This guide began as a study for pastors. It was drawn from more than twenty-five books on suffering, grief, and comfort, all listed at the end. But the more the material was studied, the clearer one thing became. The ministry of comfort was never meant to belong to pastors alone.
Paul wrote it plainly, Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).
That is written to a church, not to a clergy. The command in Galatians is the same, Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2). One another. Not the pastor alone.
Somebody in your life is hurting right now. A neighbour. A coworker. A friend from church. A family member who has stopped answering messages. You want to help. You are afraid of making it worse. This guide is written for you.
Part One: Show Up
When we meet someone in catastrophic loss, chronic pain, or deep depression, the instinct is to do something or saysomething that takes the pain away. We want to offer a verse, a solution, a silver lining. But the deepest comfort does not begin with words. It begins with presence.
Suffering is not a question demanding an answer. It is not a problem waiting for a solution. It is a mystery that demands a presence.
Overcome the fear of showing up
The first thing to defeat is your own dread. We shrink back from hurting people because we feel inadequate. We are afraid of saying the wrong thing. We are afraid of making them cry. So we do the worst thing possible. We stay away. Or we send that vague line, "Call me if you need anything," which quietly places the whole burden back on the person least able to carry it.
Go with no agenda. Grieving people do not want to be somebody's project. Nancy Guthrie puts the whole assignment in five words. Show up and shut up.
Distance is not the obstacle you think it is. Pete Greig once travelled four thousand miles to Wales to spend five minutes with a suffering friend. His conclusion was that God is present in the middle of suffering because His people are present in it.
The risk is worth it. Grieving people are like burn victims. They are raw, and they are easily rubbed the wrong way. You may occasionally say the wrong thing. Say it anyway. A clumsy word from someone who came is far better than the deafening silence of everyone who did not, because silence tells the sufferer that their pain does not matter.
Learn the rule of the ash heap
We are terrified of awkward silence, so we fill it with nervous chatter, quoted verses, and advice nobody requested. True comfort requires you to sit still.
Job's friends began beautifully, So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great (Job 2:13). Those seven silent days were the most helpful hours they ever gave him. Their ruin came the moment they opened their mouths to explain.
Sitting feels useless. It is not. Joe Bayly, after burying his second son, described two visitors. One talked constantly about God and about hope beyond the grave, and Bayly wished he would leave. Another sat quietly for an hour, listened, prayed simply, and rose to go. Bayly wrote that he was comforted, and that he hated to see the man leave.
If words fail you, use something else. When Beethoven heard that a friend's son had died, he hurried to the house with nothing to say. He sat at the piano, poured out half an hour of grief through the keys, and left. His friend said afterward that no visit ever meant more.
Listen to understand, not to fix
You cannot heal a broken heart with logic. You can only love it.
Do not treat the sufferer like a puzzle. Resist the urge to hand over a doctor's name, a book title, or a spiritual remedy. Warren Wiersbe said it well. Do not try to explain everything. Explanations never heal a broken heart.
Expect raw and untidy words. Hurting people say things that are chaotic, exaggerated, and sometimes flatly untrue. They may say they hate themselves. They may say they are angry at God. Do not pounce. Do not correct. When Ronald Dunn and his wife sat with a woman crushed by depression, they offered no solutions. They said only that they understood, because their own son had walked that road. She nearly came out of her seat with relief. She had found somebody who understood, and suddenly she was not alone.
Ask gentler questions. "How are you?" forces a person to grade their own progress. "How are you doing today?" or "What is your grief like these days?" tells them you already know this is a daily battle.
Weep with those who weep
We assume we must be the strong one. We hold back our tears so we do not add to their burden. Scripture says otherwise, Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep (Romans 12:15).
Grieving people feel they are hauling an impossible load. When you cry with them, you pick up one of the buckets and carry it yourself.
Follow the Saviour. He stood at the tomb of Lazarus knowing full well what He was about to do. He saw Mary's agony. He groaned in His spirit, and then came the shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept (John 11:35). Those tears are the holiest sympathy this world has ever seen. Your tears do something similar. They tell the sufferer that what they lost was worth crying over.
If they apologise for crying, refuse the apology. Tell them their tears are beautiful, and that tears reveal how deeply a person loves.
Become the hands of an invisible God
In the darkest valleys, believers often feel abandoned by God. They cannot read. They cannot pray. Heaven feels shut.
