This guide is for anyone who loves someone that trauma has pushed away from God, and who keeps catching themselves wanting to fix it. It trains one skill: ask about the person before you explain God. You can use it alone over a single week or with a small group across one or two meetings. It starts with your own reflexes, moves through three passages of Scripture that stay with pain instead of hurrying past it, and ends with a listening practice you can try with one real person.
The material comes from a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields and Nona Jones. Jones describes years of childhood abuse, two suicide attempts before she turned twelve, and a faith that began when a classmate invited her to church. Her story is the backbone of what follows, but the guide is not about her. It is about what you do with your mouth and your attention when someone you love says God is not real.
Start with your own mouth
Before you think about anyone else, take ten minutes with a pen. Picture one person who has stepped back from God after being hurt. If no one comes to mind, picture a time you sat with someone in fresh pain.
Write down every sentence you have said to them, or rehearsed in your head, about their faith or their pain. Write them exactly as you would say them, with no polishing. Aim for at least five.
Now sort them. Beside each sentence, mark which of these it does:
- Explains why the harm happened or why God allowed it.
- Defends God, the church, or a particular Christian.
- Corrects something they said or believe.
- Assigns a next step, such as praying, forgiving, or coming back to church.
- Reassures them that it will turn out fine.
- Asks about them.
Count the marks. Most people find the last category nearly empty. That is not a sign that you care too little. Usually it means you care so much that the person’s distance feels like an emergency, and emergencies make people talk.
Lisa Fields gives a name to what those sentences tend to aim at. She describes a spoken objection as fruit growing from something underneath: “The fruit may be, I don’t believe in God, but the root is some kind of traumatic experience that happened.” Look at your list again. How many of your sentences respond to the fruit, the words the person said, and how many reach toward the root?
If you are in a group, nobody has to read their list aloud. The sorting is for you. A leader might ask only for the counts, or simply ask whether anyone was surprised by what they found.
Three passages that stay in the room
Read each passage slowly, preferably aloud. For each one, write down two things: what the text actually claims, and what it does not claim. The second column matters as much as the first.
James 1:19
“Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath” (James 1:19). James is writing practical instruction to believers, and this line is a command, not a description. Notice the order. Hearing comes first and is supposed to be fast. Speaking is supposed to be slow. Compare that with your sorted list. Which of your sentences came out swift?
Job 2:13
When Job’s three friends arrive, “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). This is narrative, so it describes what they did rather than commanding a seven-day silence. But read what comes after. Once the friends start talking, they spend chapter after chapter explaining Job’s suffering to him, and at the end of the book God says they did not speak rightly about him (Job 42:7). The friends were at their best before they opened their mouths. What does it say that the part of their visit Scripture remembers well is the part where they only stayed?
Psalm 23:4
Jones says that at eleven she took a Bible home, started reading the Psalms, and found this one spoke directly to her. Psalm 23:4 reads:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Fill in the two columns. The psalm claims the valley is real. It claims God is present in it. It does not say why the valley is there, how long it lasts, or that the walker should already feel better. Notice also that the speaker shifts from talking about God to talking to him, saying “thou.” The comfort is a presence, not an explanation. This psalm is a song of trust, not a promise about outcomes, and it should not be read as one.
Jones describes what the psalm did for her: “It was me realizing, wait a minute, even though this happened to me, there is still purpose.” She did not receive an answer to why the abuse happened. She received the sense that she had been kept, and that her life had a future.
Two different whys
Here is the distinction that this guide is built around. Jones uses the word “why” in two very different ways, and helpers often confuse them.
The first why is a question about the person. Describing how she acted out in school, Jones says: “And nobody ever asked, why are you behaving this way? No one ever asked that. They simply labeled me as a problem child.” She connects this directly to the church: “when we don’t get beyond the behavior and we just kind of stop at diagnosing the behavior, we actually miss, as you call it, the root.” Applied to unbelief, her counsel is plain: “We do have to begin asking, why is that?”
The second why is a question about God. Why did this happen? Why didn’t he stop it? Jones is just as clear that an answer to this question does not heal: “there is no explanation that can heal something that has already happened.” Fields makes the same point from the apologist’s side. Going to someone who has experienced intense trauma armed only with reasons, she says, “it’s like talking to a brick wall often.”
Look closely at what Jones says about the second why. She titled a chapter of her memoir Releasing the Why, and she describes that release as work the wounded person does: “It’s on each of us to be willing to release the why.” She is speaking as a survivor, about survivors. It is not a task a friend can assign.
That gives the helper a clear division of labor. Your job is the first why, asked gently and about them. The second why belongs to the person carrying the wound, to bring to God and perhaps one day release, on their own road and timetable. The common mistake runs exactly backward. We rarely ask why about the person, and we rush to answer why about God.
