Friday, May 30, 2014

{Five Minute Friday} Nothing

Every Friday, over at LisaJoBaker.com, she posts a prompt. The idea is to write for five minutes, unscripted, unedited, real. Then post it. Then, on Twitter and on her blog, all participants gather together and share what we wrote. We encourage each other.

Today's post was admittedly a little dark for me. I've just been weighed down in my life lately by all of the hurt in the world. There's a lot. This isn't necessarily addressed to anyone in particular, but rather a conglomerate of what I feel when people dear to me are hurting. Sorry if it's a little dark for a Friday morning. This is just what's on my heart.

{Start}

There is nothing that I can do for you.

Feeling helpless often frustrates us to no end. What can I do to ease your suffering, your pain, erase past hurts and heal raw wounds? What can I say, what can I do?

Often it feels like nothing.

My hands are empty and usually the best that I can do is offer a hug, a heart aching in sympathy with yours, heavy beats thudding in empathy, feeling your pain.

Is that enough? Is my fellow hurting alongside your suffering helping you at all?

I suppose that the Christian in me says that I can bring our brokenness to God, that I can ask Him to prop you up and hold you but I feel as if there ought to be more that I can do.

But how can hands reach across hundreds of miles when bank accounts scrape bottom?

Meals help but they are only Band-aids; they fill the body but not the soul. They don't assauge the pains that you're going through; they don't fill the gaping hole left by loved ones lost, by innocence lost or memories and what can I do but offer you my empty hands and my empty heart and try to love you in my imperfect way?

What can I do when I myself am teetering on the edge, when my heart is already so full of all the pain that is in the world?

You come to me with your hurts and your pains, all of you, with your loneliness and your past and I am powerless to offer anything more than empathy, than a heart aching with you and all the hurt in the world.

But what, ultimately, can I do to help you?

Nothing.

{Stop}

Have a good weekend.

Carry on,
 
        {SarahBeth}

3 comments:

  1. Sarah Beth, I appreciate your thoughts. So often it does seem like there is nothing we can do, but sometimes I think we don't realize how much it does mean to someone when we smile in passing, or when we sit and cry with a friend, or like you said, "My hands are empty and usually the best that I can do is offer a hug, a heart aching in sympathy with yours, heavy beats thudding in empathy, feeling your pain." Sometimes empathy helps more than anything at the time. But I do know what you mean. It feels like nothing when our hands are empty.

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  2. And sometimes that nothing is the best gift of all... when we feel we have nothing to offer, all we can offer is ourselves, our time, our being - that speaks volumes to me when I'm hurting.

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  3. This is beautiful and much of what I have been feeling lately. Thank you!

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