A study at the University of Wisconsin asked volunteers to hold their bare feet in buckets of ice water. When a caring companion stayed in the room, people endured the cold roughly twice as long as those who suffered alone. Presence multiplies endurance.
When God seems silent, He sends His people. Sit with them, weep with them, and carry their load without preaching at them, and you become the tangible proof that God has not walked away. One widow said it simply. It was the love of her church that proved the love of God when heaven seemed quiet.
Part Two: What Not to Say
Job called his friends miserable comforters (Job 16:2). They earned the title honestly. Their trouble was not a lack of theology. It was a surplus of it, delivered at the wrong moment, in the wrong tone, to a man they had already decided was guilty.
We wound people the same way. Here are the traps.
Do not play the comparison game
We want to relate, so we dig through our own history for something similar. Then we say the sentence that helps nobody. "I know exactly what you are going through."
You do not. Telling a person with crippling nerve pain about the time you had tennis elbow only trivialises a reality you have never touched. Unless you are Jesus, you do not know exactly how they feel.
Do not rank losses either. Jerry Sittser lost his mother, his wife, and his daughter in a single accident, and he still warns against asking whose loss is worse. Never begin a sentence with, "At least it is not as bad as." To the person in front of you, this is the worst thing that has ever happened. Treat it that way.
Do not push them to move on and cheer up
Lingering sadness makes us uncomfortable, so we press people to get over it. That pressure is not kindness. It is our own discomfort wearing a smile.
Job's friends urged him toward cheerful denial. Forget the complaint, change the face, put on good cheer. It was terrible counsel then and it is terrible counsel now.
Give them room. A traumatised person cannot snap back to business as usual on your timetable. They need time and space to doubt, to cry, to question, and to work through emotions that will sometimes look extreme to you.
Beware the prosperity offer
The cruelest thing you can imply is that a person suffers because their faith is too small, or that God will heal the moment they get right.
Zophar tried it on Job. Put away your sin, prepare your heart, and God will restore everything. It sounded devout. It was false.
God is not a vending machine. He is not obligated to remove pain in exchange for the correct spiritual formula. Teach a sufferer otherwise and you have set a bomb under their faith, timed to detonate the day the healing does not come.
Do not be the fix-it person
Do not offer guaranteed cures, unsolicited medical advice, or a book that promises a quick recovery. You are there to carry a burden, not to serve as their physician or their prosecuting attorney.
And do not answer questions God has left unanswered. When we try to connect the dots of providence where God has kept silent, we do exactly what He rebuked in Job's friends, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? (Job 38:2).
Right truth, wrong season
There is a vast difference between the intellectual problem of evil and a bleeding heart in your kitchen. The first wants an argument. The second needs a friend.
It is true that God is sovereign. It is true that He refines us through affliction. But truth out of season lands like an attack. Quote And we know that all things work together for good (Romans 8:28) to a mother in the first week after burying her child, and she will hear an accusation rather than a comfort.
Let the shock pass. The deep theology of suffering is precious, and there will be a right time for it, usually months later, usually when they ask. Wait for the door to open. Do not kick it in.
Part Three: Care for the Whole Person
We tend to offer only spiritual solutions. A verse, a prayer, a call to repent. But God did not make people out of soul alone. Catastrophic loss and chronic illness batter the body and the mind as surely as they batter the spirit.
Remember that a person is a double being
Charles Spurgeon suffered both physical gout and crushing depression, and he insisted that man is a double being. Body and soul are bound together. Physical illness and chemical imbalance will inevitably drag the spirit down with them.
Refuse the either-or. Zack Eswine observes that both the scientific and the spiritual camps are tempted to seize one explanation at the expense of the other. Do not make a hurting person choose between medicine and faith. Account for both.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a physician before he was a preacher, taught that God made us with mind, heart, and will in balance. When the body is entirely depleted, the mind and heart cannot process spiritual truth. Feed the body first.
Encourage the natural helps
Before you prescribe a fast or a study plan, ask a simpler question. Why is this person in this condition? Very often the honest answer is exhaustion.
Look at Elijah. Suicidal, spent, hiding under a juniper tree. Before God gave the prophet a single word of correction, He gave him sleep and a hot meal, twice (1 Kings 19:5-8). Sometimes the most spiritual counsel you can give is that they take a nap.
