This is a powerful quote that I got from my dear friend Devoshn’s post Daily Kabbalah Tune Up: Listen Up. It speaks to a thing that it perhaps the most important for me to be as a friend and for my friends to be for me; to surrender to simply being a friend and not a fixer or a solver or an oracle.
When I learned to surrender to simply being a friend, all the draining stress of being a friend simply left me. What was left was the human connection between beings who simply care about each other. It is nourishing and nurturing and beautiful in a way that poetry cannot convey.
When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.
The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.
Henri Nouwen
