There is a kind of love that comforts, shelters, and defends. But there is another kind of love—perhaps a harder one—that knows when to stand nearby and allow another person to live through the difficulty that life has placed before them.
We are called to bear one another’s burdens, but we are not called to remove every burden. Sometimes our eagerness to defend another springs from genuine compassion; yet sometimes, without realizing it, we may deny them the very struggle through which wisdom, strength, and grace are being born.
Life is not perfect. People disappoint us. We are misunderstood. Things go unfairly. There are wounds we cannot prevent and circumstances we cannot repair. Much of spiritual maturity lies in learning, as Sister Joan suggests, to endure “the average heat of the average day”—to receive both its pain and its blessing with a tempered heart.
Perhaps friendship sometimes asks us simply to remain present: not to rescue, not to take sides, not to make another’s difficulty our battle, but to say quietly, I am here. I will walk beside you.
For sometimes the most loving thing we can do is allow those we love to grow.
It is not abandonment.
It is trust.
And sometimes, it is simply life.
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