The flustered customer smiled ruefully as she told me that she’d paid for a prescription and then left it behind at the pharmacy. I jokingly asked her if it was a medication for memory loss, and we both laughed. But in the next moment she suddenly dropped her mask and shared the burden behind her plastic smile. Her mother had died two months earlier, and she said she hadn’t had her head on straight since. Her eyes welled with tears, and suddenly mine did the same as we thought of the coming holidays and the difficulty she would face in getting through them with her recent loss weighing down on her so strongly. I touched her shoulder and suddenly she was gone, leaving me feeling that I’d failed to help her in any way. There was no time to pray with her or to tell her about the One who died to mend broken lives. And in retrospect I realized that she wasn’t looking for me to do anything but listen and understand as she shared her pain in a moment of vulnerability.
Sometimes the best way to speak of Jesus’ love is to silently listen with His heart.
“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted…”
