June – For the Gospel’s Sake
Day 169 – 18 June
Being there is most of it
Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing. (1 Thessalonians 5:11, NIV)
Most of us have stood frozen outside a grieving friend’s door, hand half-raised to knock, suddenly unsure whether to go in at all. The fear that pins us there is nearly always the same one. We dread saying the wrong thing, fumbling out some clumsy sentence that makes the ache worse, and so we promise ourselves we will visit later, once we have worked out exactly what to say, which of course turns out to be never. A whole world of comfort goes undelivered because we have half-believed a lie about what encouragement actually asks of us. We imagine it demands the perfect words, the wise insight, the phrase that mends a broken heart on the spot, when the truth folded inside the word the New Testament uses is far gentler and far more within our reach.
The boy who only wanted someone there
A small boy wakes in the black of night, certain that something waits in the corner of his room. He calls out, a parent comes, and it is worth noticing what actually settles him. The light stays off, the shadows sit exactly where they were, and the sensible explanations about how monsters are make-believe do almost nothing for a frightened four-year-old. What drains the terror clean out of the room is a single fact, that someone who loves him is now perched on the edge of his bed in the dark beside him. The danger, real or imagined, loosens its grip though nothing whatever about the room has changed, because the boy is facing it alone no longer. A warm hand rests on his back, a familiar voice murmurs a few soft and unremarkable words, and within minutes he has drifted off. No clever speech achieved that; sheer presence did. Most of the comfort human beings ever manage to give one another works in precisely this fashion, by the plain power of somebody simply being there.
A word that means ‘come alongside’
The word at the heart of the Bible’s call to encourage one another is παρακαλέω (parakaleō, meaning to encourage, comfort, or come alongside), and its whole shape concerns position long before it ever concerns speech. Folded into it is the simple idea of being called to a person’s side, of crossing the room to stand where they are standing. To encourage someone, in the oldest sense of the word, is first of all to draw near to them, and only then, if at all, to speak. That single recovery rearranges the whole task and lifts a crushing weight off the would-be comforter. You need carry no perfect paragraph in your pocket before you go. You need only be willing to close the distance, to perch on the edge of the bed, as it were, and stay there. A deep tenderness sits in the fact that the same family of words names the Helper heaven sends to stand beside us, so that every time you come alongside a struggling friend you are doing in miniature the very thing the Spirit does on a far grander scale. A community of partakers together is, at bottom, a great web of people willing to show up for one another, and a church learns to encourage long before it learns to be eloquent. Someone near you is dreading the dark tonight. The kindest thing you own is your presence, and it costs you only the trouble of going.
Declaration
I have stopped waiting until I know the perfect thing to say before I go to someone who is hurting. The gift they need most is rarely my cleverness, but my nearness, the plain fact of my turning up and staying put when slipping away would be far easier. So I sit with people in their hard hours, offering my steady company more than my advice, content to share the silence when no words will do. And when my own season turns heavy, I let the ones who love me draw close, resisting the urge to wave them off and carry it alone. Today I choose to be present rather than impressive, trusting that simply standing beside another soul is among the kindest and strongest things a person can ever do.
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