How to be a Friend to Someone in Pain

Those of you who have had the privilege of accompanying people in distress and inner pain know that it is not easy to walk with them, without having any answers to their problems or solution to their pain. For many people in pain there is no solution; for a mother who has just lost her child or for a woman who has just been abandoned by her husband, there is no answer, there is just pain.

What they need is a friend willing to walk with them in all that pain. They do not need someone to tell them to try to forget the pain, because they won't. It is too deep. When a child has experienced rejection, you can say all sorts of nice things to the child, but that will not take away the pain. It will take a long time for that pain to diminish and it will probably never completely disappear.
- Jean Vanier, From Brokenness to Community, p.16