Dear Inner Circle,
So often when someone is hurting, before they’ve finished speaking, we’re already reaching for the answer. A phone number, perhaps, or a plan that might make things better. The only guarantee is that it makes the silence easier for us, the listeners, to bear. Presence is a discipline.
Some years ago, the kids and I watched the movie Taken, where a retired agent’s daughter is kidnapped, a decision the kidnappers come to regret because of his “very particular set of skills.” When I asked my kids what mine were, they both laughed. “It’d be your mouth, Dad!”
Henri Nouwen wrote that the people who mean the most to us are rarely the ones who speak quickly or fix things. They’re the ones who stay, the friend “who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion.” At Wayside we call this courage. It’s one of our values, and it’s easy to misread. Courage here isn’t the dramatic rescue — it’s the staying in the room when there’s nothing to fix, sitting beside someone whose news is bad, whose story has no tidy ending, and not leaving, in body or in spirit.
At the end of a long week, Lisa was exhausted. Then she sat with a woman carrying pain, confusion and fear, and for three hours that woman poured out her grief. Lisa stayed. What a gift she gave: the gift of remaining.
Fixing is often about our own discomfort. Staying is about the other person. It means facing together the things neither of us can change. Many people who walk through our doors have had plenty of advice. They’ve been assessed, referred and moved along. What they rarely get is someone who stays. That’s where the hope is hidden, not in a rescue plan full of promises, but in the silent solidarity of knowing the darkness isn’t endured alone.
That’s what you make possible, and I must confess something you already know: your support doesn’t buy a cure. It buys time, and a person willing to stay in the room.
My kids were being cheeky about my particular set of skills. Wayside is still teaching me a harder one: keeping it shut.
Thank you for being part of the Inner Circle,
Jon
Rev. Jon Owen
CEO & Pastor
Wayside Chapel