There are a lot of people hurting in our country. I’m sure there are a lot of people hurting within our community. It’s a fact of life that living brings pain. What are we to do with the pain others are feeling?
Jesus addressed the issue of other’s pain when he told people that the second part of the greatest commandment was to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Unfortunately, that phrase has become so common that we sometimes forget the difficulty of putting it into practice.
Loving someone as oneself involves understanding and dealing with that person’s pain. If we aren’t willing to understand their pain, if we aren’t willing to sit with their pain, we can’t begin to love them as we love ourselves.
A key concept of loving our neighbor is the phrase “as yourself.” We have to be aware of our own pain in order to understand someone else’s pain. Even then, our understanding will be limited. Valarie Kaur in her book, See No Stranger, comments that “When we are brave enough to sit with our pain, it deepens our ability to sit with the pain of others. It shows us how to love them.”1
The normal human reaction is to avoid pain. It’s healthy to avoid pain whenever possible. Pain reminds us that there’s something that’s a danger to our survival. It’s a natural part of life and we usually want to make things better as quickly as possible. It does nothing to please God when someone seeks pain for the sake of pain.
Still, there are times when we need to sit with our pain, particularly our spiritual and emotional pain. If we try and run away from it too quickly, it will continue in the background and will affect all the rest of our life, even our physical health. Sitting with our emotional and spiritual pain gives it a chance to heal.
I have seen people who think the key is just to “move on.” They may make a statement to the effect of, “Don’t dwell on it!” If one moves on without somewhat understanding the pain and integrating whatever caused the pain into their life, the result will be the same as if we ignore a physical injury.
I have met former athletes who were urged to play through the pain of an injury. Years later they had trouble walking or had consistent back pain. That’s what can happen if we ignore physical injury. Something very similar happens when we ignore our spiritual or emotional pain.
If you want to follow what Jesus said and love your neighbor as yourself, it is helpful to first experience the pain you feel and sit with it, then you will be in a better place to understand what loving your neighbor means.
- Kaur, Valarie. See No Stranger (p. 43). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ↩︎
Ross T Lucas 