Quotes About Understanding

Who helped you most? Most often they (suffering people) answer by describing a quiet, unassuming person. Someone who was there whenever needed, who listened more than talked, who didn't keep glancing down at a watch, who hugged and touched, and cried. In short, someone who was available, and came on the sufferer's terms and not their own.

As Dorothy Day put it, "I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.

Think too of all who suffer as if you shared their pain. HEBREWS 13:3

One of the most important things we can do for a suffering person is to restore a sense of meaning or significance to the experience.

Then the question becomes, "How do we treat sinners?

The first step in helping a suffering person (or in accepting our own pain) is to acknowledge that pain is valid, and worthy of a sympathetic response.

It takes no grace to relate to someone who looks, thinks, and acts just like me.

Forgiveness breaks the cycle of blame and loosens the stranglehold of guilt. It accomplishes these two things through a remarkable linkage, placing the forgiver on the same side as the party who did the wrong.

Jesus was able to love men because he loved them right through the layer of mud.

He who cannot forgive another breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself. GEORGE HERBERT

Nothing else — no learned "how-to" program, no expensive gift — is worth more to the sufferer than the comfortable assurance of your physical presence.

the issue is not whether I agree with someone but rather how I treat someone with whom I profoundly disagree.

we in the body of Christ are called to show love when God seems not to.

Because of Jesus, I can never say about a person, "She must be suffering because of some sin she committed"; Jesus, who did not sin, also felt pain.

For Jesus, the person was more important than any category or label.

the same answer from suffering people: it matters little what we say — our concern and availability matter far more.

the same answer from suffering people: it matters little what we say — our concern and availability matter far more. If we can offer a listening ear, that may be the most appreciated gift of all.

Confieso que, a pesar de las largas horas de estudio de los profetas, no tengo un entendimiento más claro de lo que sucederá el año próximo ni en el año 2025. Pero tengo una idea mucho más clara de lo que Dios desea lograr en mi vida ahora mismo. Y estoy ganando, gradualmente, confianza para creer en el presente lo que solo será totalmente entendible cuando se vea desde el futuro.

by embracing grief and standing beside the hurting person, we can indeed aid another's search for meaning.

Perhaps the greatest way to give suffering people time is being patient with them — giving them room to doubt, cry, question and work out strong and often extreme emotions.

The Bible's many fierce passages on sin appear in a new light once I understand God's desire to press me toward repentance, the doorway to grace.

It makes a huge difference whether I treat a nonbeliever as someone who is wrong rather than as someone who is on the way but lost.

a suffering person needs: love, and not knowledge and wisdom.

Barfield understood his epochal experience are not as a rebound from love sickness, but as a spiritual epiphany that cured a spiritual illness.