The Courage to Stay, Not Just Explain…

The Courage to Stay, Not Just Explain…

Note from Juan Carlos (Pastor Los): I’ve invited several writers from our church to contribute to this site so they can share what the Lord has placed on their hearts. The goal is to encourage those in need and to prompt thoughtful reflection. I’ve known Garrett for many years, and I’m thankful for his contribution here at Real Talk Pastor.

The church is very good at explaining suffering.

We can quote Romans 8 without looking down. We can articulate God’s sovereignty with precision. Many of us were trained—well trained—to defend the goodness of God in a broken world.

And yet, when suffering becomes personal—when it has a name and a face—we often find ourselves strangely unsure of what to do.

We know what to say, but we are less practiced in how to stay. This is not a failure of theology. It is a failure of formation.

At my church, we recently spent several months studying the book of Job—a book filled with suffering and humanity’s response to it. The study was both fruitful and uncomfortable. Fruitful, because we are blessed to have men and women who handle Scripture with care and faithfulness. Uncomfortable, because many of us—including myself—became less self-assured when a theology of suffering was applied to our own lives, rather than to this story in our favorite book.

I work in a field filled with death and dying, so I like to think I have a grasp on how we are called to suffer well. At the same time, I was navigating a divorce while studying Job, and it became evident that I did not always “suffer well” as I went through it. This wasn’t for lack of desire—it was because understanding often outpaces the ability to embody.

Most pastors and Christians I know were trained to interpret pain long before they were trained to inhabit it. We learned how to preach through suffering before we learned how to sit with it. We were taught answers and defense, not presence.

And to be clear: doctrine matters. Good theology matters. The church must never abandon its convictions in the face of suffering. But there is a difference between holding the truth and hiding behind it. Our theology should turn us into compassionate witnesses, not insulate us from the pain in front of us.

Job’s friends are a cautionary tale. For seven days, they do the holiest thing recorded in Scripture: they sit in silence. They weep. They remain. It is only when they begin to explain Job’s suffering that they mess up. Their theology was not entirely wrong—it was simply mistimed, misapplied, and disconnected from love.

The problem was not that they spoke falsely about God. The problem was that they spoke instead of staying human.

Jesus Himself exposes this tension most clearly.

At Lazarus’ tomb (John 11), Jesus knows exactly what is about to happen. He knows resurrection is coming. He even states, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it” (John 11:4 ESV). And still—He weeps.

He does not offer a lecture. He does not end the conversation and rush to move on. He does not correct Mary and Martha’s theology. He weeps.

If anyone had the right to explain suffering away, it was Jesus. Instead, He dignified it with tears and recognized that, even when there is purpose in suffering, the suffering itself still sucks and deserves acknowledgment, presence, and recognition.

Surprisingly, in my own work at the bedside of the dying, I have rarely heard people ask why when death is imminent. What they ask—sometimes silently—is who will stay. Who will sit with them and just be. Who will listen without reframing. Who will bear witness to their suffering without trying to redeem it prematurely.

And yet, the church—especially churches that value theological clarity—often rushes toward meaning-making too quickly. We offer resurrection language to people who are still bleeding. We forget that resurrection only comes after death, and that there were three days of silence between the cross and the resurrection.

This is particularly costly in urban contexts, where suffering is not episodic but chronic. Our church is in a neighborhood where violence, poverty, addiction, incarceration, displacement, divorce, and death are not abstract concepts—they are the neighbors next door. In these spaces, credibility is not built through eloquence but through endurance and presence.

People are not asking if the church has the right answers. They are asking if the church will still be there tomorrow. Weep with those who weep, right?

The quiet truth is this: suffering dismantles our pastoral illusions—illusions of control, competence, and usefulness. It exposes the limits of our training and the thinness of our words. That exposure can either keep us isolated in ivory towers of theological discussion—or it can make us human.

Paul does not say we comfort others with explanations but “with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (2 Corinthians 1). Comfort is not transferred through information. It is a hug. Not a lecture.

We do not need to abandon our theology in moments of suffering. But it should slow us down rather than speed us up. It should make us quiet rather than defensive intellectuals. It should form us into people who are not afraid to feel and sit with those feelings until the Lord Himself heals, not our thoughts about the situation.

The gospel is not primarily an answer to suffering. It is the presence of God within it. If we cannot sit in it, remain with it, and be changed by it—then our explanations will always sound hollow, no matter how true they are.

Faithfulness, in the end, may look less like having the right words and more like having the courage to stay when there are none.

And that, perhaps, is the kind of church our wounded world is actually longing for.

About the Author: Garrett Drew Ellis is a writer, end of life doula, chaplain in training and father. Most importantly, he is a believer and disciple. A student at MetroBaltimore Seminary and a member at Christ Alone Fellowship in Lancaster, PA, his desire is to present the Father of Mercies and the God of all Comfort to all who might hear. Very soon, you can find him and his work at http://www.thegoac.org