For awhile, I attended a healing ministry at Imago Dei Church aptly called “Refuge.” One of the mantras we developed in one of the small groups I was in, was “We don’t compare pain.”
It’s one of the values I’ve tried to incorporate into my life ever since.
Sometimes in church culture, there is a tendency to want to always appear put together and whole.
We want the church to be safe for anyone new who walks in the door. We want visitors to know they are accepted and loved no matter how they walk in.
But on the flip side, we put pressure on ourselves to be whole and have our game face on at all times. “How are you?” someone asks. “Wonderful!” we lie, hoping that our puffy eyes from crying ourselves to sleep the night before don’t betray us, or that the person asking doesn’t press us for details.
The truth is it’s scary to be open and vulnerable in a faith community. Honestly, sometimes it scarier than being open and vulnerable with friends in the world. In the church community, there is the added pressure of wanting to “be used” so maybe it’s best to always appear to be walking in victory and happy.
Or maybe we are leading something, and so we want to be strong for those we are leading—we don’t want it to be “about us,” so we go on Sundays to pour out to others, but leave with no one truly knowing us or the pain we are carrying ourselves.
Or maybe we are just afraid of being judged for our problem or pain because it’s not as big as someone else’s. Have you ever sat in a small group and you were going to ask for prayer but by the time the group got to you, you couldn’t possibly share what you need prayer for because the needs on the table are so big that your request seems menial by comparison?
Judging pain. IT IS A THING. We don’t mean to, but we do measure how much emotion a person is allowed to have for a given issue. And for how long. Or we might initially empathize having gone through something similar, but then in the telling of the empathetic story, we one-up them. Well, I can understand why you would be upset about your bike being stolen. Once I had a CAR stolen. In fact, it was a BMW. I didn’t get upset though. You know, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. I’m just thankful for the 10 years God allowed me to drive it.
The problem with judging other people’s pain is that we don’t truly know anyone else’s internal journey. What might cause one person excruciating pain might not even phase us. It’s easy to judge in those moments. But maybe that person is in deep pain because it’s not the first time that particular hammer has fallen. Maybe they’ve been hit with that thing 50 times and all of their resoluteness is gone.
Maybe for their age and season of life and what they’ve experienced thus far—-the pain they are experiencing is every bit as big as ours; perhaps it’s bigger.
Or maybe the thing we think they are going through is just one small thing of many that we cannot see. Maybe we see someone crying in the grocery store because they have to take items out of their cart—-but really they are crying because the person waiting on them triggers them because it looks just like the person who abused them for 4 years twenty years ago. WE DONT KNOW.
I used to get upset with my 4th graders when they fought over their place in line. “We’re all going to the same place!” I would admonish. Till one day I realized it wasn’t about getting to the destination first. It had nothing to do with that. It was about status and power, and it was about someone else stealing their power. Cutting in line was an act of aggression and superiority. “I’m more important than you. What I want/need is more important than what you want or need.” And the issue no longer seemed petty or small.
I cried at Chase bank last week. It wasn’t because the nice gentleman sitting before me couldn’t help me with the paperwork I needed to help my parents. It was because everything about helping my aging parents is tough when one parent no longer remembers the finances, and one was never in the know. Everything is hard when they are 900 miles away and I am here in Washington state. Everything is tough when the people who used to help you with finances now need you to manage theirs. I cried because it was one more impossible thing I had to figure out on my own when I thought there would be help.
I don’t want to compare pain anymore. If you are in pain because your puppy died, I’m going to assume that your puppy had a bond with you that I cannot completely understand. If a child is sad because their balloon floated away or popped, I want to comfort them with the same compassion as I might comfort an adult who just lost something precious to them. If you’re acting in a way completely incompatible with who I thought you were, I’m going to trust that there is a good reason for it, and continue to believe the best.
Both as a participant and as a leader in the Genesis process, I experienced a group of compassionate women giving equal time and empathy to every participant no matter the issue. It was a practical demonstration that we were equal in value and that anything we were carrying was worth bringing to the open and worth being seen so that it could be healed.
Everyone matters. Everyone’s pain and burden count. I don’t want to compare anymore.
