COLUMN: Grey Matters – The pain around us

“Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” Romans 12:15

Welcome to a two-part series with two powerful stories. This week we will look at how there is more pain around us than we realize and that this should sensitize our perspective as we go about our day with others. Next week we will think about how there is more love around us than we might realize.

The following story comes from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. When I read it in my 20s this story dramatically shifted my sensitivity to the strangers around me. It made me realize that people around me may be experiencing a lot more pain than I can imagine and my response to others matters more than I realize.

“I remember a mini-paradigm shift I experienced one Sunday morning on a subway in New York. People were sitting quietly — some reading newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed. It was a calm, peaceful scene.

Then suddenly, a man and his children entered the subway car. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed.

The man sat down next to me and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people’s papers. It was very disturbing. And yet, the man sitting next to me did nothing.

It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive as to let his children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all. It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway felt irritated, too. So finally, with what I felt like was unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, “Sir, your children are disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?”

The man lifted his gaze to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, “Oh, you’re right. I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to do, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”

Can you imagine what I felt at that moment? My paradigm shifted. Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw differently, I thought differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn’t have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behavior; my heart was filled with the man’s pain. Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely. “Your wife just died? Oh, I’m so sorry! Can you tell me about it? What can I do to help?” Everything changed in an instant.”

Stephen Covey’s subway commute was not as calm as it first appeared; it never truly is. Beneath the stillness of folded newspapers and half-closed eyes, unseen stories pressed quietly against the air – stories of worry, of grief, of battles carried inwardly. The children’s noise broke the silence, but it also broke a fragile illusion: that peace is always required, that pain stays hidden. Sometimes it does not. It arrives loud, disruptive, misunderstood. What do we do then? Do we get irritated and push away or do we seek first to understand and enter the posture of ‘mourning with those who mourn?’

We move through each day interpreting the little things we see around us, building quick judgments from inadequate understanding. A man who seems careless may be carrying a heart too heavy to lift. A child who seems unruly may be grieving in a language they do not yet know how to speak. There is more pain around us than we realize.

May we learn to live as though every stranger is fighting a quiet battle, as though every interruption might be a cry we do not yet understand. Empathy is not merely kindness – it is a way of seeing, a posture of the soul that leans toward mercy instead of judgment. The world does not need sharper reactions; it needs deeper noticing. When we pause long enough to imagine another’s unseen burden, irritation gives way to compassion, and in small sacred ways we begin to fulfill God’s call to ‘mourn with those who mourn’.

Gary Dyck is a chaplain and spiritual care provider at a hospital and personal care home in the Southeast.