Dr. Brand said, in a comment that has always stayed with me, "A healthy body attends to the pain of the weakest part.

by embracing grief and standing beside the hurting person, we can indeed aid another's search for meaning.

Where is God when it hurts? I have often asked. The answer is another question, Where is the church when it hurts?

Perhaps the greatest way to give suffering people time is being patient with them — giving them room to doubt, cry, question and work out strong and often extreme emotions.

Every hour or so she asks how I'm feeling, and I hear her giving reports on the phone to her friends. "He's doing better today. A little trouper, doesn't complain at all." I like hearing her talk about me, as if I matter.

Wounded people who have been broken by suffering and sickness ask for only one thing: a heart that loves and commits itself to them, a heart full of hope for them.

a suffering person needs: love, and not knowledge and wisdom.

To ache so deeply now for Nana gave the older woman's life profound meaning. It was a privilege to mourn such a loss because it meant you had loved and been loved.

One of the most often asked questions posed after America was attacked on 9/11 was, 'What has the United States done to arouse so much Muslim hatred?' The question, however, is on the same moral level as asking what German and other European Jews did to cause the Holocaust, or what blacks did to arouse the hatred among the American whites who lynched them.

When we accept our own pain we can begin to see past it to the other person's woundedness. We can begin to consider that if we were in their shoes, if we stood inside their story, we might have done to others what they did to us.

When you truly empathize with someone, you have to take into account all the things that make that person who they are.

Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn't think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn't bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled a worm or grasshopper in front of the fish and said: "Wouldn't you like to have that?" Why not use the same common sense when fishing for people?