I do not claim to be an expert on ministering to the suffering; it’s not even a strong suit of mine. This message is simply advice from an older pastor recounting what he has learned from God over 40 years of ministry: mistakes I made, and where God in His grace allowed me to be a comfort to those who were suffering.

All of us are called to minister to those who are suffering. Yet, when I began my ministry, without consciously thinking it through, ministering to the suffering was pretty far down my list of priorities. I knew I wanted to serve Jesus and wanted my people to see and know Jesus, and I especially wanted them to know Reformed theology. So, for my first series of sermons, I planned to preach on the five points of Calvinism and expand upon them.

A wise older preacher must have guessed what I was planning and assigned me to preach from Isaiah 40 for my ordination message. He said to me in so many words: “When young men come out of the seminary, they are full of new knowledge they want to impart. They see flaws in the congregation and they tend to address those flaws with enthusiasm, but they can have the effect of burdening the congregation.”

He assigned me to preach from Isaiah 40 to remind me that a big part of my responsibility was to comfort the people of God as they faced being overwhelmed by the world and their own sin. Although in the first 39 chapters of Isaiah God reminds the people of their sin and the consequences of that sin, He then says to Isaiah, “Comfort, comfort my people.” I took the wise preacher’s words, and God’s words, to heart. I realized that it is not just God’s people in Isaiah’s time who needed comfort.

However, knowing I was to comfort wasn’t the same as knowing how. One of my big problems was being unable to identify with those who suffered. When I started my ministry, I hadn’t really suffered. At the beginning of my ministry, the worst suffering I could recall was being rejected and humiliated by a pretty girl in third grade. I had fallen for her and with fear and trembling I told her so in an anonymous love note. She immediately knew I sent the note and she and her friends laughed at me. She broke my heart and I suffered. We would all agree that this was pretty mild compared to the suffering many people go through.

Even so, I don’t mean to minimize such suffering in childhood. Children can suffer deeply, often over things that adults might make light of. One of my favorite comic strips some years back was from Calvin and Hobbes. It had six-year-old Calvin running into the house with a sorrowful face, crying, “Mom, Mom, a big dog knocked me down and stole Hobbes [his stuffed tiger]. I tried to catch him but I couldn’t. And now I’ve lost my best friend!”

His mom responded as many parents might: “Well, Calvin, if you wouldn’t drag that tiger everywhere, things like this wouldn’t happen.”

And Calvin’s response: “There is no problem so awful that you can’t add some more guilt to it to make it worse.”

When I read that, it struck a chord with me, both as a parent and as a pastor. Even though it is hard to pass up an opportunity for a moral lesson, there are times to keep your mouth shut and not add to someone’s suffering with a little moralizing.

The first time I had opportunity to minister to someone suffering in my congregation, I failed badly. I had been in the congregation less than a month when a 17-year-old boy asked if he could see me in private. I set up a time in my office and was thinking, What will this be about? Has he gotten a girl pregnant? Worse? When he came and told me his problem, I must have smiled with relief. He had fallen for a girl at a church conference and wasn’t sure how she felt. I gave him advice, but he claimed years later that I didn’t treat it seriously and he was in misery. He never came back to church and I didn’t know why, even though I asked. When he was 40 years old, he finally told me he didn’t come back because I had been no comfort when he was suffering.

But I didn’t just fail a 17-year-old. I failed older people as well. I had an older man in my congregation whose mother, in her 90s, was dying. I spent hours with his mother until she finally passed away. For some time after the funeral the son was very cool to me. Finally I went to him to find out what was wrong. He said in so many words: “You were very good to my mother. You spent time with her. But you totally ignored me. I was grieving while she was dying, and, even on the day of her death, you just dealt with funeral arrangements and didn’t give me comfort.”

He was right. Somehow I felt that since his mother was in her 90s and he was 70, his pain wouldn’t be so great. Now that I’m 70 I can see just how wrong I was.

I wish I could say that I have gotten much better with insight both as to when to comfort and how to comfort, but let me tell you one more error I made only a year ago. I sent a note to a friend who had once made a profession of faith. He seemed to have lost that faith over the years. When I found he was in difficulty I sent him a note, offering him my sympathy and letting him know that I cared. Then I let him know that I was praying that this trial might bring him back to the relationship with God he once seemed to have. He responded with these words: “Despite your tons of experience, you are talking a little like Job’s friends who came to comfort him but all they could find to say was that his relationship to God was deficient.”

I was devastated. He was right. I hadn’t just sympathized. I was indeed praying for him, but I didn’t need to add that little bit of reproach to my words of comfort. Because of that little attack, he didn’t feel comforted or encouraged.

Although my friend quoted Job to remind me what poor ministering skills I had, I find the book of Job also lets us know how proper ministering can be done. Job considers his friends miserable comforters, mainly because they were convinced that his calamity was a result of his sin and thus spent time reproaching him for his sin; yet they did do something right. Consider what they did before they began to reproach him:

1. First they came to him. That’s something. It beats a text message or an email, or even a card. They came, says the Bible, “to show him sympathy and comfort him.”

2. When they saw him, they cried. They were truly moved by his miserable circumstances. They wept, they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads.

3. And then “they sat with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.” That takes some commitment. Who has that much time? His friends did. I have never done that.

The problem with them came only when they opened their mouths and began to give their opinions as to the cause of his misery. That’s not uncommon, is it? Too often we feel we just have to say something. And often that something is not much comfort. Just being there, standing beside, sitting beside the one suffering, is the greatest comfort there is.

My first real suffering in life came a few years ago when my daughter-in-law Stacy died. My suffering had three causes. Her death hurt me deeply on a personal level because I loved her dearly. My congregation loved her, and therefore watching them grieve caused me to suffer. Watching my son, with his heart torn out, sobbing to the depths of his being, caused me to suffer as I have never suffered before. One thing I believe I did right was with my son. My wife, Boni, and I stayed with him constantly. And when he seemed inconsolable we asked if he wanted God’s Word read to him. He did. We began to read. We read through all the Psalms. We read through Corinthians, We read through John and Lamentations. Boni and I would trade off, but we read for hours a day for several days without comment. We just read God’s Word and let it speak, and it brought him—and us—great comfort.

Besides the reading of Scripture, the other thing that I have always found to be a comfort, even to unbelievers, is prayer. When I have asked people who are suffering physically or emotionally if they would like me to pray for them, I have never had anyone say no.

Being there, as God’s servant, is the key to ministering to the suffering. When I failed to minister well, it was because I didn’t give myself to the situation. I wasn’t there. When you are not there, you can’t minister in Christ’s name. When I did well, it was because I was there. One’s presence alone can bring comfort—if you are there in Christ’s name.

So I encourage you to, in the power of the Holy Spirit, learn from my mistakes and your own. To take seriously the suffering of others: the young, even though their suffering may seem minor to you; and the elderly—even though you may not yet understand or empathize with them. I urge you to give yourself to those who are suffering, to stand by them, to sit by them, to pray with them, and to read with them. Give them the comfort of Christ. And may God bless you as you minister to those who suffer.

–Donald Piper

Don is a retired minister of the RPCNA. He and his wife, Boni, live in Brier, Wash., and are members of the Seattle, Wash., RPC. This is Part 4 in a series of articles on the theme of suffering, based on devotional messages to the 2013 RPCNA Synod.