I've been thinking about Job a lot recently (see yesterday's post). When I consider the miserable comforters, I'm often reminded of this...
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAXOu-RSKmg]
The interviewers and those phoning in were undoubtedly well-meaning. But so were Job's comforters (Job 2:11). They do want to fix him. But again, that was the motivation of the comforters too. Yet, after endless rounds of "Do this and be healed", comfort becomes torment.
Interestingly, Chris Sands was eventually cured because a brain surgeon was watching one of these interviews. He wondered whether a tumour pressing on a nerve was the problem. It was. And so Chris went under the knife for drastic surgery. That was the answer and it went so much deeper than all our home spun remedies.
The true answer to suffering is so much deeper than our little platitudes ever acknowledge. In our pastoral care, let's have true compassion on people, admitting our own helplessness and pointing sufferers away from their paltry efforts to the true Doctor of our souls.
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