When I want to help others who are suffering, I sometimes feel quite helpless, and often say and do all the wrong things.

Certainly it does no good to join others in feeling bad. Nor does it help to empathize with their momentary weaknesses.

Worst of all are the many times I ignore whatever my grieving friends are trying to share, so uncomfortable and busy am I inattentively casting about madly in my own mental bag of tricks for something helpful to throw out—some solution or fix, perhaps an insight, a factoid, something I’ve read, or tried, or heard about, some word of comfort.

My problem is always that I look to myself for my answers, and forget to ask for help, trusting that my willingness to be of use will always be sufficient, and that my higher power is always with me, ready to respond to requests for help, whether or not the effects are immediately obvious.

When I think I’m alone, I sometimes fall back on my own devices and solutions, and then I only have confusion to offer, because present problems require solutions arising in  the present. Nothing I’ve learned, nothing from my past, nothing I can pull out of my history can fix my friend’s present problem. But I can trust God to help.

Good solutions never come from me anyway, but sometimes they come through me, from my endless Source of solutions. Whenever I give a problem to my higher power to bless, he always works magic, and sometimes he chooses to do it through me.

It’s hard to remember to stop interfering though, and to trust his working out of his own answers in his own way and time. Too often I rush to offer my own hurriedly and worriedly dreamed-up solutions, when the best step I can ever take is to get out of God's way….

I can always ask, listen, watch, wait, and have faith.