Living in community means being sensitive to each other’s struggles, acknowledging, sympathizing, and encouraging someone who is having a hard time. Last week, a member of our house (who I’ll call Ed) was involved in a tragedy, and it’s affected him greatly.

Ed offered to take care of a co-worker’s dog on Monday. The dog was a rescue that had been adopted just a couple weeks earlier. Ed is a dog owner and often kept dogs for friends, so this was nothing new. Things went well for the first hour, so, while the three dogs were playing in the fenced back yard, he ducked downstairs for a moment to take care of laundry.

When he came back, the rescue dog was gone. She had apparently jumped the fence and ran off. He and I started searching immediately, and he contacted the owner, who also came to help. Someone posted flyers and put out the word on social media. Several people in the neighborhood saw the dog, but she always ran from them. The following day, she was found dead, apparently run over.

Everybody was disconsolate, Ed more than anyone. When he heard the news, he immediately went outside and sat by himself, hunched over, for a long time. He kept away from others the rest of the day and the following day as well, except for sitting through our times of prayer, where he avoided eye contact, reading written prayers in a barely audible voice. He didn’t go to work and stopped eating. When I asked him how he was doing and whether he would like to talk, he said that he just needed some time. I knew how passionately he cared for animals and how deeply this would affect him.

I waited a couple days to see if he would talk about what had happened, or at least stop avoiding everyone in the household. Then I ambushed him. He often takes his dogs for a walk late in the afternoon, so I waited for him to leave and ran after them. When I caught up, he didn’t try to avoid me; I think he did want someone to reach out to him but wasn’t going to take the initiative himself.

We walked and talked for quite a while. I don’t want to go into detail about what he said, other than that he’s tormented by what happened and blames himself. We kept up the conversation in subsequent days.

An hour after we got back from our walk, I remembered having seen a link to a story about the help given to someone else who was struggling. I found and read the article; it brought tears to my eyes. It was about Trea Turner, a major-league shortstop who had signed a big contract at the beginning of the year to play for the Philadelphia Phillies. He struggled from the start, making lots of errors and not hitting well at all. His year reached its nadir in an early August game in which he went hitless and made an error that cost the game. A local radio producer, noticing Turner’s misery in a post-game interview, proposed a radical response: give him a standing ovation. He reasoned that it might help, and, even if it didn’t, it would be a good message to the team that the fans were behind them. So, when Turner came up to bat in the second inning of the next home game, everyone stood and cheered him. Here’s a link to the article, which has an embedded video of the moment: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2023/10/04/trea-turner-ovation-phillies/  

Isn’t that what we all need? To be affirmed and valued, even and especially when we fall short and are full of self-criticism and regret? And I knew someone right in our house that needed the same sort of affirmation. So, after prayer that evening, I told those in attendance about the article and got everyone to stand and cheer for Ed. It may be a small thing, but I think it touched him. And it wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t in community together.

Who do you know that needs a standing ovation?