Climbing in the Casket
Note: This is the fourth in a blog mini-series asking the simple question: Is there a biblical model for spiritual friendship, one-another ministry, biblical counseling, and pastoral counseling?
Read Part 1: Spiritual Map Quest, Part 2: God’s Treasure Map, and Part 3: Biblical Soul Care for Suffering.
I’m summarizing these posts from Spiritual Friends.
God’s Biblical Counseling GPS # 1: Sustaining—“It’s Normal to Hurt”
Knowing that life lived in a fallen world can be raw, we communicate to one another, “It’s normal to hurt.” We weep with those who weep, refusing to blame people for hurting or shame them for feeling pain. We join them in the fellowship of their suffering.
Created for Paradise, our hurting spiritual friends now live in a desolate desert. Our first calling is to sense their earthly story of suffering. We empathize with their agony, engaging them in their despair.
How? We offer compassionate commiseration, a term flowing through the pages of Church history. Co-passion feels another’s passion, shares a friend’s suffering. Co-misery becomes a partner in our spiritual friend’s misery and woe. Such empathy is not simply understanding with someone’s pain, but sharing in and experiencing his or her pain.
Shared Sorrow
Shared sorrow is endurable sorrow. As Jonathan with David, the binding of our hearts together exponentially and miraculously enables us to endure what otherwise would overwhelm. Ponder Paul’s words.
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same suffering we suffer. And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort” (2 Corinthians 1:3-7).
In order to provide compassionate commiseration, we need to practice dual listening: listening to our friend’s earthly story while listening to God’s eternal story. Spiritual friends tune into their friend’s smaller story that communicates “Life is bad” (sustaining). Spiritual friends also tune into God’s larger story that communicates “God is good” (healing).
In sustaining, our empathy promotes our spiritual friend’s grieving. Paul commands us to grieve within the context of hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Without hope, grieving terrifies. Faced with what appears to be nothing but a black hole of unending pain, we back away. We deaden ourselves; deny. We refuse to grieve and groan. Often to start the “chain of grieving” we must grieve for our spiritual friends before they can grieve for themselves. Our weeping allows them to weep. Grieving is the bridge toward healing. When we grieve and groan we admit that we are not God, that we cannot control life, and that we need God (Romans 8:18-27).
Climbing in the Casket
Spiritual friends understand the essential principle for sustaining faith in the goodness of God: we have to climb in the casket with our spiritual friends. Life is a series of multiple deaths, daily crucifixions. We need the courageous compassion to climb in the casket with our friends in the throes of death, in the valley of the shadow of death. When they sense us there with them, when they see our courageous hope, then they’re encouraged to face death so that they can face life again. As Paul wrote to his friends in Corinth:
“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death” (2 Corinthians 1:8-9a).
Sometimes it appears that our “default” response is to “spot sin.” Instead, let’s be biblical counselors who understand suffering. Let’s not be ignorant of our friends’ earthly stories of suffering. Let’s not miss their hearts. When we do, we tend to cram God in. Instead, we want to encourage them to invite God into the casket with them.
The Rest of the Story
I invite you to return for Part 4 where we learn about Biblical Counseling through Healing: Celebrating the Empty Tomb.
Join the Conversation
Who has climbed in the casket with you in your suffering?
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