Looking for comfort

One of the Hard Things for me, in this time, is that I have only myself really to rely on for comfort. No one can give me an actual hug; and the effort of communication via text or phone or whatever is enough for me that it's a poor substitute for just a conversation, a real conversation, face-to-face.

One thing my counselor noted: "you seem to have a hard time when you don't have other people to bounce things off of" and I think she is right - no one is telling me that my worries are overblown, or that that thing someone said to me was really rude and uncalled for, and I tend to live in my head a little too much and do things like, "Well, that person yelled at you because you WERE in a place inconvenient for them, and you are really too sensitive anyway"

But also - not being able to be that quick easy source of comfort to OTHERS gets to me somewhat. In the before-times, I'd often be popping in and out of colleague's offices - helping someone with a computer problem, or listening to someone talk about a problem one of their kids was having at school. And it was the little back and forth that made life nice - I help you, and then sometime, you help me.

Anyway. Looking over one of my (many) bookshelves today, I found a little book of Bonhoeffer quotations. Everyone knows Dietrich Bonhoeffer, right? Lutheran pastor in Germany, spoke out against the Nazis, was imprisoned and ultimately killed for his opposition to them?

And yet - his ideas will outlive theirs, and I suspect many people around the world whose lives never overlapped with him - would never have met him - benefitted from what he wrote.

I saw this passage, and liked it:

"You may know that the last few nights have been bad... Those who had been bombed out came to me the next morning for a bit of comfort. But I'm afraid I'm bad at comforting; I can listen all right, but I can hardly find anything to say

"But perhaps the way one asks about some things and not about others helps to suggest what really matters; and it seems to me more important actually to share someone's distress than to use smooth words about it.

"I've no sympathy with some wrong-headed attempts to explain away distress, because instead of being comfort, they are the exact opposite.

"So I don't try to explain it, and I think that is the right way to begin, although it's only a beginning, and I very seldom get beyond it.

"I sometimes think that real comfort must break in just as unexpectedly as the distress."

I like that. Especially the idea of "explaining it away" being wrongheaded - how many times have you heard someone try to justify something with "it was God's will" or "he's in a better place now" or whatever, and it's kind of terrible and unhelpful when you are genuinely hurting. And also the listening - that is well taken; someone I know will ask, when someone starts talking about problems, "Let me know if you want advice or if you just want to vent" and a lot of the time, yes, you DO want to just talk out what's in your head without someone pushing advice at you. 

And yeah. What I said earlier about having no wisdom in this whole mess; the only prayer I was able to make yesterday after watching some news was "Abba, I'm scared."

And I still am. Scared for what we may be becoming. Scared for the future - scared that the good times I enjoyed in the past are over forever. And I know, Bonhoeffer of all people would say that that shouldn't matter to me, that there are things more important. But one thing I've learned through the years is that I'd make a bad ascetic, and from this whole thing I'm learning I'd make a poor contemplative, also.

And an interesting thing - this little book, like a number of other unusual books I have, came from a booksale at The Alamo II - the bookstore on ISU's campus. A couple years running, they'd get a huge shipment of random used books - most of them, I suppose, books that had been sold back by college students and then didn't resell. They sold them incredibly cheap, so it was easy to take a chance on something you might not pay $20 or even $10 for - but would buy for a quarter.

Some of the books were highlighted or underlined. One passage is highlighted in this book:

"It must be a decisive rule of every Christian fellowship that each individual is prohibited from saying much that occurs to him"

Heh. Though yeah, I know I've been doing a fair share of self-censorship these days.