The Grace of Just Showing Up (With Cheetos)

When someone we love is going through something hard: a scary diagnosis, a death, a divorce, a job loss, we want to fix it. But in reality, we know we can’t. That helplessness makes us even more nervous about showing up. We don’t want to make things worse. So what is there left to do? “Admit that you may not want to go, go anyway, and bring Cheetos.” This nugget (chip? puff?) of wisdom comes from Luther Seminary professor Rolf Jacobson, who along with his brother Karl and their mutual friend Michael Pancoast (all three Lutheran pastors with firsthand cancer experience) recently wrote a wonderful book called God Meets Us in Our Suffering.

Rolf lost both of his legs to cancer as a teen, and before this book was finished also lost his brother and co-author Karl to meningitis. When he says God meets us in our suffering, he’s not making theoretical arguments. This personal and pastoral book comes out of real pain and finding God in the midst of it.

The Cheetos idea comes from a time when a pastor from Northern Minnesota brought his confirmation class on a field trip to the Twin Cities, including a stop at Luther Seminary. Rolf was talking to these kids who were respectful but largely uninterested (they were fourteen and fifteen years old, after all). He noticed one girl sneaking Cheetos from a bag she had hidden under the table, and this gave him an idea.

“How many of you are fifteen years old … or hope to be fifteen years old someday?” Rolf asked. They all raised their hands. He told them that when he was fifteen, he developed cancer and had to have his right leg amputated. Then the cancer spread, and he eventually lost the left leg too and had over twenty surgeries in high school alone. He told them he had a wonderful, close group of friends. Then he asked, “During those years, how many times do you think that my closest group of friends came to see me in the hospital after surgery?”

The girl with the Cheetos looked up, smiled, and said “Every day!” Many of the others nodded. Rolf went on: “Almost never.” The quiet turned to shocked silence. “Do you know why?” he asked. “Because they loved me and didn’t want to see me in pain.” Now he had their attention. He continued:

“Understand why,” I said. “If you are a normal human being, the intense, psychic pain of another person will repel you — it will push you away. It pushes me away. None of us want to be around those who are in pain — we don’t know what to do, and we don’t know what to say. So here is what I want you to do when one of your friends is in deep pain. When one of your friends has a grandparent die, or has parents get divorced, or gets cancer, or is injured in a car accident, this is what I want you to do. First, admit to yourself that you may not want to go. There is nothing wrong with you if you feel that. Second, go anyway. Go anyway.

Then, looking at the girl with the Cheetos, I added, “And bring Cheetos. Say to your friend, I’m here because I love you. And I brought you some Cheetos. Can you do that?”

They looked around the room at each other … and they nodded.

People deal with tragedies in different ways. Some try to fix as many things as they can. They want to contribute. They want to be helpful. Something bad has happened, and they scramble to soften the blow. Others are overwhelmed and can’t think of a single way they can be helpful. They are paralyzed, shrinking back and withdrawing altogether. Everything is too big to handle, too sad to be helpful. However different their responses, they are both responding to the same law: “Thou Shalt Be Helpful.” One feels accused and wilts, the other fulfills all righteousness.

But our showing up isn’t meant to be the thing that makes everything better. This applies to both the person who is anxious to the point of paralysis about how to help and to the person who rushes into this kind of situation at full force and quickly burns out trying to save their loved one. Those in a crisis don’t need flowers to cheer them up; they need a hand to hold. They certainly don’t need someone else trying to fix them. They just need you. No pressure, just presence. We show up, and from there, trust that God meets us there too.

In the book, Karl calls it a kind of “sacrament of showing up.” We don’t need to rectify anything or redeem anything. But when we show up, we carry the grace of God into the room with us. We tend to the sufferer rather than to their affliction, remembering their humanity rather than their diagnosis. It’s a grace to be seen as a person, not just a condition.

When Jesus felt the woman with the bleeding problem touch the hem of his garment in a crowd, he stopped. Even though he had other places to be, he didn’t just heal her and move on. After the miracle came the gospel: he asked who touched him, found her, saw her, spoke with her at length. This is the good news in microcosm: God showing up, taking on flesh, and entering into our suffering to the point of death. We’re not being asked to go that far. We’re just being asked to show up and tend to the sufferer and attend to their humanity — with nothing in our hands but a big bag of Cheetos.