For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:...a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;...a time to keep silence, and a time to speak. Ecclesiastes 3:1, 4, 7b

Years ago, when I was a very young pastor, I stood nervously at the funeral visitation for an elderly gentleman, wondering what I could say that might help ease the family’s grief. Streams of people filed by the open casket and greeted the widow. One particular woman was clearly struggling to come up with something helpful to say. "Oh!" she exclaimed, looking at the body and then back to the widow, "Why, you know, he looks just wonderful, so much better than he did at your golden wedding anniversary!"

To borrow from the title of Judith Viorst’s children’s book: Sometimes the only thing you can do is laugh when somebody responds to your pain with a "terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad" thing to say. But what should we say? How should we respond when someone is grieving the death of a family member, facing trouble with a child, going through a divorce, or otherwise suffering?

A time to keep silence
Surprisingly, the best first response to a friend’s pain could be to say very little. It might be no accident that in the book of Ecclesiastes (part of the well–named wisdom literature of our Bible) the sequence is first a time for keeping silence, and then a time for speaking.

I recently asked my women’s Bible study group what they found helpful when they were going through tough times. Marci, a teacher, told about when her daughter, a troubled and troublesome teen, was picked up by the police for possession of marijuana. The call came on a Thursday, and on Friday morning her daughter moved out, "never to live under our roof again," Marci said. That morning, she posted a memo at school telling her colleagues the news and that she was too close to tears to discuss it, but would appreciate their smiles. "One of the teachers met me outside the school office, gave me a hug, and handed me a bunch of balloons, without saying one word. It meant everything to me."

In the beginning of the book of Job (another wisdom book), Job’s friends come to console him after several tragedies. They don’t help him much with their long speeches, but have you ever noticed what these friends do before they start talking? They sit with Job in silence for seven days (Job 2:11–13)!

In the Jewish tradition, people "sit shiva" after the death of a relative. The word shiva comes from the Hebrew word for seven, and sitting shiva means seven days of quiet mourning. During this time friends may pay a shiva call. The emphasis of these visits is not on speaking, but on listening to the mourner and quiet remembrance and reflection. The important part is being there with the mourner, not trying to distract her or "fix it."

It can be healing to allow a person to focus on her sadness, to take it seriously and not try to wipe it away. As Christians we know that it is God’s job to wipe tears away. It’s foolish to think that it’s ours. Foolish and presumptuous and often downright irritating. "I wanted to slug her," said another woman. "I was a little girl and my favorite uncle had passed away. At the funeral my aunt told me I shouldn’t cry, that it was wrong of me to cry. I was so mad at her for trying to make me ashamed of my tears."

The group remembered that Jesus himself cried at the death of Lazarus. Why then should we try to keep a grieving friend’s tears away?

Many of the "no-good, very bad" things people blurt out to grieving friends seem to come from speaking without thinking. Well-meaning Christians can be among the worst offenders. My friend Kayli described how her pastor "warbled on and on" about the resurrection at her mother’s deathbed. The pastor’s timing was off. "I do believe in the resurrection," she told me, "but it wasn’t helpful to feel this pressure to be a ‘faithful’ person and be rushed from Good Friday right into Easter."

Allowing time for grieving is an important part of the wisdom of women I have spoken with. At the death of Jesus himself, there was a full day of God’s silence (that second day, a Sabbath) before God spoke the resurrection into being.

Worse comments include the "Christian" friend who told the mother of a man who died of AIDS "how sorry I am that your son won’t be going to heaven since he was gay." Whatever her honest beliefs about sexual orientation might be, does her Bible not include Jesus’ words, "Do not judge, so that you may not be judged"? Does her Bible not include Apostle Paul’s words about comforting others "with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God" (2 Corinthians 1:4b)?

