Is it fair to share our suffering with others?

How often do we hear these words spoken by those in pain, suffering and anguish?

'I’m sorry, it’s unfair to burden you with this…'

How often have we ourselves spoken words like this as we pour out the frustration, anger, grief and anxiety of our hearts to others?

As we share all that weighs us down in life, the initial cathartic relief is soon displaced by guilt, shame and more anxiety, feeling both the vulnerability in ‘saying too much’, and the guilt and concern for those we have laid into or onto.

How much easier is it sometimes when others unburden their souls to us? We can speak the hope and truth of a God who is the Father of all mercies, the God of all comfort, a Sovereign, saving, caring Lord who compels and commands us to pour out our hearts to Him and one another, to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice.

Yet, despite our proclamation of this counterintuitive gospel - the mercies of which extend far beyond cathartic release, far deeper than any initial unburdening relief - we continue to pile on shame, extra worry and grief to our hearts, feeling a sense of ‘unfairness’ to ourselves and others. We so quickly forget the radical, culturally subversive hope of the gospel and believe the lie that sharing like this must be wrong, unfair, unjust.

Could it be that there is good, not bad, in knowing the sad, devastating news of one another’s lives?

Could it be that what would be truly unfair to ourselves and others is to heed the first stipulation and readily ‘rejoice with those who rejoice’, and forego the subsequent, being unwilling to ‘weep with those who weep?’

Could it be that the unfairness lies in refusing to hear and share the sorrows that are caused by the chaos of suffering and sin in life?

Could it be that we are being unfair to ourselves and others (and indeed halting the process of reconciliation, hope, renewal, and healing) by sealing our sharing of woes?

Mitigating our sufferings

For, somehow, in God’s kingdom, our suffering experiences a degree of mitigation, as one member suffers alongside, suffers with, another. This mitigation is caused not by another experiencing the same situation, not by participating in the chaos and calamity, but rather by the love experienced through another’s consolation.

The situation may remain, it may never change. The Lord does not promise otherwise, but what He does assure is that the trials and chaos will work patience, endurance, hope. This hope will relieve shame as we share those sufferings with one another.

If we hold onto our sufferings, or if we withhold from the sufferings of others, we hold onto shame, and we withhold the comfort and work of God’s Spirit from desperate hearts crying out for consolation in their chaos.

The suffering brother or sister bears the actual burden, but the sympathising brother or sister shares with Christ-consoling, compassionate understanding. So in this sharing of burden, the Spirit binds ever more deeply the unity of Christlike fellowship. As we weep with those who weep, we share in their pain, we share in the same hope, the same love, the same Spirit.

What would life look like, what would life be like, if as well as following the tendency of our hearts’ impulses to share those joyful, ‘blessed’ moments of life, we also surrendered to the Spirit’s stirrings - and shared our trials, heartbreaks and sorrows? It could be that we encounter more of God’s miraculous, powerful work than we could ever imagine; more depth to the intricate unity between rejoicing and weeping than we allow ourselves to believe; and more knowledge of God and one another than we have ever encountered.

Let us submit to the process of God’s glorious gospel:

• The seemingly counterintuitive work of His strengthening grace through tribulations;
• His radical countercultural work of increasing depth of fellowship and true unity in His church;
• His miraculous ever-gracious and ongoing creating work to bring life out of our death;
• And His mysterious work of building hope and banishing shame as we speak out and through our seemingly unspeakable shame.

As Augustine of Hippo reminds us:

‘He who after the battle would receive the crown ought not to be broken in spirit while the battle is on, for He Who prepares unspeakable gifts for the victors ministers strength to them when they are engaged in the conflict.'^[1]

^{[1] ‘Letters of Augustine’, Loeb Classical Library, trans James Houston Baxter, p181.}