WHO CARES?

What hurts you the mosT?

In 2019 we asked our community the question ‘What Hurts You The Most?’ and then responded to it. The resources on this page contain our responses.

SERMON SERIES

WHO CARES? WHAT HURTS THE MOST

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This covers answers like ‘feeling worthless’, ‘depression’, ‘worrying about the future’ or ‘regrets from my past’.  These are the kind of answers where people don’t reveal the cause of their emotional pain.  It could be that the underlying issue is one of the other categories or it could be that the thing that genuinely ‘hurts the most’ is not a specific issue but the emotional distress itself.  For example one person wrote ‘feeling low and not knowing why’.  Either way it’s not surprising to many that with this kind of responses would be on the increase.

This covers answers like ‘breaking up with my boyfriend last year’ and ‘people saying mean things about me at school’. Anything to do with rejection, conflict or abuse would fall under this heading.  In one sense you could say other issues could sit under this heading if it was made even broader. For example family, loneliness and bereavement while we have them as separate categories they are all profoundly relational problems. Loneliness and bereavement are to do with the loss or absence of relationships. It would also be interesting to learn how many of the ‘negative emotions’ responses have a relational cause – past abuse, neglect, or rejection.

This a broad category and covers anything from ‘the poverty I see in the world around me’ to ‘littering in the countryside’.  Some might say these answers are a kind of deflection – we’ve asked people ‘what hurts YOU the most?’ and they’ve focused on something that is relatively impersonal and to do with other people.  And yet, it may well be for many of these individuals that the thing that genuinely hurts them the most IS what they are reading about in the news, and is the unfairness of the world.

This covers issues about conflict in the family (e.g. ‘falling out with my son’) while others share the worries and concerns they have for their children and grandchildren (e.g. ‘worrying about my daughter who is hanging out with a bad crowd’). For others it’s the pain of being separated from family members (e.g. ‘Living so far away from my grandchildren’). How tragic that the family –meant to be a place of security, love and acceptance has often been the cause of the deepest pain for so many people.

Death is one of the few things that unites all human beings. It’s the great leveller regardless of wealth, status and ethnicity. We all die. One out of every seven people who responded to our survey told us that death, bereavement or loss was the thing in life that hurts the most. Many were specific: some people had lost both parents while others had lost wives or husbands, young children or grandchildren. Some people had even lost all their family members. Others had lost brothers and sisters in their early twenties and one told of the people they loved being murdered.