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A dear friend tells me that she is working on writing the story of her life — including a compelling and sweeping conversion that saved her and led to the conversion of many in her family. When she comes to visit, she brings a few chapters from her story to share. She has decided it is time to entrust some of it to me and to another close friend.

So, one afternoon, she situates herself on my lumpy old couch, a box of tissues close by, and turns to page one. She reads. We listen. We sit quietly and witness the earliest days of her life and some of the tragedies and losses that set her on her way — into trauma and childhood rape, into an abusive marriage to a man who dove deeper and deeper into the occult, into the crushing heartbreak of an abortion she did not want.

My friend and I sit and listen, an hour or two one day, an hour or two the next, and she just reads, quietly and with calm dignity as she reveals another loss, another sin committed against her, another sin she committed before she even knew what sin really was — that terrible breach growing between her and God. And I am struck by this recurring theme: She was so young, so naive, she didn’t know what to do and she had no one to talk to, no one to listen, no one who understood. There was such tremendous emotional and spiritual isolation.

My friend and I listen and receive her story as reverently as we can.

While I’m driving her to the airport for her return trip home, she says, “I’m leaving here a changed woman. I think I just needed someone to hear all of that and to still love me. I just needed to come out of hiding and to completely be myself.”

If she only knew how much she honored me, leaving a little bit of her pain there in my living room, allowing us to help carry a share of her story, to shoulder a touch of the loss. She says it changed her, it was a gift to her to be received in this way, but of course, I know it was equally a gift for me and my other listening friend. It changed us, too. Listening is not only a gift for the one being “listened”; it is of course, a gift for the listener. We honor the souls of those we listen to, but let’s not forget how their entrusting us with their story honors us.

Maybe for Lent this year, I can concentrate on fasting from feedback, from sharing my opinion and offering commentary, or from trying to “fix things” in others. Maybe I could concentrate on listening and on simply being present without judgment to those who need to be seen, heard and received. Maybe this year I can try to practice the gift of being present in the same way Mary and John and Magdalene did at the foot of Christ’s cross: witnessing in love, sharing in the suffering of my loved ones around me, staying present and faithful through the trial.

Jesus, from the cross you cried, “My Lord, why have you abandoned me?” In this holy season, let my listening help to lift the sense of isolation and abandonment of those near me who are suffering. Let my listening be a comfort and a reminder that you are near, you will redeem, you do save, and Easter Resurrection is already yours.

Kelly is the award-winning author of nine books including “Love Like A Saint: Cultivating Virtue with Holy Women” and co-host to the podcast “Deep Down Things.” Visit her website at lizk.org.