We live in a world that places enormous value on fixing things. Got a problem? Find a solution. Someone is hurting? Offer advice. Someone is grieving? Find something comforting to say. We are so uncomfortable with helplessness that we sometimes mistake our inability to make things better for an inability to do anything at all. But what if the most important thing we can offer someone isn’t a solution? What if it’s simply our presence?
One of the things that strikes me about Jesus’ ministry is how often he stops. He stops for people who call out to him. He stops for people everyone else is trying to ignore. He stops for the sick, the grieving, the frightened, and the socially inconvenient. And sometimes, before anything else happens, Jesus listens. When blind Bartimaeus calls to him, Jesus asks, “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mark 10:51). It’s an extraordinary question, really. Jesus doesn’t begin by assuming he knows what this man needs. He gives him the dignity of answering for himself.
We don’t always extend that same courtesy. We rush to reassure people that everything will be fine, even when we have absolutely no grounds for making that promise. We tell grieving people that their loved one is in a better place, as though that somehow makes the empty chair at the dinner table less painful. We offer explanations for suffering, sometimes dressing them up as theology, because silence makes us uncomfortable. And in our eagerness to be helpful, we can end up asking the person who is hurting to manage our discomfort as well as their own.
The story of Job offers a rather pointed lesson here. When Job’s friends first arrive, they sit with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights without saying a word, because they see how great his suffering is. It’s arguably the finest thing they do in the entire book. Unfortunately, they eventually open their mouths. What follows is chapter after chapter of increasingly confident explanations about why Job is suffering and what he must have done to deserve it. Their need to make sense of his pain becomes more important than listening to the man who is actually experiencing it. Thousands of years later, we haven’t really improved on their technique.
There is a particular kind of arrogance hidden inside the assumption that every problem requires our intervention. Sometimes people aren’t asking us to repair their lives. They’re asking us to witness them. To hear what happened. To acknowledge that something was terrible, or unfair, or simply heartbreaking, without immediately searching for a silver lining. There is a profound difference between standing beside someone in their suffering and standing over them with instructions for how to get out of it.
This is where I think we sometimes misunderstand Christian ministry. We associate ministry with doing: preaching, teaching, feeding, organizing, visiting, raising money, running programs. All worthwhile things, certainly. But ministry also happens in the quiet spaces between those activities. In a kitchen where someone finally feels safe enough to cry. In a hospital room where there is nothing left to say. In a conversation where someone discovers they don’t have to pretend to be coping better than they are. None of these moments necessarily produces a measurable outcome. That doesn’t make them any less sacred.
And perhaps this is one of the more challenging implications of believing in the Incarnation. Christianity doesn’t simply proclaim a God who sends instructions from a comfortable distance. It proclaims a God who enters human life, with all its messiness, vulnerability, grief, and uncertainty. Emmanuel: God with us. Not God hovering above us with a checklist of improvements. Not God explaining away every tragedy. God with us. If that is the model of divine love we claim to follow, perhaps we ought to take the word with rather more seriously.
We cannot always make someone else’s pain disappear. We cannot undo a death, repair every relationship, or promise that tomorrow will be better. But we can resist the urge to turn away simply because we don’t know what to say. We can listen without preparing our response. We can allow people their anger, their questions, their tears, and even their silence. Sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is pull up a chair, put the kettle on, and stay awhile. Not because we have all the answers, but because nobody should have to face life’s hardest moments entirely alone.
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