President Bill Clinton popularized the line: “I feel your pain.”  He could say it with such pathos in his voice, you felt–at first, anyway–that he just might do that.

“I feel your pain.”  I suspect that is said too easily much of the time. And I can almost guarantee that hearing the words does not give comfort to the one hurting.

For the last forty years of his life, my coal-miner dad had silicosis, “black lung” it’s called, the result of breathing coal dust for decades in the depths of the pits.  He started working inside the mines when he was 14–that would be 1926–when child-labor laws were in their infancy and safety for the workers was an afterthought.  As a result, he often had trouble breathing.

There were times when he would look at me with pained eyes and say, “I can’t get my breath. You have no idea how it hurts.”

My heart breaks now just from remembering. (He left us in 2007 at the age of 95+, but I miss him every day.)

Dad was right. I didn’t have a clue how he felt. I was on the outside of his pain, a distant spectator it seemed, as though my seat was on the back row of the center field bleachers.  My heart hurt for him, but I was helpless.  He may as well have told me he was being tormented by aliens for all the good I could do him.

My wife lives with fibromyalgia.  There are days when her pain is relentless.  As one who rarely ever has a pain of any kind, it would be foolish for me to say “I know how you feel.” I don’t. I hurt for her, and I would do anything to take some of the pain from her and experience it myself.  But I can’t, and feel helpless.

Anyone who looks to another human to “feel” his pain, to understand it and sympathize with it, may be putting too heavy a burden on the other

It is enough that they are there for you.

There is One who understands, who has been there and knows how you feel.  There is only One who knows how it feels to be you.

“We do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).

He knows.

But don’t be too disappointed in your husband or wife, your counselor or your pastor, for not being able to enter into your pain and experience it the way you do.

In a real sense, you don’t want them to.

You would not wish that agony on your best friend.  And furthermore,someone has to fly this plane.  (smiley-face here)

If I’m sick and in the hospital, I don’t want the nurse weeping every time she enters. “Oh, Mr. Joe–my heart is broken over what’s happening to you!”  No thanks.

I want her upright and strong, clear-thinking and capable so she can do her job. That’s the best help she can give me.

I don’t need you to feel my pain. Just appreciate the fact that I’m feeling it, and help me as much as you’re able.