Watch for the wrong medicines too. When people are weary and cannot face the day, alcohol and other numbing agents become very attractive. Guide them away gently, and without a lecture.
Take the shame out of getting help
Many believers feel guilty for seeing a doctor about severe anxiety or clinical depression. They have been told that medication signals weak faith. That idea has done enormous damage, and you can help undo it.
Physicians, counsellors, and medicine are instruments of God's common grace. Telling a person with biological depression to simply pray more is not spiritual. It is dangerous. Support the medical caregiver rather than competing with him.
Lloyd-Jones compared recovery to physiotherapy on a diseased joint. Passive waiting is not enough. Healing requires movement, treatment, and time. Encourage them to use every tool God has made available, and pray that God blesses the means.
Give tangible, menial service
Hurting people need help far more than they need instruction. Grief is physically exhausting, and the ordinary duties of life pile up fast.
Do not wait to be asked. Grieving people have no energy left to delegate. Mow the lawn. Take the laundry. Drop off groceries and leave. Drive the children to practice. Show up with a meal already made and containers they never have to return.
Dave Furman asks caregivers a piercing question. Are you too embarrassed to be treated like a servant? Most of us will do a menial job cheerfully as long as somebody thanks us for it. Being treated as a servant is another matter. Yet the Lord Jesus washed feet, and The servant is not greater than his lord (John 13:16). Roll up your sleeves and expect nothing back.
Part Four: Help Them Reframe the Question
Suffering is never neutral ground. It is a battlefield, and the traps are laid on the inside.
Name the traps
Paul David Tripp identifies three that quietly destroy a believer.
Denial. When people are exhausted and barely holding on, they start telling themselves it is not that bad. Denial does not confront reality. It dodges it. That is not faith. Remind them that Jesus walked this road and knew real agony, so they are free to be weak and honest with God. No performance required.
Discouragement. Discouragement is dangerous because it breeds a lifestyle of complaint, and complaint eventually paralyses. The praying stops. The Bible closes. Church attendance thins out and then ends. The remedy is not a demand for silence. It is a slow rebuilding of praise.
Envy. Sufferers look sideways at everybody whose life appears smooth and painless. Envy whispers that God is unfair and is holding out on them. Left alone, it dismantles their ability to trust Him at all.
Lead them away from "Why?"
The first question out of every sufferer is "Why me?" It is a natural question. It is also a dead end. God rarely explains the reasons behind an individual sorrow, and a person who demands an explanation before they will move stays trapped in the past.
Here is the sentence worth giving them. God does not answer every "Why." He gives assurance to every "Who." We may never learn the reason. We do know the character of the God walking through the fire beside us.
Move them toward "What now?"
"What now?" turns the eyes off the self and onto God. It asks what He may be doing rather than why He allowed it. That single change of vocabulary turns suffering from a random cruelty into part of a design.
Ronald Dunn illustrates it from the wilderness. Israel arrived at Marah, where the waters were bitter, and the people became bitter with them. Elim was not far. Twelve wells and seventy palm trees, just up the road (Exodus 15:23-27). Your friend may be standing at Marah today, tasting nothing but bitterness. "What now?" is the confession that there is an Elim ahead, that sweetness returns, and that life can be good again.
The final version of this is Joseph, standing in front of the brothers who sold him, But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good (Genesis 50:20). When a sufferer can say that, the future opens up in front of them.
Shrink the next step
Standing at the edge of a shattered life, people are overwhelmed by the size of the future. Break it down.
Robert J. Morgan writes that God never gives guidance for two steps at once. Take one step, and light arrives for the next.
So ask a small question. What is the one thing you need to do next? It may be laundry. It may be a phone call. It may be paying a bill, going back to work, or getting out of bed. The problem is always bigger than what can be fixed today, and God has never asked anybody to clear a building in a single leap. Doing the next right thing is how a person keeps moving on daily grace.
Part Five: Give Them Back the Language of Lament
The church has largely lost its vocabulary for sorrow. So when tragedy strikes, believers carry a second burden on top of the first. Guilt. They assume that despair, sadness, or anger at God proves their faith has failed, so they paste on a smile and reach for a cliché.
You can lift that burden.
Let them be honest
Sufferers think they must tidy up a prayer before God will accept it. Give them permission to bring the mess.
Pete Greig suggests an exercise. Write a prayer, a song, or a poem to God in the simplest and most honest words you have, and ban every religious-sounding phrase you would not use in ordinary speech. God already knows what is in the heart. Hiding it accomplishes nothing.
