Hidden Wars

Someone you care about is fighting a war you cannot see.

Not on a distant shore, though it can feel that far. The hardest battles a man fights are the ones inside him — hidden to the world, fought behind a face that tells you everything is fine. You are standing right next to him and still too far away to know what is actually happening in there.

So how do you help?

You run through the options and none of them feel like enough. Keep him in your thoughts — that costs nothing and he never even knows. Tell him you are there — a little more, but words are cheap and he has heard them before. Show up, consistently, be present — closer, but presence can still stand outside a door that will not open. Intervene, force it — maybe, but you do not know the terrain in there, and the wrong move at the wrong moment does harm.

There is no formula. Anyone who tells you there is one has never actually stood outside someone's hidden war feeling useless.

But here is the one thing I am sure of. The thing that does not require you to know the right words.

You do not leave.

You stay at his side, whatever that has to look like, and you do not leave even when he tries to make you. Because a man losing a hidden battle will often try to push away the exact people who could help — he will hide, go quiet, tell you he is fine, try to escape being seen. That is not a reason to go. That is the reason to stay.

You may never find the perfect thing to say. You may never fully see the war he is in. But you can refuse to be one more person who left when it got hard to reach him.

Maybe that is the whole job. Not to win his battle for him. Just to be the one who did not leave the field.

For now, that is enough. It has to be.

"A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity." — Proverbs 17:17