Quotes About Support

Maybe what we say to each other is not so important after all, but just that we are alive together, and present for each other as best we can be.

I believe that when all si said and done, all you can do is to show up for someone in crisis, which seems so inadequate. But then when you do, it can radically change everything. Your there-ness, your stepping into a scared [person's] line of vision, can be life giving, because often everyone else is in hiding...

This is who I want to be in the world. This is who I think we are supposed to be, people who help call forth human beings from deep inside hopelessness.

But when someone enters that valley with you, that mud, it somehow saves you again.

Sam was alternately distant and clingy and mean, because I am the primary person he banks on and bangs on. I stayed close enough so he could push me away. Sadie slowly floated off.

Talking to the parents of older kids was helpful for me, since the parents of kids the same age as yours won't admit how horrible their children are. ... you can either practice being right or practice being kind. Screaming in the car helped. [p. 94]

What helps is that we are not all crazy and hopeless on the same day.

For thirty years, she has answered all of my distressed or deeply annoyed phone calls by saying, "Hello, Dearest. I'm so glad it's you!" I've come to believe that this is how God feels when I pray, even at my least attractive.

This family business can be so stressful - difficult, damaged people showing up t spend time with other difficult, damanged people

One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness.

And I guess when you take away the resentment and disappointment, it's that simple. It is what we do in families: we help, because we were helped.

They taught us that extending ourselves to others would help us stay sober and sane. But they also wanted us to extend ourselves to our own horrible selves, get ourselves a lovely cup of tea. It was and is the hardest work ever.

ultimately we're all just walking each other home.

Help, Thanks, Wow

this is the work of the Holy Spirit and our operating instructions, to be cooling breezes to sad or worried people, including ourselves, in this sometimes hot stuffy joint [the world].

But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us.

This is all that restoration requires most of the time, that one person not give up.

One of the hardest lessons I had to learn was that I was going to need a lot of help, and for a long time. (Even this morning.) What saved me was that I found gentle, loyal and hilarious companions, which is at the heart of meaning: maybe we don't find a lot of answers to life's tougher questions, but if we find a few true friends, that's even better.

Yet union with a partner—someone with whom to wake, whom you love, and talk with on and off all day, and sit with at dinner, and watch TV and movies with, and read together in bed with, and do hard tasks with, and are loved by. That sounds really lovely.

To heal, it seems we have to stand in the middle of the horror, at the foot of the cross, and wait out another's suffering where that person can see us.

Look around and see whom you can serve.

As well as we know our grown children and relatives, we don't know how much energy they have to put into simply keeping their lives together at all.

what good people can do in the face of great sorrow. We help some time pass for those suffering. We sit with them in their hopeless pain and feel terrible with them, without trying to fix them with platitudes; doing this with them is just about the most gracious gift we have to offer. We give up what we think we should be doing, or think we need to get done, to keep them company. We help them to bear being in time and space during unbearable times and spaces.

It may strike you as a small miracle that you have someone in your life, whose taste you admire, who will tell you the truth and help you stay on the straight and narrow, or find your way back to it if you are lost.