NOBODY KNOWS….

Remember the old spiritual that begins “Nobody knows the trouble I've seen. Nobody knows my sorrow”? On the one hand, that is true. On the other, it is not. We’ve all seen and experienced trouble and sorrow in our lives. There are no exceptions. And we will continue to experience them till the day we die. Thankfully, most of the troubles and sorrows that come our way are minor, mere blips on the road from birth through life till we die.

Yes, even those blips, as short as they are, can be quite painful and the memory of them quite lasting. We do our best to avoid them; and when we cannot, we do our best to cope with them. That is all we can do and that is all we are expected to do, no more and no less. It, again, is all part of life, part of living in this sinful and broken world in which we do and which we cannot avoid or escape.

Back to the spiritual: it is correct to say that nobody knows the trouble we’ve seen. Nobody knows the sorrows we have experienced. Those troubles and those sorrows are our own and no one else’s. Others may have had similar experiences, but they have not had our experiences. Two people may have both lost a spouse through, for instance, cancer. Both had similar experiences but not the same experience. How each dealt with that experience was unique. No one else has dealt with it in the exact same way or had the exact same experiences and no one else ever will.

All that is why we can and never should say to another, “I know what you are going through.” No, we do not. We may have been there, as they say; but we have not been exactly where that person is now. All we can do is be there with that person as he or she suffers and is in pain. Words, any and all words, words of consolation, understanding, comfort, will all fall short.

But the reason that we are there with the one in pain is that we have been there ourselves. We do know trouble and sorrow. We have not been immune. We have not escaped what happens to every human being. We are not an exception. And so we do know, in a very real way, something of what that person we love and care about is going through at that moment in his or her life.

The danger, of course, when we believe that no one knows our pain, our sorrows, our troubles; when we think we must be being punished because we hurt so much – the danger is that we will push everyone away and allow ourselves to wallow in our sorrow. This is not to denigrate the pain we are in. It is simply to say that the reason why there are those who want to be with us is that they have been through something similar to what we are going through. They cannot undo what was done nor can they take away our pain. But they do know pain and sorrow and they are there to help us get through it as others, who also knew pain and sorrow, helped us. We are never alone unless we choose to be.