Most of us have a reflex when someone near us is grieving, and most of us have never looked at it. Some of us fill: we talk, because silence feels like failure. Some of us fix: we reach for an explanation, a verse or a plan that might make the loss make sense. Some of us flee: we stay away, telling ourselves they need space, when really we do not know what to say. This guide helps you find which of those is yours, set it next to two scenes of grief in Scripture, and then spend one week practicing a different instinct: staying.
The study draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation with John Onwuchekwa, a pastor in Atlanta whose brother Sam died six weeks before the church he pastors launched. He is clear that he speaks from experience, not as an expert. He invites listeners to “tap in and tap out where it’s helpful.” Take this guide the same way.
You can work through it alone in two or three sittings, with a notebook, and then live the practice for a week. A small group can cover the first four sections in about an hour, do the practice separately, and meet again a week later to talk about what happened. Nobody has to describe their own losses to do any of this well.
First, catch your own reflex
Before you read anything, think of the last time someone you knew lost a person they loved. Not a hypothetical. A real moment. Write down, as plainly as you can, what you did in the first week and what you did a month later.
Now read your notes against these three descriptions and mark the one that fits best:
- Fill. You talked more than you listened. You told a story about your own loss, offered a verse, or kept the conversation going so it would not go quiet.
- Fix. You looked for something to solve. You explained what God might be doing, suggested what they should do next, or told them when they would feel better.
- Flee. You meant to call and did not. You sent one text and stopped. You felt relief when someone else was taking care of it.
Most people find a little of all three. Pick the one that shows up first. Then write one honest sentence about what that reflex does for you. Filling may quiet your own discomfort. Fixing may make you feel useful. Fleeing may protect you from a sadness you are not ready to feel. The point is not guilt. You cannot change an instinct you have not named.
In a group, invite people to say which reflex they chose. They do not need to say why or tell the story behind it. A word is enough.
Read Job: the best week and the worst chapters
Read Job 2:11-13 slowly, out loud if you can. Three friends hear what has happened to Job and travel to mourn with him and comfort him. When they see him, they barely recognize him. They weep and tear their robes. Then the text records this:
“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)
Notice the reason the verse gives. They kept silent because they saw how great his grief was. Their silence was not awkwardness. It was a response to what they saw.
Now turn to Job 4:1-9, where the first friend finally speaks. Read it and write down, in your own words, the assumption underneath what he says. (He suggests that innocent people do not perish this way, which implies that Job’s suffering must have a cause in Job.) Then read Job 16:1-5, where Job answers his friends: “I have heard many such things: miserable comforters are ye all” (Job 16:2).
John Onwuchekwa reads the book’s proportions carefully. Job’s losses take up two chapters. Most of what follows is speech, and he describes much of Job’s suffering there as “Job warding off the terrible words of his friend.” The silent week, he says, is “the bright spot in the book.”
Stop and test that against your reflex. The friends are a warning to all three types. Their speeches are filling. Their theology is fixing. And they show something the flee type should hear: showing up was the right instinct. Their failure was not coming. Their failure was what they did after a week of doing it well.
Read John 11: two sisters, two responses
Now read John 11:1-44 in one sitting. Then go back to verses 17-36 and look closely at what Jesus does with each sister.
Start with what Jesus knows. Before he arrives, he tells his disciples that Lazarus is dead and that he is going to wake him (John 11:11-14). He does not come to Bethany unsure of the ending.
Martha meets him first and says that if he had been there, her brother would not have died (John 11:21). Mary later falls at his feet and says nearly the same words (John 11:32). Write down what Jesus does in response to each.
With Martha, Jesus talks. They have a real exchange about resurrection, and she answers with a confession of who he is (John 11:23-27). With Mary, who is weeping, he asks where they have laid Lazarus, and then the text gives the shortest verse in the KJV: “Jesus wept.” (John 11:35)
Two observations come out of this, and both matter for the practice ahead.
First, knowing the outcome did not keep Jesus from weeping. Christians have read his tears in more than one way. Some see grief for a friend he loved (the onlookers say as much in John 11:36). Others emphasize his compassion as he saw Mary and the mourners weeping (John 11:33), or his sorrow over death itself. The text does not settle which, and these readings can sit together. What the text does show is that tears and certain hope were not in competition for him.
Second, Jesus did not give both sisters the same thing. Martha came with a question, and he engaged her mind. Mary came with tears, and he met her with his own. This is narrative, so it describes rather than commands, and it would be a stretch to build a rule from it. But it does correct a too-simple lesson from Job. The goal is not silence for its own sake. The goal is attention: seeing what this grieving person is bringing you, the way Job’s friends first saw how great his grief was.
What a grieving pastor learned about himself
Onwuchekwa’s story adds something neither passage can: what it is like to discover you misjudged someone’s grief.
