Bishop Charlie Haynes Jr. reached his answer after a fight for justice that ended without justice. What freed him was an old adage he repeated to a Jude 3 Project panel on power and pain: “the cure for pain is in the pain.” That is the honest answer to anyone hoping that control will finally make the hurt stop. Arranging the world around you can quiet the noise for a while. The wound sits underneath the arrangements, and healing begins when you turn and face it, with God and with people who will stay beside you.
Said quickly, that answer can sound harsh. It deserves to be said slowly, with the reasons behind it and the limits around it.
Why the Grip Feels Necessary
The reach for control usually starts with injury. Moderator David Bailey framed the panel’s question with a point he drew from a book by Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project: “when we feel powerless, we find tools that will give us control and help us curate the life we want to live.” Powerlessness comes first in that sentence. Control is the response to it.
So the person who runs every calendar, rehearses every conversation and manages every relationship is often someone who learned that the world is unsafe. A parent let them down, or a church, or an employer, or their own body. Each new rule promises that the next blow will miss. The urge deserves compassion before it gets correction.
Some of the most respectable forms of control are the hardest to spot. Rahel Tesfamariam, an author whose book is about transforming pain into power, described how chasing the American dream can turn into an endless grind. People “obtain this obsession with productivity where we wake up every day toiling and grinding just like our ancestors did,” she said. She tied the way out directly to healing: returning to simpler things like joy, love and intimacy. Busyness can look like strength while it keeps a person from ever stopping long enough to notice what hurts.
Latasha Morrison, founder and CEO of Be the Bridge, named the illusion underneath all of it. Speaking about her own leadership, she said, “I can think that I’m in control. But ultimate control, when you’re dealing with power, is it being surrendered to God.” The feeling of control and the reality of it are two separate things. Much of the exhaustion people carry lives in the gap between them.
What Bishop Haynes Actually Let Go Of
Haynes described years of pastoring in the Bay Area and standing on the front lines after the killing of Oscar Grant, working for some semblance of justice that, as he put it, they never really received. The outcome left him with a pain he called unsettling. It also left him with a question he refused to soften:
“why do we, as people of color have to always be the ones suffering without any sense of relief?”
That question is a lament. He mentioned wrestling with the claim that suffering is redemptive, and he gave no sign that the claim settled things for him. What changed him was the adage, which he explained this way: “once you release the ability or the idea that you can control your pain and begin to face your pain and live in your pain, that’s when the healing started to happen.”
Read closely, he is describing the release of a belief. The pain stayed. What he set down was the conviction that he could master it. That reverses what many people expect. We tend to picture healing as finally getting the pain under control. Haynes describes control as the thing that kept the pain from healing, because controlling something means holding it at arm’s length, and a wound held at arm’s length never gets tended.
He then told what happened years later in Oakland. After another act of violence, a group of angry people wanted to target churches. They could not deal with their pain, he said, and it was about to become harm to others. His conclusion: “we had to help them face their own pain to deal with the idea of letting go control and understanding that healing is actually living with your pain.”
Two details in that story carry the argument. First, unfaced pain stayed volatile and was close to spilling onto innocent people. Second, the facing happened with help. Nobody in his account healed alone in a dark room. Others stood with them and helped them look.
What Is Still Yours to Do
The fair objection comes here. Responsible people plan, set boundaries, protect their children and walk away from bad situations. Surely some control is good.
Haynes agreed, and he drew the line precisely: “there’s only two things that you can control, is your intention and your posture. Everything else is not up to you.” Then he added, “If you understand how to control your effort and control your attitude towards your context, then that’s the greatest freedom that you can have.”
This is a smaller, more honest kind of control. You decide how you will show up and what you will aim at. Other people’s choices, whether a system changes and whether the past repeats itself belong to a different list. Much of our pain comes from filing the second list under the first.
