For the past four weeks, most of my clinical hours have been with patients who are suffering from psychiatric illnesses, and for whatever reason, this particular patient population really grips me in the gut like nothing I’ve ever done before.

If you had asked me four weeks ago, I might have admitted to you that I believed that most patients in psychiatric settings aren’t really that sick. But what I’m coming to realize is that sometimes, the most serious wounds that we have—the brain hemorrhages and heart attacks that kill people silently and often without warning—are those that can’t be seen. And I think that one of the things that has been most gripping about these psych patients—especially the little kids—is just how deeply wounded they truly are...many of them so much more so than they will ever know.

There are days when I get back into my car after a clinical and put my head down on the steering wheel and cry—cry for my patients, these precious little kids who are so angry and so bitter and so scared that they can’t cry themselves...cry for their parents, who are often so confused they don’t know what it is to love a child or what it feels like to be loved themselves...cry because it hurts to see so many hurting so deeply in numb silence.

But all of this has made me ponder, sometimes throughout the dark hours of the predawn on the days when sleep has fled, about the different forms of human suffering, and how outsiders normally respond to the suffering of others. I read a fascinating article on Boundless.org called “Let’s Talk.” The author, Christopher Riordan, is speaking about communication, but he also makes some interesting points about the way we as people are wired.

In speaking of communication, he says, “I believe all communication begins with who we are (or who we are becoming) and only then moves into the specific ways we speak and interact with one another. If our hearts are ill or fearful, so too will be our interactions with one another. Am I the kind of person who is willing to trust another? Will I share all of myself or hold back for fear? Can I accept what my loved one shares with me, no matter how hard it is to hear?”

Further on in the same article, Riordan continues, “The truth is that many of us struggle with secrets and the dark places of the heart that we dare not share with another. We find it extremely difficult to trust others because we don't see this modeled well in real life. Instead, we witness (and many of us have experienced) what happens when we reveal too much of ourselves. Our partner flees. Isn't this our deepest relationship fear?

Of all the obstacles to open and honest communication, fear may be the most crippling. We fear not measuring up to society's or our loved one's standards. We fear being revealed as a fraud. We fear rejection and loneliness. So we hide those parts of our lives that we believe would threaten the relationship. We set aside true intimacy, which is to be known and loved, in favor of the cold, shallow comfort of our delusions of safety. We forget that mature love comes not after years of being together, but when we release our fears of rejection, failure, loss, heartache.

In the book Hannah Coulter, Wendell Berry's title character reflects on a lifetime of intimate relationships: "You can't give yourself over to love for somebody without giving yourself over to suffering."

Yet, giving ourselves over to suffering is not what any of us would describe as relational bliss. In fact, many of us get married precisely to end our suffering and loneliness. Henri Nouwen tells us:

Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it. And so we ignore our greatest gift, which is our ability to enter into solidarity with those who suffer.”

The sentence that really stuck out to me was Riordan’s comment that “compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely and broken.” It was precisely that desire/ability/disposition to go into the messy places of the heart and do major restoration that made Christ an anomaly, a puzzle, and an endless source of delight to the multitudes who followed Him.

I feel like, all too often, that’s the last place in the world that we want to accompany our friends—to hold their hand and go down under the façade and help them to unpack all of their filthiness and uncover the putrid infected wounds of their soul. We hate that because it scares us—it reminds us too much of our own carefully hidden rotting mess.

 As I was driving home from one clinical in particular, I remembered a conversation that I’d had with a friend over the summer. We were talking about friendship, and she made the comment that she had a lot of friends, and that she loved all of them intensely. I asked her if she loved them enough to be willing to challenge them when they were wrong, and put some tension in the relationship at times for the sake of helping each friend grow and mature. She got really quiet for a moment, and then said quietly,

“Well, no, I don’t really do that. I really don’t like that part.”

I nodded.  “Yeah, I hear you. I feel like there are parts of friendship that we all like—the feel-good parts. The parts where we get to encourage each other, and cheer each other on, and tell each other what we appreciate in one another…all the mushy stuff. We love that. But then when it gets tough—when they’re doing something stupid, and we need to tell them, or when we’re doing something stupid, and they need to bring it to our attention, and we know that the conversation is going to hurt, and that it might make us unpopular for a while…we don’t like that part so well. And a lot of times we let our dislike for the process keep us from being a part of the other person’s growth…which is a pretty high price to pay for superficial popularity, when you really think about it…”

The conversation went on from there, but I’ve thought of it many times since when I was in a place where I needed to gently challenge one of my friends with an uncomfortable truth. The reality is that sometimes, I’m right with my friend: I don’t really do it, because I really don’t like that part. And yet we serve a God who modeled, during His time on earth, what it means to have the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely and broken.

Riordan went on to comment that Christ chose an unfaithful woman to be His bride. That He “surrounded Himself with people who had utterly — and publicly — failed and called them to be His bride, His body on earth” to remind each of us that God is a Father who “accepts us as the broken people we are and transforms us into what we are meant to be.”

At the end of the day, the obvious question that each one of us faces, then, is whether we’re truly willing to give all that it might cost us to follow His example in walking alongside others into the black despair of their weakness, vulnerability, loneliness, and brokenness? Are we willing to face that same blackness in ourselves?

It’s not an easy question to ask, and it’s an even harder question to answer. However, as I work with the broken little ones who surround me in the children’s psychiatric wards and interact with their parents, I’m beginning to see, in the haunted sadness of their empty, pleading eyes, that it’s a question we really can’t afford NOT to ask and answer…and so my prayer is that we—that I—would be willing to go the distance and ready to plumb the depths with each person God calls me to accompany on this journey to wholeness, healing, and divine redemption.