For When You Don't Know What to Say
/Here I am; it’s my turn on the blog, and I don’t know what to say.
I think I’ll run with that – and say some things about not knowing what to say.
The older I get the more I realize that most of the stupid things people (myself included) say come from a knee-jerk kind of anxiety about not knowing what to say. And for some reason, instead of telling the truth in that moment, we grasp for ‘the right thing’ to say, which usually isn’t the right thing to say.
A lot of the time what we grasp for as ‘the right thing’ to say is artificially neat and tidy and can come across as dismissive of the immediate pain a person might be feeling. Sometimes these kinds of reactive responses are accurate or factual, but they might not be helpful or encouraging to the person they’re directed to.
“Well, everything happens for a reason…”
“You just need to do ________”
“The same thing happened to me/a friend and I/they ______”
Often, the truth would be something like:
“I know you’re hurting and I wish you didn’t have to”
“What you are going through is hard for me to make sense of”
“I don’t know how to understand your experience in light of what I believe to be true about God/the world”
“I don’t know what to say, but I love you and care about the situation you’re dealing with”.
I’m sure non-Christian people get caught in situations where they don’t know what to say as often as Christian people do. I do think, though, that for Christian people there’s an extra layer of anxiety around not knowing what to say because we are afraid to appear as though we don’t have all the answers, and if we don’t have all the answers, maybe it will expose our faith to ridicule. We might refer to 1 Peter 3:15, “But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” and feel like we are required to have an answer or explanation for everything at the drop of a hat.
I don’t think that is what is being suggested by this verse, since that would imply we have a complete handle on how the world works and exactly what is going on spiritually, physically, emotionally, and mentally, for all people involved in every situation. That’s not possible. We’re all limited by our own knowledge and experience, and our perspective is not comprehensive. When we are asked to be ready to give an answer for our hope in Christ, I don’t think that means we also have to have immediate explanations for why a given person is experiencing a given situation or how that fits into the larger picture of our fallen world being reconciled in Christ.
We should also remember Romans 12:15, which exhorts us to “rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” I think for most of us, this is what we want to do when we don’t know what to say. Or maybe we just want to fix the problem so there is no need to mourn! When we have time to slow down and think it through, I think most of us know that telling someone their pain or discomfort or trial is part of “God’s plan” (which I think we should be very careful about saying, since we’re not in on all the details of God’s plan and wouldn’t want to put words in his mouth), or that if only they did __x__ everything would be fine, or that other people have had it worse is not exactly the same as mourning with them. It really sounds a lot more like we are telling them they do not have permission to mourn in our presence, that how they feel doesn’t matter to us.
It’s hard to change the script we’re accustomed to using when we don’t know what to say. Familiar words and phrases will tend to come tumbling out before we’ve had a chance to think them through. We can try to slow down, tell the truth instead of dispensing platitudes, and apologize when we are aware of when and how we’ve fallen short and failed to mourn with those who mourn.