Morrison gave a concrete case from a church job where she had a seat at the table but little voice. She set herself a limit: if she was still having the same conversations in year three that she had in year one, she would leave. While she stayed, she used the gifts she had. She also knew where her reach ended: “But I can’t control whether someone listens or not.” For her, leaving was an exercise of the part that was truly hers.
Mike Kelsey, a pastor at McLean Bible Church, took the same distinction into the deepest kind of injury. He recalled Fannie Lou Hamer confronting a man who had brutally abused her by asking whether he ever thought about the day he would meet God. Kelsey’s point was that belief in God’s final judgment gave her a way to act without carrying everything. That hope “was never just a wait for that to all work out,” he said. It “enables us to do what is ours to do.” Hamer kept advocating for the oppressed for the rest of her life, and in Kelsey’s telling she could do it without becoming cruel “because she trusted vengeance wasn’t hers, it was God’s.”
Kelsey linked that posture to Jesus, and the text supports the link. Peter describes Christ this way:
“Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously” (1 Peter 2:23).
The verse describes real suffering. Jesus is wronged, and he hurts. What he does with the wrong is hand the final verdict to the Father. That is the release Haynes was describing, seen in its fullest form.
The panel, then, asks hurting people to keep acting. It also asks them to stop requiring their actions to guarantee that they will never be hurt again, since no human effort can carry that weight.
Facing Pain Is Different From Staying in Harm
“Face your pain” can be misused, and the misuse does real damage. Told carelessly, it can sound like an instruction to remain where someone is hurting you, or to reopen a wound every day with no one beside you.
Neither follows from what these speakers said. Morrison’s own story included leaving. If someone is harming you now, facing the pain includes facing the truth that you need to be safe and acting on it. Telling the truth about pain never requires staying close to the person causing it.
If you are in danger, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.
Rumination is also a different thing. Replaying the same hurt over and over can become one more control strategy, an attempt to master the memory by rehearsing it. Haynes chose the word live. He meant letting the pain be present and real, in company, so it could be cared for.
That company can include trained help. The Jude 3 Project holds that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith and that God works through trained counselors and clinicians. For many people, facing pain will mean sitting with a counselor who can help them look at what they could never look at alone. That can be one of the ways prayer gets answered.
Finally, facing pain never requires calling it good. Haynes wrestled with the claim that suffering redeems, and Scripture itself makes room for complaint. Psalm 13 opens with words addressed straight to God:
“How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1).
The psalmist neither manages his pain nor explains it away. He brings it, unedited, to the One he believes can hear. The Bible’s own prayer book shows what facing pain with God sounds like, and it sounds like honesty.
What Holds You When You Loosen Your Grip
Beneath most of the gripping is a fear: if I let go, nothing will catch me. The panel offered no technique for that fear. Its answer was trust in a God who already holds what we cannot.
That trust tends to be practiced in small pieces. Morrison was describing the hardships of leading work against systemic racism, something she called bigger than herself, when she explained what kept her going. Surrendering it to God let her do the next right thing in small chunks: “one day at a time, one moment at a time, one second at a time helps me to persevere and endure.” Her context was leadership, but the method is ordinary enough for anyone carrying something too large.
Scripture does not promise that pain will lift on a schedule, and no honest reading of these speakers does either. What they offer is sturdier than a promise of quick relief. You were never meant to hold the whole weight, and the place you are most afraid to look is a place God is willing to enter with you.
A First Step
Start privately. Write down the things you grip hardest: the schedule, the image, the person you keep watching, the conversation you rehearse. Beside each one, ask Haynes’s question: Is this my intention and my posture, or is it something that was never up to me?
Some of your effort will belong on the first list, and it should continue. Some of it will turn out to be an attempt to make sure you are never hurt again. Take one item from that second group and say it to God in words as plain as Psalm 13, unpolished and unresolved. If it is too heavy to hold alone, ask someone to hold it with you: a trusted friend, a pastor who will listen without rushing you, or a counselor trained for exactly this. That is what it means to face the pain instead of managing it, and according to the man who learned it the hard way, it is where healing starts.