“How puny my hugs and tears before the magnitude of a friend’s grief. Is this all my presence can offer? In my own helplessness, I remember Jesus’ words: ‘For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them’ . . . Maybe Jesus’ words are really true. Maybe our physical presence beside those who grieve, who feel abandoned, who wrestle against the muck of life is itself an embodied prayer that invokes — or somehow actually — becomes ‘I am there among them.’ God with us.”
Leslie Leyland Fields, author, speaker, and editor, from her “Stones to Bread” column in Christianity Today Magazine (September 2011)