[Side note: I'm not really sure what exactly I was thinking with that title but I'm not sure how else to explain it.]
Have you ever had a day? Just a bad day and you think that you must be the only person in the world that has ever just had a bad day? We know this is not realistic and yet we sometimes need to sink into that for just a few minutes to get a grip on the reality of our lives and how we feel. I learned a very important lesson this summer at the Holocaust conference. They gave us guidelines to teach the Holocaust and one of them is not to minimize or compare the story of the Holocaust and it's reality by simulating it. I'm not sure if that makes sense... let me describe it to you... during the Holocaust 11 million people died, we can't really wrap our brains around that. (I tried to, it's useless.) This is just the number that we know of, that doesn't include those who were sick or wounded, it doesn't include the conditions in which they died or their hope or desire to survive. It's just a number. However, often (I'm so guilty of this) in order to make it relevant, we describe it by comparison. Really, what can you compare that to? I can take the symptoms of the Holocaust and compare it to, say, a genocide in Rwanda or Cambodia or Armenia but they are still not equivalent. They're all dramatic situations in which a group(s) of people was targeted but we cannot minimize the mass fatality of the Holocaust by talking about Rwanda. Just can't be done.
We do this to people all the time. Instead of walking with someone through a hardship, we are quick to say, "I know what you mean.... I've felt the same way...I dealt with the same situation...etc." Get my drift? However, we don't know what they mean, we haven't felt the same way, and we haven't dealt with the same situation. (Often, we say things so they'll stop talking to us about this-- do we really care about people? More a question to me than you.) On the surface, they do look the same, they do seem to feel the same or deal with situations the same way but varying circumstances define so much of how people look and deal with situations that we cannot possibly rank in comparison. Sometimes, we need to let people feel for a few minutes. Let them get the unrealistic ideas out and then let them process through realism. (This is not AT ALL a blog of excuses for people who constantly throw pity parties--different time, different place.) As they process the realism, jump in. How did you deal with a 'similar' situation? Note: the word similar does not imply the same... they're not. Rather than overlook their emotions for a few minutes, give them time to grasp what's really going on.
When we compare, we shrink real life for people. I mean, honestly, you're not going to walk up to a three year old boy learning to walk and when he falls over, yell in his face like a drill sergeant, "BE A MAN!" You're not (and if you do, those are completely different issues that I will, more than likely, not touch on in this blog EVER). Stop shrinking real life and real circumstances for people. Stop making your life worse than theirs... stop one-upping people's horrible moments and just let them be for a bit. I know that this is an area that I can really work on and grow in and I hope that you are able to do the same. Let's help others see their reality through the lens of moments, rather than compared situations. Will you pray for me in this? I will for you too. -Melis
