When someone is suffering, the most helpful thing you can usually offer first is not an explanation. It is your presence: staying close, taking the pain as seriously as they do, and letting the case for God’s goodness wait until they are ready to ask for it. That order matters. A true answer given at the wrong moment can land as a dismissal. A friend who stays can earn the trust that lets the answer be heard later.
This guide is for anyone who has watched a correct answer about evil make someone’s pain worse, or who has been on the receiving end of one. It draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields and Dr. Leo Percer, an associate professor of biblical studies who directs a doctoral program in theology and apologetics. You can work through it alone over a few sittings, or with a group in one longer session or two shorter ones. Nothing here asks you to tell your own story. Every reflection is optional, and a group should agree at the start that what is shared stays in the room.
Start with what you have seen
Before reading anything else, take a few minutes with one memory. It can be from your own life or from watching someone else. Think of a time a person in pain was given an answer that was technically true and still hurt. You do not need to write down names or details. Just notice two things: what was said, and what the person seemed to need instead.
If you are in a group, the facilitator can invite people to describe the kind of answer rather than the situation. Someone might mention being told that everything happens for a reason, without explaining what the everything was. That keeps the conversation useful without pressing anyone to disclose more than they want.
Percer does not treat this as a small problem. Asked which apologetic question he finds hardest, he named the problem of evil, and he was candid about why. “I think there’s good sound, apologetic answers to it, quite frankly,” he said, and then: “but that’s the most challenging to me because it’s real life.” He is not doubting the arguments. He is saying that holding a good argument does not make the question stop hurting.
Seven days on the ground
The book of Job is the Bible’s longest look at what happens when well-meaning people try to explain suffering to someone in the middle of it. Read Job 2:11-13 slowly, then skim the opening lines of Job 4 and read Job 42:7-9.
Job’s three friends arrive after hearing about his losses. Before they say anything, they do something remarkable. Job 2:13 records it: “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.” The reason given is simple. They saw how great the grief was, and they let it set the terms.
Then they start talking, and the next many chapters are their speeches. Job is a wisdom book written largely as poetry, and its long dialogues record what the friends said without endorsing all of it. Many of their statements sound like things Christians still say: God is just, people reap what they sow, the righteous are not forsaken. Some of those lines are true as general principles. The problem is what the friends do with them. They apply general truths to a particular man in order to explain his suffering, and they are wrong about him.
At the end, God tells Eliphaz that he and his two friends have not spoken of God what is right, as Job has (Job 42:7). That verdict is worth sitting with. The man who complained, argued and pleaded with God is commended. The men who defended God’s justice with neat explanations are rebuked.
Two careful limits keep this reading honest. First, Job does not teach that comforters should never speak. Second, it does not teach that every explanation of suffering is false. What the story shows is narrower: silence and nearness came first and were good, and confident explanations of one person’s pain went beyond what the friends actually knew.
Observation prompt: Mark the point in the story where the friends stop sitting and start explaining. What changed? What did they claim to know that they did not know?
What Percer learned from a hospital bed
Percer tells a story that works almost like a modern Job in miniature. In seminary, he went through a painful breakup. His roommate Ed told him it seemed simple and he should just blow it off. Years later, Ed had a severe bicycle accident and, as Percer remembers it, spent close to six weeks in a coma before relearning how to walk and eat. During that recovery, Ed told Percer he now understood that a burden that is light for one person can be heavy for another.
Percer knew exactly what he could have said back. He could have told Ed to get out of bed and follow the doctor’s orders. Of that advice, Percer says, “that would’ve been accurate.” Then he names why it would still have been wrong: “He needed my agreement, not my correction.”
That sentence carries the whole guide. Accuracy is one property of a statement. Fit is another. Percer’s correction would have been true and badly timed, and in that room the timing would have done the damage. What he said instead was simple. “We’re here for each other,” he told Ed, and he credits that moment with deepening the friendship.
Percer draws a broader lesson from it: “The one size fits all, parameters don’t always work in real life situation.” Lisa Fields makes a similar point from her own wrestling with the question, observing that what feels like a satisfactory answer to one person “may be a discouraging answer to another person.” The same argument, offered in the same words, lands differently in different lives.
Percer also speaks from inside this, not only from the outside. His wife has multiple sclerosis. “I cry out to God a lot about her situation,” he says, and he admits that watching her live with a chronic disease “does raise the question of why.” Here is someone who trains doctoral students to answer the problem of evil, and he does not pretend the question goes quiet in his own home.
The test: is presence just a way to dodge the question?
