Journal rdewald's Journal: When bad things happen to good people 11
The most important thing to do is to learn to separate your feelings from theirs.
You, as the friend, will be feeling angry, helpless, and fully invested with a desire to right the wrong. You'll want to even the score, to make the world safe again, to make sure that justice is done. You see something wrong and you want to make it right. You see hurt and you want to do something about it.
These feelings demand details. They need to know everything about what happened. They want to know how to prevent this from happening again, to you, to your friend, or to anyone else you love. No detail is too small and insignificant, everything must be known.
You want to make sense of this. How can something so bad happen to someone so good?
Your friend wants everything to stop. Everything. Your friend wants to go back. They have suffered a tremendous loss, the kind of thing that makes death, bankruptcy, job losses and any other problem seem ridiculously insignificant in one respect, yet, at the same time, they suddenly feel all loses, especially other people's, deeply personally.
Details are not important to your friend. The details keep changing, things that once seemed important sudddenly aren't, other things that hardly seemed worth mentioning suddenly seem to be the pivot about which everything revolves. The details are a moving tableau of blurry confusion. They change from one moment to the next, trying to get a hold on them is a recipe for bottomless frustration.
Everything is happening too fast for your friend. They want to sit and stir their tea in quiet stillness. Sitting quietly, saying nothing, asking nothing, doing nothing, just *being* is more important than words can express. In fact, words are mostly noise--inside and out..
As a friend, deal with your feelings, absolutely take care of yourself, but don't confuse that process with theirs. The best way to do is to be.
funny... (Score:2)
Re:funny... (Score:2)
Kushner? (Score:2)
Re:Kushner? (Score:2)
Re:Kushner? (Score:2)
If God is All-Powerful, then He can stop nice people from being hurt. But He doesn't, so He wouldn't be All-loving then.
If God is All-Loving, then He would stop people from being hurt if only He could, but He doesn't so maybe He can't.
Kushner opts for the second choice - that God is All-Loving but can't prevent all bad things from happening. Instead, He suffers with us. Where was God during the Holocaust? He was right there suf
Re:Kushner? (Score:2)
Who knows. I've read of people with a dibilitating disease thank God for the disease so they could be an example in of living life with joy in what you have.
interesting thoughts to waste a few hours on though...
jason
Re:Kushner? (Score:2)
I believe God has been forced to back off and not interfere in our lives. I guess we have only ourselves to blame - humankind told God to back off and His nature forced Him to honour our request. He can only come back to help us by our invitation. That is my theology. I may be wrong, so don't take it as gospel.
Re:Kushner? (Score:2)
Well that gels with the written word in lots of places in the Bible. God does allow fredom of choice for all humans, though in a stretch beyond out comprehension, he knows which way we will choose (so does that mean there is no choice?). Lots of headaches can be induced by trying to figure that out. I believe that no one will ever figure that out until the second comming. The reason is that an infitite God cannot be understood by a finite
exactly (Score:2)
this is why i worked like i did tonight on getting the song ready. i needed to not sit with my sorrow... but take that melancholy-ness and put it to good use (which explains the lead guitar parts in the song i just posted -- i recorded that tonight after i got off the phone).
these are my feelings... and i'm going to feel them. they don't belong to anyone else... and by trying to do something not direc
pretty (Score:2)
Re:pretty (Score:2)