Return to your sorted list. Take every sentence marked explains, defends or assigns, and try to rewrite it as a first-why question. For example, a sentence about God having a plan might become a quiet invitation: When did God start feeling far away? Some sentences will not convert, and that is useful to know too.
One caution belongs here. An open question is an invitation, not an interview. A survivor decides what to share, how much, and with whom. If the person answers briefly or changes the subject, that is an answer. Do not press for details.
Is staying quiet a way of giving up on truth?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a real answer. Jude 3 Project holds that Scripture is the final standard for faith and practice. If someone you love has walked away from God, isn’t silence a kind of surrender?
Jones’s own story suggests the issue is order, not omission. She did come to convictions. She explains suffering as the result of sin entering the world through human choice, not God’s design, and she speaks of Jesus as God’s refusal to leave people apart from him. But those convictions came after she had been invited, after the psalm met her, after she discovered she had not been abandoned. Truth was not withheld from her. It arrived in a sequence she could receive.
Fields’s point about trauma explains why the sequence matters. Jones says trauma reshapes perception itself: “It changes the way you see the world. It changes the way you see yourself.” If that is true, a sound argument can be completely correct and still fail to reach someone. Listening does not replace the truth. It is often what makes the truth hearable.
The opposite failure is also real. Presence is not endless passivity. If the person asks what you believe, answer briefly and honestly. And presence never means keeping quiet about danger, which the final section addresses.
A week of listening
This practice takes one week and one person. Choose someone who seems distant from God, or from you, and with whom a conversation is safe and welcome. The goal is not to bring them back to faith by Sunday. The goal is to learn their story and notice your own reflexes as they happen.
Before the conversation. On a single page, write what you actually know about what this person has been through. Below it, write what you have never asked. Choose one open question from your rewritten list. Then write down one sentence you will not say this week, the one you are most tempted to say.
During the conversation. Ask your question once. Then wait longer than feels comfortable before you speak again. When you do speak, try first to repeat back something they said in their own words, so they know you heard it. Do not add a verse, a reason or a next step. If you feel the urge, notice it and let it pass.
After the conversation. Keep a two-column log. In the first column, write every moment you listened well. In the second, write every moment you reached to fix, explain or reassure. Note what was happening just before each reach. Were they angry? Silent? Saying something about God that frightened you? Over a few conversations, you may find that your reflex fires at particular moments, and knowing those moments is most of the work.
Expect the conversation not to go deep. Many will not. Jones warns that what you see may not be the full picture: “I think many times people walk into your life on the chapter that you’re in, and they assume that’s the whole story.” Someone calm and successful may be carrying an older chapter underneath. You will only hear it if you are someone they can tell. Jones asks a question worth putting to yourself: “Who do they have around them that they can actually confide in?”
When listening is not enough
Your presence matters, but it is not treatment. Jones is direct about what someone carrying trauma needs: “not just prayer, seek a therapist.” Jude 3 Project holds that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith and that God works through trained counselors and clinicians. If the person you love is open to it, helping them find a counselor is part of staying, not a handoff.
If what you hear involves current danger, safety comes before every theological question. If someone is being harmed now, or a child is at risk, involve the appropriate authorities and trusted people who can protect them. In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233. If the person mentions thoughts of ending their life, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and do not leave them alone with it. Never encourage someone to return to a person who hurt them because forgiveness or family seems to require it.
For group leaders: some people in the room will be carrying their own abuse, church hurt or grief. Say at the start that no one has to share anything personal, and mean it. When someone does speak, model the practice yourself by asking and waiting rather than answering. Have the numbers above available before the meeting begins, and be ready to help someone reach a counselor or pastor in person afterward.
Questions for discussion
- When you sorted your sentences, which category was fullest? What do you think that category protects you from feeling?
- Jones was labeled a problem child, and nobody asked why. Where have you seen behavior managed instead of understood, in a church, a family or yourself?
- Do you agree that the second why, about God, belongs to the wounded person to carry? Is there ever a time when a helper should engage it directly, and what would tell you that time had come?
- Job’s friends sat in silence for a week and then got it wrong when they spoke. What do you think changed when they started talking?
- Psalm 23 offers presence rather than an explanation. Is that enough for you? Would it have been enough for the person you have in mind?
- What makes someone a person others can confide in? Which of those qualities do you have, and which are you still learning?
Back to the first list
At the end of the week, take out the sentences you wrote at the start. Read them again with the two-column log beside them.
Some of those sentences may still be true. A few may even be things the person will need to hear someday. The question is not whether they were wrong, but whether you have been told enough of the story to know which one belongs, and when. Cross out the ones you now see were for your own comfort. Circle any you would still say if asked. Then put the list away and keep listening, because the next thing you learn from the person you love will probably change it again.