Someone in your group may push back here, and it is a fair objection. If Christians respond to suffering mainly with hugs and casseroles, have they given up on the truth? Comfort can feel like a way of changing the subject when the subject gets hard.
Percer’s answer is not that the arguments are unimportant. He calls them sound. His answer is about order and about God’s own example. “We can always have a cup of coffee and a philosophical conversation about why bad stuff happens to good people,” he says. The conversation stays available. But in the moment of grief, he points somewhere else: “I realized that God faced the problem of evil head on.” He has in view Jesus, fully God and fully man, facing temptation in the wilderness and bearing sin on the cross. Percer says God did not treat evil as a puzzle. In his words, God “addressed it, and he endured it.”
John 11:35 makes the same point in two words: “Jesus wept.” In the narrative, he is at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, and the surrounding chapter shows he intends to raise him. Knowing the ending did not stop Jesus from entering the grief of the people around him. If he did not skip the tears, his followers have little reason to.
So presence is not the absence of theology. It acts on a theological conviction: that God came near to suffering rather than lecturing it from a distance. Percer’s hope is real too. He calls the resurrection “the promise that evil is short term is not long term.” He warns against using that hope as a quick fix, though, and describes the mistake of “trying to wave hope in the face of a person who just lost a loved one to sickness.” What that person needs, he says, is this: “what they need is your hugs. They need your love, they need your prayers. And that’s harder because that’s bearing a burden as opposed to answering a question.”
Galatians 6:2 names that harder task: “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.” And Romans 12:15 asks believers to “weep with them that weep.” Neither verse tells you what to explain. Both tell you where to stand.
One honest limit belongs here. The resurrection is a promise about how the story ends. It is not a promise that a particular illness will be healed or a particular loss reversed in this life. Percer prays for his wife and still watches her carry a chronic disease. Do not promise a suffering person what Scripture does not promise.
A practice: the order of care
This week, try putting the sequence into practice with one real person who is carrying something heavy. It might be a coworker after a death, a friend in a long illness, or a relative after a divorce. You do not need to tell them you are practicing anything. Work through these steps, and adjust them to the person.
- Show up before you speak. Send the text, make the visit, drop off the meal. Let your first contact carry no explanation at all.
- Agree with the weight. Find a way to say that what they are facing is hard, without comparing it to anything else. Resist the reflex to point out that it could be worse.
- Listen for the real question. Percer distinguishes people who want to win an argument from people who are genuinely seeking. Add a third possibility: people whose question is really grief. Notice which one you are hearing.
- Wait to be asked. If they want to talk about why God allows suffering, they will usually say so. When they do, answer with what Percer calls “gentleness and reverence,” and be willing to say you do not know.
- Know when care needs more than you. Grief can become depression. Presence is a gift, and it is not a substitute for a counselor or doctor. If someone speaks of not wanting to live, encourage them to call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and help them reach a trusted person today.
At the end of the week, notice privately which step was hardest for you. Many people find step two harder than step four, because agreeing with someone’s pain feels like conceding something. It is not. It is telling the truth about what they are carrying.
For groups, the facilitator might pair people to practice step two aloud with an invented situation, taking turns. The point is to hear the difference between telling someone that what they carry is heavy and telling them that God has a plan. Keep the situations fictional so no one has to rehearse their own loss.
Questions for discussion
- Job’s friends sat in silence for seven days and then spoke for many chapters. What do you think made the speeches worse than the silence?
- Percer says his advice to Ed “would’ve been accurate” and still wrong. Can you think of a true statement about God that you would not say to a grieving person? What makes it the wrong fit for that moment?
- Lisa Fields recalls taking away from Percer that “the arguments help, but it won’t necessarily take the pain that goes along with wrestling with the problem of evil.” If arguments help but do not remove pain, what are they for?
- When someone around you is hurting, is your first instinct to explain, to fix, or to stay? Where do you think that instinct came from?
- How does Jesus weeping at Lazarus’s tomb change the way you think about whether grief and faith can exist together?
- What would it look like, in a real conversation, to move from presence to the philosophical question later without it feeling like a bait and switch?
- Percer admits the question of why stays with him as he watches his wife live with a chronic disease. Does it help or trouble you that a trained apologist still asks it?
Before you go
Percer notes that “walking with each other through our own problems, through our own trials, was much more Christ-like than trying to offer easy solutions.” That does not retire the hard answers. It puts them in their place, which is usually later, at a table with coffee, after someone has learned they can trust you with their pain.
Carry one question into the coming week: when the person in front of you is hurting, what do they need from you in this moment, and is it the thing you most want to say?