One of the greatest privileges I have at present is sitting with people who are early in their seminary journeys and serving as their spiritual director for a brief season. It’s an old form of ministry involving listening and reflecting, questioning and offering. I hear many things, but many of them are the same things by different people. For each one, I am required to hold them as true and valid and unique to that person.

The most surprising element of this is how often I have to defend my directees’ experiences from themselves. There is this tendency I see where they invalidate their own experience because someone else’s is seemingly worse. It may be a known person or some ethereal other, but somehow the worse experience lessens the authenticity of the easier one.

In its most basic form, this invalidation is equivalent to something like the following: “My pain is not as bad as their pain; therefore my pain is not valid.” Obviously, my directees don’t say this but it is what their statements essentially mean. It is heartbreaking but not surprising.

I’m sure we can all think of times when this argument has been used against us by others and we have accepted it and repeated it to ourselves and to others. “It’s not all that bad in the ‘big scheme of things’.” “Think of the [fill in the blank with your favorite group or individuals in need] and be grateful you’re not one of those.” Etc. There is some truth in these and I don’t mean to lessen the needs that do exist in this broken world. However, I find that these same arguments are often unhelpful in that they lead us to believe that God doesn’t have an ear for our very real sorrows–however slight they may seem relative to another’s–or that He has less of a heart for our pain than for someone else’s.

I once had another great privilege of working in an emergency room for a couple of years during my service in the U.S. Navy. It was rarely busy and rare that anything serious happened, or at least that any patient was in a real life-or-death situation. Thus it was a rather average night when two patients came in with the same complaint: finger pain. Both were adult males, both were officers, both were pilots.

In the medical field, we use the “pain scale” to assess a patient’s experience of pain. It is the closest we can come to anything objective and it is certainly not that. I would ask a question as follows: “On a scale of 0 to 10, with zero being no pain at all and ten being the worst pain you have ever experienced, how would you rate your pain right now?” This question is entirely relative to a patient’s experience and the answer can be fabricated, exaggerated, or diminished for a variety of reasons and purposes.

A patient’s answer is affected by whatever other pains they have previously experienced. The same complaint for two people can produce widely different answers on the pain scale. One who has gone through childbirth will very likely give a lower answer than another who has only experienced cuts and bruises. For the two patients we saw with finger pain, one gave us a 3 and the other a 6 on the pain scale. The guy with a 6 had little more than a bruise. The guy with the 3 had a broken finger. I will admit it was hard to take the 6 guy seriously, but we did the best we could.

For my directees, I have the opportunity–or perhaps rather the charge–to reflect a God who honors their answer on their own unique soul-pain scale. He does not compare or belittle but receives as is and provide equal measures of compassion and grace for each and every experience. Sadly, I find that there are many who do not seek this compassion and grace because someone else has experienced worse. I wonder how often Jesus weeps for those who do not reach out for this reason.

For those reading this, I hope you hear in this an invitation to honesty with God. Your “dark night” may seem less than another’s, but it is significant to you and that is what matters to God right now. Your experience is valid and significant. You have the same access to God’s care as any other person and I believe God is eager to give it. What would it be to set aside the hardship of the supposed “other” and give a voice to your own? I am certain there is nothing to lose if you do so…