Remind them that more than a third of the Psalms are laments. God put those raw prayers in the Bible on purpose. He was telling His people that the darkness is real, that others have walked it, and that He welcomes tears.
Explain that lament is worship, not rebellion
There is a crucial difference. Despair walks away from God. Lament reaches for Him in the dark.
Timothy Keller notes that Job complained bitterly and cursed the day he was born, and did all of it in prayer. He complained to God, and he struggled before God. A person who screams at heaven in grief is displaying a desperate kind of faith, because they still believe Somebody is listening.
Vance Havner said that some of our toughest battles are with God Himself. Jacob wrestled in the dark and came away with a new name and a limp. That struggle is not apostasy. It is often the very process God uses to change a person.
If they confess they are too hurt to love God right now, give them Simone Weil's counsel. If you cannot love God, want to love Him, or at least ask Him to help you love Him.
Do not force the turn
Michael Card observes that nearly every biblical lament reaches a moment where the writer crosses a line. In Hebrew it is often a single word. But. Yet. The psalm pivots from the writer's pain to God's character, and everything changes.
Card also warns that this is a form, not a formula. You cannot manufacture the turn on somebody else's behalf, and you must never demand it. Pushing a person to praise before the Spirit has done His work only teaches them to fake it. When the turn does come, let them stay there a long while, resting in the presence of God.
Point them to the Man of Sorrows
Christianity is unique in this. We worship a God with wounds.
He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3). He sweat as it were great drops of blood in a garden. He cried out in abandonment on a cross. That is why He is a High Priest who understands their particular sorrow rather than sorrow in the abstract.
Card traces our suffering through gardens. The fall in Eden. The surrender of Gethsemane. The grief outside the garden tomb. When your friend is wrestling in their own dark garden, they are walking a path their Saviour walked first.
And lament has an expiry date. One day we pass through the gates of the New Jerusalem and hear Him say, Behold, I make all things new (Revelation 21:5). We will lay our laments down there, and forget for ever the vocabulary of our pain.
Part Six: Help Them Build a Bedrock of Trust
When the first shock fades, the sufferer is left standing in the rubble, questioning everything they believed about God. Emotional support alone will not hold that weight. Eventually they need theology under their feet, and you can help them lay it.
Discipline is not punishment
The most crippling lie a sufferer believes is that God is punishing them for past sin. They feel the rod, so they assume the Father is angry.
Take them to the cross. Jesus Christ absorbed the full punitive wrath of God for their sins. That account is settled. God will never punish His child punitively again.
Then take them to Hebrews 12. The argument there is that God deals with us this way because we are sons. Lloyd-Jones taught sufferers to say it out loud. God is in this, and God is doing this because I am His child, and it is being done for my good.
Show them the furnace as well. The old hymn puts God's purpose in the fire beautifully. He designs the dross to be consumed and the gold to be refined. Self-reliance burns off. Idols burn off. Endurance and wisdom remain.
Teach them to preach to their own soul
Prolonged suffering means a mind under constant attack from its own fears.
Lloyd-Jones diagnosed the problem precisely. Much of our spiritual depression comes from listening to ourselves instead of talking to ourselves. The psalmist did the opposite, Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God (Psalm 42:11). He interrogated his own despair and then preached to it.
Lloyd-Jones also warned against nursing the sore joint. When a joint hurts, we protect it and stop moving it, and it stiffens. People do this spiritually, curling up around self-pity and refusing to walk. The command of Hebrews is the opposite, Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees (Hebrews 12:12). Encourage them to stand up and start walking again. Obedience is a tonic to feeble faith.
Give them an anchor, not a wish
In a crisis, people hang their hope on an outcome. The tumour will shrink. The prodigal will come home. The money will come through. If hope is tethered to an outcome, it shatters when God says no.
Nancy Guthrie points to Hebrews 6, Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast (Hebrews 6:19). Biblical hope is not willpower aimed at a preferred result. It is something solid to hold when circumstances change hourly.
Drive their roots down into the promises of God. A tree without deep roots goes over in the first strong wind. And remind them that God's final answer to suffering is usually not an explanation, but a presence, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee (Hebrews 13:5).
Part Seven: The Wounded Healer
The goal is not merely survival. God intends to take the valley and do something with it.
