How can I make a positive difference for someone who is suffering?

I know that I cannot fix another but by being a good listener hopefully, I can bring them some relief, some peace.

I keep an article called “The Inner Journey to Peace” in my personal journal and I do not know who wrote it but the author’s wisdom reminds me that I can best help our species by being willing to grow. Here’s the article for those who have time to read it:

I heard two children talking recently and realized what children need from us. I also realized that we are giving them just the opposite. In these two children I heard a microcosm of a world at war. I was talking to children, to innocents, and discovered that they were not innocent of our wars at all. Children are, in fact, their carriers. These two children knew just whom to hate. They were Irish children, and they resented Americans for their money and they hated the English for their history. “I hate them,” the one child said simply. “Me, too,” the other child agreed. And it was final. Schooled in someone else’s attitudes, they were impervious to any other one.
I saw in their faces all the children of the world. Hutu children and Serbian children and Palestinian children—children who were learning to hate Tutsi children and Bosnian children and Jewish children. They had all been born into a world of adult enemies, which they inherited along with the land under their feet. They had inherited the sins of their ancestors, and these sins festered like time-bombs within them, until years later those same weapons would surely go off in them, too.
Clearly, it is the lack of peace within ourselves that we are passing on to our children. If we do not have a rich inner life, we will want the tinsel and glitter of the world around us, and someone else’s money to get it, too. If we are insecure, we want to control others. If we are not at peace with our own life, we will make combat with the people around us. And if we do not learn to face our own struggles, we will never have compassion for the struggles of others.
Peace comes then when we learn what the Spirit is trying to teach us. When we feel rejected, we learn to seek the love above all loves in life. The Spirit is trying to teach us that when we are threatened by differences, we must come to realize that otherness is what stretches us beyond the narrowness of sameness. Instead, the desire for conquest comes when I try to shape the world to my own limited ideas of it. Then differences begin to be a threat rather than a promise of inspiring new possibilities or daring new experiences in life. Then, we set out to mold the rest of the world to our own small selves.
 
We rape the planet and make war against strangers and build our private little walls higher and higher and higher. To feel good about ourselves, we measure ourselves against other races and sexes, religions and cultures and call them lesser, call them enemy. We entomb ourselves in ourselves. So brown people remain the enemy for generation after generation, and white people stay a menace to us all our lives, and strong women threaten our world view, and the children of this generation become the adversaries of the next one.
The question is, then, what is the way to peace? Blaise Pascal wrote once, “The unhappiness of a person resides in one thing, to be unable to remain peacefully in a room.” It is silence and solitude, in other words, that brings us face to face with ourselves and the inner wars we must win to become truly peaceful people. Then, understanding myself I can understand everyone else as well.
There is a major social obstacle, however, to a development of a spirituality of peace in this time, in our time. The fear of silence and solitude loom like cliffs in the modern human psyche. And noise becomes what protects us from confronting ourselves. Quiet is only a phantom memory in this culture. Some generations among us have had no experience of silence at all.
Spiritual peace has been driven out by noise pollution, endemic and invasive. There is Muzak in the elevators and PA systems in the halls and people talking loudly on cellular phones everywhere—in offices and restaurants and kitchens and bedrooms—while the ubiquitous television spews talk devoid of thought and people shout above it about other things. There are loudspeakers in boats now so lakes are not safe. There are rock concerts in the countryside so the mountains are now not safe. There are telephones in bathrooms now so the shower is not safe. We don’t think anymore; we are wired for sound. Indeed, silence is the lost spiritual art of this society. Clamor and struggle have replaced it. But the great spiritual traditions are all clear about the role of silence in the spiritual life.
“Elder, give me a word,” a seeker begged the Desert Monastic.
And the holy one said, “My word to you is to go into your cell and your cell will teach you everything.”
That point is clear and simple:  All your answers are within you. And so are the questions. The questions no one can ask of you but you. Everything else in the spiritual life is mere formula, mere exercise. It is the questions and the answers that are ranting within each of us that, in the end, will grow our souls. Then we will get to know ourselves. Then we will blush at what we see.  Then we will lose our self-righteousness. And come to peace.
Silence does more than confront us with ourselves, however. Silence makes us wise. Knowing our own struggles, we come to reverence the struggles of others. Knowing our own failures, we are in awe of their successes, less quick to condemn, less intent on punishing, less certain of all our damaging certainties. Make no doubt about it, to listen for the voice of God, and to wrestle with the self is the nucleus of the spirituality of peace. It may, in fact, be what is most missing in a century saturated with information, sated with noise, smothered in struggle, but short on reflection, and aching for peace.
Once upon a time a disciple asked,  “How shall I experience my oneness with creation?”
And the elder answered, “By listening.”
 “But how am I to listen?” the disciples asked. And the elder taught, “Become an ear that pays attention to every thing the universe is saying. The moment you hear something you yourself are saying, stop.”
Peace will come when we expand our minds to listen to the noise within us that needs quieting and the wisdom from outside ourselves that needs to be learned. Then we will have something to leave the children besides hate, besides war, besides turmoil. Then peace will come.