In 2012, he says, a close friend’s brother was murdered, and the friend’s wife asked him to be the one to tell him. He remembers the hollowness in his friend’s eyes, and he believed he felt some of that pain. When his own brother died in 2015, his reaction was “oh, this is foreign.” Looking back, he says, “Whatever I thought that I shared of his pain, I’ve realized that I didn’t” and adds that he did not get a fraction of it.
That admission speaks to each reflex. The filler often assumes they understand enough to speak. The fixer assumes the loss can be explained. Onwuchekwa says that living long enough teaches you that “the formulas that we have for life, they don’t work.” He also describes what a grieving person needs from a companion in the early stretch: “it’s not about answers right now.” The fleer assumes the moment will pass. His answer is blunt: “There is no expiration date.”
He also gives a picture of fleeing from the inside. After Sam died, he says, he distanced himself from his own family, bracing so that future losses would hurt less. He came to see that “the only thing that I was really doing was robbing myself of present joy.” That was a grieving man pulling away, not a friend avoiding a mourner, but the logic is familiar to anyone with the flee reflex. Staying away can feel like protection. Usually it just costs something.
When he describes what actually helped, he says, “Presence is the greatest gift in that.” He then names simple acts: “proactively taking care of the simple needs, not grand gestures, simple needs.” He adds prayer, noting that “when you pray for somebody, you don’t have to get permission from them.” When words are needed, he offers a modest sentence: “Sometimes just the words, I can’t imagine how you feel.” And he asks friends to “let go of the expectation that they are going to be back to normal.” Of the people who carried him, he says, “I’m grateful that in the same way grief didn’t expire, that their patience didn’t expire either.”
A week of staying
Choose one person who is grieving. It may be a recent loss or an old one that everyone else has stopped mentioning. If no one comes to mind, choose someone whose loss was a year or more ago. Onwuchekwa’s point about non-expiring grief means those people are often the most alone.
Each step below is aimed at one reflex. Do all of them, but pay the most attention to the one that targets yours.
- Early in the week, pray for them by name. Do it every day. Do not tell them unless it comes up naturally. This is the one form of care that asks nothing of them.
- Handle one small need without offering first. Send a meal, run an errand, cover a gift card for food. Attach a short note saying you thought of them. Do not ask them to call you if they need anything. (This step targets the fixer: help that solves a small, real problem instead of the big one you cannot touch.)
- Midweek, be with them once with no speech prepared. A visit, a walk or a phone call. Before you go, decide what you will not say: no explanations, no timelines, no stories about your own loss unless they ask. When there is a silence, count slowly to ten before you break it. (This step targets the filler.)
- While you are with them, notice what they bring. Are they asking questions, like Martha, or carrying tears, like Mary? Are they laughing? Let them lead. If they want to talk about the person they lost, ask about that person.
- Before the week ends, put a second contact on your calendar for three or four weeks out. Pick a date that might be hard for them: a birthday, an anniversary, a holiday. Then keep it. (This step targets the fleer, and it is the one most people skip.)
Each evening, write two or three lines: what you did, what you felt tempted to do instead, and anything you noticed about them that you would have missed if you had been talking.
Questions for after the week
Use these alone or in a group. They work best after the practice, not before.
- Which step was hardest for you, and does that match the reflex you named at the start, or did something surprise you?
- Job’s friends saw how great his grief was and kept silent, then later spoke from a formula. What do you think changed between chapter 2 and chapter 4?
- Jesus talked theology with Martha and wept with Mary. How did you try to tell what your person needed? What signs would you watch for next time?
- Onwuchekwa believed he understood his friend’s pain and later found he had not. Where might you be assuming you understand someone’s loss better than you do?
- Is there a kind of speech that does help a grieving person? What would separate it from filling or fixing?
- What would it actually cost you, in time or comfort, to keep showing up for this person six months from now?
For anyone leading a group
Expect that someone in the room is carrying a fresh or unfinished loss. Make every sharing prompt optional out loud, more than once. If a person begins to grieve during the session, the group’s job becomes the practice itself. Let the silence sit. Resist the urge to rescue the moment with a comment or a prayer unless they ask for one.
Watch for the conversation turning into a trade of loss stories. Gently steer back to the question of what a comforter does. Onwuchekwa’s own words fit a group like this: “The not being put together, the silence” is okay.
Grief can sometimes settle into something heavier than friends can carry alone. Seeking a counselor or therapist in that season is not a failure of faith, and a good friend can help someone take that step. If anyone, in the group or in their care, talks about not wanting to live, take it seriously and point them to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988 in the US), as well as a pastor or counselor.
Carry this into next month
Go back to the reflex you wrote down at the start. Read it again after the week. Do not ask whether you fixed it; one week rarely does. Ask a smaller question: in what moment did you notice the old instinct and do something else? Write that moment down. Then look at the date you put on your calendar, and keep it.