Stop waiting for the old life to return
The cruelest expectation a sufferer carries, often handed to them by the church, is that they will one day recover and be exactly who they were before.
Jerry Sittser puts it starkly. We recover from broken limbs. We do not recover from amputations. Catastrophic loss is an amputation of the soul. The familiar self is gone, and there is no walking back to it.
He offers another picture. Before a tragedy, a relationship is a motion picture, growing and changing. When someone dies, the film stops and becomes a photograph. Sufferers exhaust themselves trying to live inside the photograph. Your job is to help them start their own film running again.
Vaneetha Risner adds a warning. Look backward long enough and you will remember a past that was never as perfect as it now appears, and you will miss what is actually in front of you. The new road is bumpy and unfamiliar. It is also the road God sovereignly chose, which makes it the only one worth walking.
Aim for an enlarged soul
If recovery is the wrong target, what is the right one? Not a return to normal. A larger soul.
Grief is often treated as a set of stages to get past. Real growth goes underneath the stages, into our mortality and our absolute dependence on God. Suffering strips away vanity, burns off self-reliance, and sorts out what actually matters. When a person begins asking "What now?", they are already growing, and that proves their future has not been destroyed.
Let their scars become their credentials
Return to where this guide began, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God (2 Corinthians 1:4). The comfort was never meant to stop with them.
Spurgeon said God leads some believers along rough roads to train them as hardy mountaineers, so they can climb after His sheep who are lost in the craggy places. A person who has crossed the country of despair knows the terrain. They know where the ground gives way. They know how to pull somebody out of the marsh, because somebody once pulled them out.
There is a beautiful irony here. Those who have suffered deeply are the ones best equipped to save. And when a hurting believer finally turns outward to comfort somebody else, the sting of their own sorrow begins to lose its edge. Their scars become their credentials.
The best is still ahead
Anchor everything to the end of the story. This world is not all we have, and what God does in the furnace now is preparing us for a destination we have not seen yet.
Joni Eareckson Tada, paralysed since she was a teenager, defines her future glory in a single sentence. It is the time after her death here when she will be on her feet, dancing. That is not sentiment. That is the promise, Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing (Psalm 30:11).
Marah is real. Elim is closer than it looks. And the day is coming when the presence of God crashes into history, all things are made new, and we forget for ever the syntax of our sorrows.
A Quick Reference
Say this
- "I do not know what to say, but I am here."
- "How are you doing today?"
- "What is your grief like these days?"
- "Tell me about him."
- "Your tears are beautiful. They show how deeply you love."
- "I am bringing supper on Thursday. Do not cook."
Do not say this
- "I know exactly how you feel."
- "At least..."
- "Everything happens for a reason."
- "God needed another angel."
- "All things work together for good." (Not yet. Not now.)
- "Call me if you need anything."
Sources
Presence and silence. Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?; Nancy Guthrie, What Grieving People Wish You Knew; Pete Greig, God on Mute; Vaneetha Risner, The Scars That Have Shaped Me; Dave Furman, Being There; Warren Wiersbe, Be Patient (Job); J. R. Miller, To Whom the Lord Loveth; Ronald Dunn, When Heaven Is Silent.
What not to say. Dave Furman, Being There; Jerry L. Sittser, A Grace Disguised; Christopher Ash, Job: The Wisdom of the Cross; Eric Ortlund, Piercing Leviathan; John S. Feinberg, The Many Faces of Evil.
The whole person. Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows; D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure; Dave Furman, Being There.
Reframing the questions. Paul David Tripp, Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense; Ronald Dunn, When Heaven Is Silent; Robert J. Morgan, The Red Sea Rules; David Powlison, God's Grace in Your Suffering.
Lament. Michael Card, A Sacred Sorrow; Pete Greig, God on Mute; Timothy Keller, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering; Vance Havner, Though I Walk Through the Valley.
Sovereign trust. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression; Timothy Keller, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering; Nancy Guthrie, Holding on to Hope; David Powlison, God's Grace in Your Suffering; Paul David Tripp, Suffering.
Reconstructed meaning. Jerry L. Sittser, A Grace Disguised; Vaneetha Risner, The Scars That Have Shaped Me; Charles Spurgeon, as compiled in Zack Eswine, Spurgeon's Sorrows; Joni Eareckson Tada.
Scripture quotations are from the Authorized King James Version.