People agreed whole-heartedly that the least appreciated Bible passage people can say in times of grief is, "God gives you only as much as you can handle." This is actually not a Bible verse at all — it’s a misquotation of Paul’s carefully constructed statement in 
1 Corinthians 10:13. There is real meaning in that text, but Paul surely is not trying to tell us God heaps trouble on people just to show their spiritual strength!

A comment that women who have suffered miscarriage almost unanimously hate is, "you’ll have other children." But one woman who had lost a baby in her third month of pregnancy beamed as she told us what her parish mothers’ group had done. "They remembered my due date and when I came to church that night for our meeting, they surprised me with the sweetest bouquet of white and yellow daisies. Of course, I cried. We all did, but it was such a good kind of cry."

A time to speak
There is a time for silence, but there is also a time to voice concern.

My husband, Wayne, recalls his parents’ misery in their marriage, including struggles with alcoholism, hospitalization, and bankruptcy. Through all those years, both parents were active in church life. Their troubles must have been apparent to other church members. Wayne recalls when his mother finally told her church friends that she was getting a divorce. "Oh," said one long-standing fellow parishioner. "Well, we’ve all been thinking there’s been something wrong."

"A lot of help that was," my husband says. "You wonder what might have happened if somebody would have said something to my mom or dad years earlier, even just to let them know that they could count on those people there at church."

Those are almost exactly the words Elise, a mother of two, found most helpful as her own marriage was ending. "I had friends who said, ‘whatever you decide, I will support you, and I will be there for you.’ I took a lot of comfort in that."

There is a time for speaking. Silence has its place, but continued silence can be insulting or cruel.

Several of us have had the experience of someone we considered a friend not saying a word about a tragedy in our lives. We agreed that a card or a phone call — even months later — was much better than nothing at all. In fact, receiving a note months or even a year later was sometimes especially helpful. By then others have forgotten, but for the sufferer, there can be fresh waves of sorrow.

One man told me that when he had a mental health crisis at work, his boss dropped everything and traveled several hours to be with him. He said that as he recovered, it was helpful that several people, including his wife and his grown daughter, kept asking him insightful questions. "They didn’t let me wiggle out of them, no yes or no questions and answers. They kept asking me how I was doing and they stayed to listen." He needed people to speak to him, and he appreciated every note he got. "Worst for me were the people who tip–toed around as if nothing had happened. Worst of all was a complete loss of friendship. There were people who didn’t want to have anything to do with me after I had my breakdown! That hurt."

Many people voiced their appreciation for spoken prayers. "I was overwhelmed when I was going through chemo, how people came out of the woodwork to say they were praying for me and had asked their friends to pray for me too!" said one woman. "I could just feel their support. You know that expression, ‘wings of prayer’? I was carried on those wings during my months of therapy!"

On the other hand, another woman confided, "to be honest, when people say they’ll pray for me, I feel a little looked down on, and I always wonder if they just say that to show how religious they are. But there was one woman at work who asked if she could pray with me, right then and there! I was nervous but also touched. It felt good to hear her out–loud prayer — and she kept it short for me!"

For everything there is a season
People struggle and people grieve and people heal at their own rate, in their own time, or better, in God’s time. There’s a story 3,000 years old about King David, who agonizes over his son’s illness, but then washes his face and is clearly ready to move on with life as soon as his child dies (See 2 Samuel 12:16 — 20). David was operating on a very different schedule than his courtiers and servants thought proper, but it made sense for him.

For everything there is a season. And as sisters in Christ, we can take comfort in knowing that God will bless our efforts, silent and spoken, to reach out to others "with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God." And what if one of us accidentally says a "no–good, very bad" thing? Ah, then we remember that God is the God of forgiveness and new grace in our human relationships.

Remember the lady who made the comment about the man in the casket looking better than he did at the anniversary party? She and her widowed friend enjoyed many more years of good friendship and forgiving laughter.

Christa von Zychlin and her husband, Wayne Nieminen, are pastors of Our Savior’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hartland, Wisconsin.