Last evening at a men’s meeting we were sitting around a table discussing the reading, and whatever else had been going on since we had seen each other last. We asked a brother across the table how he was doing, and his fragile smile began to break. He was not doing well, he told us, and began to describe a series of heartbreaking sufferings and frustrations that he was trying to cope with, including so many recent deaths of friends, culminating in the death of one of his closest friends that he had know since childhood the day before. This man knows death; he has looked it in the face all too often, holding his friends as they died in his arms. Experiencing his own health issues stemming from a genetic heart defect, he felt like giving up, he told us. He was not going to come to the meeting but decided to come after all. I was so grateful he was with us in his time of crisis. I wanted to fix him so badly, to hold him and to make it all better. Rather than trying to fix him though, we listened. He sat with him. We loved him. We allowed the purity of the moment to be exactly what it was, a period of suffering and compassion, without judging it or trying to change it. Later that evening a short film screened that told the story of Job. Job suffered torments that no man can know without breaking. When he asked God why, God basically said that ours is not to know why God works in mysterious, and awesome ways, so don’t ask, just bask in the purity of each moment, through the trials, the suffering, the wonder, the love.
Gregorysgardner.com
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