Room for Breaking

Everyone enjoys a good laugh. It’s good for the soul as everyone knows. It even seems to push back the darkness sometimes closing in around us. It’s easy to open the doors to our home to the laughter and delight of others. But true relationships are not formed around our ability to share laughter. At some point, we must ask if our home has room for the sorrow and tears of others.

I have spent my fair share of time in “community” groups meeting in others homes. These groups break bread together and discuss relevant topics all in the name of building a local community that “looks” like the people of God. But if we are honest, the people of God have a hard time opening their homes to the sorrows of others. The awkwardest times I have experienced in “home groups” always center around a person breaking rank and actually speaking of their specific needs and detailing the weight and sorrow pushing them into despair. It isn’t their tears and neediness making the group awkward. The awkwardness comes from the group’s palpable discomfort at such a display of need and brokenness. There seems to be a collective shrinking away from the opportunity to enter into the other person’s suffering. Bible verses and lines from the pastor’s sermon are quickly thrown out like band-aids toward the person’s woundedness. But few have the guts and compassion to stay at the moment and sink to a heart level inside the presence of another’s suffering. Few have the patience to move close long enough for the tears to dry.

I’m not sure when sharing our sorrows became the exception and not the rule inside a community claiming to find peace only through Jesus being crushed on the cross. But it becomes painfully obvious when believers can get together week after week without a hint of sorrow and need breaking through the small talk and cliches.

Making room for others breaking is not easy or clean and tidy. Because it demands hearts to be moved and extra time to be spent, creating such room for sorrow means being intentional. We are called to be the one’s to make our home accessible to the needs of others. We are called to make the sorrowful and wounded feel like an anticipated guest of honor instead of an intruder. This inevitably means the times we collect ourselves as the body of Christ should be marked by the confession of need and suffering as much as it should be marked by the confession of faith. In fact, both of these confessions should inform each other. We need each other for more than a good laugh.