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Pain Shared

 “It’s natural to trade with joy, you know.  “I couldn’t contain my joy.”  It’s a wonderful expression.  I couldn’t contain it; I had to say something about it.  You go to a football game and somebody make a marvelous run or something, and you say, “My God, I did you see that?”  And you sal the fellow on the back beside you.  “Look at that wonderful thing!”  You have to share joy…. But it’s not so natural to share pain….”

Frederick Buechner

There are two sides to not sharing our anguish.  One of them its that it avoids confronting the truth, our truth. The other is that we never truly reveal ourselves to others when pain is such a large component of who we are.

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