timeless Hope. 

Unspeakable Sorrow. Unspeakable Joy. 

Another See You Later

 

Letting God's Word Define You

Self-image might very well be one of the most difficult issues girls and women deal with. We compare our insides to other peoples’ outsides, and if you’re like me, we come up short every time. The real measure we should use is God’s word.

Last night, I had the pleasure of speaking to our church’s youth girls and women about self-image. Each gal received a gift: “IT IS WRITTEN.”

Jesus Himself combatted Satan’s lies with God’s word in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-10), telling him, "It is written..." before quoting scripture. Eventually, He just tells Satan, "Away with you!" We can too! 

So as our evening came to an end, we listened to "Mirror" by Barlow Girls, an with a permanent marker wrote scriptural truths about how God sees us and who we are in Christ around the outer edge of the mirror, leaving the center clear.

Then we took a dry erase marker and wrote a truth we specifically needed for the moment.

Now, when we look in the mirror, we no longer see our reflection. We see God’s truth. The center writing can be changed as different scriptures become particularly relevant to address a mindset, struggle, or circumstance.

Here are the scriptures and the key words we used to represent them, starting with “IT IS WRITTEN” in all caps at the top.

Scripture	Words for Mirror
I Samuel 16:7 “But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.’”	Beauty/heart
I Peter 3:3-4 “…let your adornment be…the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very  precious in the sight of God.”	Gentle/quiet spirit
Proverbs 31:30 “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.”	Fear the Lord
Ephesians 2:10 “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”	God’s workmanship For a purpose
Genesis 1:27 “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”	His image
2 Corinthians 5:17 “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”	New creation
Psalm 139:14 “I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well.”	Wonderful Marvelous
Luke 12:7 “Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.”	Valuable
Psalm 8:3-5 “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.”	Cared for
Romans 8:15-17 “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together.” & Revelation 19:16 “And He has on His robe and on His thigh a name written: KINGOF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.”	Adopted Heir Princess
I Corinthians 6:19 “Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?”	His temple
Romans 9:25 “As indeed he says in Hosea, ‘Those who were not my people I will call “my people,” and her who was not beloved I will call “beloved.”’”	Beloved
Psalm 16:8 “I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.”	Unshaken
I Timothy 4:7-8 “Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.”	Value godliness
Ephesians 3:20 “Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us…”	Powered by the Spirit
2 Corinthians 12:9 “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”	Sufficient in His grace
Psalm 23:1-4 “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me…”	Fearless
Jeremiah 29:11 “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.”	In His thoughts
Zephaniah 3:17 “The Lord your God in your midst, the Mighty One, will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing.”	Celebrated
Romans 8:38 “I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”	Inseparable
2 Corinthians 3:18 “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.”	Transforming
2 Corinthians 5:20 “Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God.”	Ambassador
Ephesians 1:7 “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace.”	Redeemed
I John 5:14 “Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.”	Heard
I Peter 2:9 “But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.”	Special
Philippians 4:13 “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”	Strong
Philippians 1:6 “He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.”	In progress

Perhaps you need to make your own “It Is Written” mirror. Or go ahead and use a dry erase marker to write these truths around your bathroom or full-length mirror (if you live at home with your parents, get permission first!). Or maybe your daughters need to do this with you, or a teenage girl you know, or your ladies’ Bible study, or your church's youth and/or women's ministry. Feel free to take the idea and run with it!

Lord, may Your word define us as we become more wholly Yours each day.

Shauna Wallace

Holy His