When someone is at their lowest, the most valuable thing you can offer usually isn’t a thing at all. “Just being there for someone when he or she needs you makes a lot of difference. It doesn’t just add a smile to their face, but life to their heart, and days to their lifetime.”

Innocent learned it by staying with someone everyone else had walked away from. He didn’t have much to give materially — just himself, his time, and words of comfort — and found that was worth far more than he’d thought.

He could give it because he knew the ache of being abandoned himself. Presence works like that: the one who has felt the loneliness is often the one who can end someone else’s.