John Onwuchekwa’s brother Sam died in 2015, six weeks before the church Onwuchekwa pastors in Atlanta launched. When he talks about what helped him in the years that followed, he does not remember anything clever anyone said. He names four things: silent presence, help with small needs before anyone asks, prayer, and patience that outlasts the calendar. He adds one warning. Never tell a grieving person you know exactly how they feel.
What Job’s friends got right in their first week
“Presence is the greatest gift in that,” Onwuchekwa says, and he means silent presence.
He makes the case from the book of Job. Job loses his children, his wealth and his health. Then three friends arrive, and the text records what they did first:
“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)
Onwuchekwa calls that week the bright spot of the book. His observation is about proportion. Job’s losses are told quickly, in the opening chapters. Most of the book that follows is speech, and he describes a large part of Job’s suffering there as “Job warding off the terrible words of his friend.” Job says as much himself: “I have heard many such things: miserable comforters are ye all” (Job 16:2).
Reading the whole book sharpens his point. The friends were serious men making theological arguments, and their arguments rested on a formula: suffering like this must mean Job had done something to deserve it. At the end of the book, God says they had not spoken rightly about him (Job 42:7). They did their best work when they had nothing to say and their worst work once they had an explanation.
Paul’s instruction to the church in Rome asks for what those friends gave in their silent week: “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep” (Romans 12:15). Weeping with someone is presence. It shares the weight of the loss without trying to account for it, which is exactly what the friends stopped doing when they started talking.
Onwuchekwa makes a related point about loss in general. Live long enough, he says, and you learn that “the formulas that we have for life, they don’t work.” Many lines we reach for at a funeral are formulas of the same kind, small explanations meant to make an unbearable event make sense. They tend to comfort the person saying them.
Why “I know exactly how you feel” does so much damage
This is the one line Onwuchekwa names outright. His advice is “never, ever saying, I know exactly how you feel.” He explains what the grieving person hears: “you can’t possibly know exactly how I feel.”
The warning carries weight because he once believed he did know. In 2012, the brother of a close friend, a pastor in Miami, was murdered. The friend’s wife asked Onwuchekwa to be the one to tell him. He did. He remembers the hollowness in his friend’s eyes, and he remembers thinking he felt something of that pain.
Three years later his own brother died. 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 had not grasped even a fraction of it.
That is the discovery under his advice. The man warning you off the phrase sat with a friend at the worst moment of that friend’s life and honestly believed he understood. Only his own loss showed him how far off he had been. If that was true for him, an outsider’s sense of someone else’s grief is probably partial too. That is simply the limit of standing outside a loss that belongs to someone else.
So he suggests a different sentence: “Sometimes just the words, I can’t imagine how you feel.” He says it can go a long way. It may sound distant, yet it tells the truth. It treats the loss as theirs and leaves room for them to tell you what it is actually like, if and when they want to.
Help that asks nothing back
Onwuchekwa’s second gift is “proactively taking care of the simple needs, not grand gestures, simple needs.” His example is ordinary on purpose: a food delivery gift card with a short note saying you thought of them. His reasoning fits on one line: “I don’t want you to have to think about the small stuff.”
Help like that arrives before anyone has to ask, and it is small enough that the grieving person has no big gesture to answer and no gratitude to perform. Compare the familiar offer, call me if you need anything. It sounds generous, yet it hands the person one more job: figure out what they need, decide whether it is worth bothering you, and then ask. A meal that simply shows up skips all of that.
His third gift needs no coordination at all. “One of the things that I love is that when you pray for somebody, you don’t have to get permission from them,” he says. You can pray in the room with them, or from across town on a day they never hear from you. It is care that adds nothing to their load.
When grief does not look the way you expect
Grieving people rarely behave the way friends expect, and Onwuchekwa’s own story heads off three common misreadings.
First, the mood can swing without warning. His church launched six weeks after his brother’s death, a good day with family and a full room. That night his wife learned her grandmother had died, and by the next Friday they were at another funeral. Joy and sorrow, he says, are not parallel streets that run neatly side by side. “It’s this constant joy and sorrow.” There are times you think you should be crying and cannot, and times you think you should be smiling and can only cry. A friend who laughs at dinner is not done grieving. A breakdown months later is not a setback.
Second, they may withdraw, and it may have nothing to do with you. After Sam died, Onwuchekwa says, he pulled away from his family, which is the opposite of what people usually do. He was bracing himself, trying to make the next loss hurt less, and he came to see that it was costing him present joy. He says one of his closest friendships is still somewhat strained, “not because of him, but because of me.” For the friend on the other side of that distance, the lesson is to stay near without forcing anything. Keep inviting. Keep sending the simple things.
Third, they may say hard things about God, and you may want to correct them. Onwuchekwa says it is okay to be angry with God, as long as you bring that anger to God directly. He points to Psalm 3 as a script for that kind of prayer, and the psalm shows such a prayer being heard: “I cried unto the LORD with my voice, and he heard me out of his holy hill” (Psalm 3:4). He also says “doubt in and of itself is not an enemy of faith,” and compares doubt to wind. Wind can blow out a candle. It can also turn a spark into a fire. Which one happens depends on where the doubt is aimed.
That changes the friend’s job. Someone telling God the truth about their anger is practicing faith in its rawest form. Your place is in the room with them, and the prayer is theirs to pray.
How long a friend should keep showing up
Longer than the calendar suggests. Onwuchekwa is blunt about the timeline: “There is no expiration date.” Grief, in his image, does not go stale like bread. He says “grief is a non-perishable food item,” something that can sit on the shelf for years and then be opened as sharp as ever. Years after his brother’s death, there are still songs he cannot listen to. He describes the surprise of thinking it was all so long ago, and his answer to it: “But time only matters if something has an expiration date.”
That is why the hardest part of his counsel for friends is to “let go of the expectation that they are going to be back to normal.” He goes further: “There is no back to normal.” A new normal slowly takes shape, and what a friend can do in it is simple to say: “Stay with them and walk with them and be patient with them.”
He also corrects our sense of scale. We say life is short, and he agrees, but he adds that life can also be long. Measured against a whole life, the stretch of time friends assume should be enough is brief. Speaking of a loss a few years old, he says “three years is not a lot of time,” and says the same of the seven years since his own. A friend who quietly expects recovery by the first anniversary has set a deadline the griever cannot meet.
What he asks for instead is help with the next step only. He tells his young daughter, who wants to climb the stairs as fast as her long-legged father, to hit each step. Grief, he says, works that way: “It’s us just being able to have somebody to come alongside us,” someone who says to take the next step and leave the finish line alone. When he thinks of the people who carried him, he names his wife and close friends, and what he remembers is their stamina. “I’m grateful that in the same way grief didn’t expire, that their patience didn’t expire either.”
Isn’t there a time to speak about hope?
There is a fair objection here. Christians have something to say about death. Paul writes, “But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Doesn’t a friend owe the grieving person that truth?
Read closely, Paul contrasts sorrow that has hope with sorrow that has none. He assumes believers will sorrow. Christian hope shapes grief without setting a timer on it, and nothing in Onwuchekwa’s counsel asks a believer to hide that hope. His concern is narrower and practical. Hope offered as a quick fix in the first raw days can sound like a request to stop grieving. Hope lived out through months of patient presence is far easier to believe.
His counsel also has limits, and he says so. He did not write about grief as an expert. He offers his experience for others to “tap in and tap out where it’s helpful.” Some grieving people want to talk for hours about the person they lost, and silence would feel like neglect to them. And sometimes grief settles into something heavier than a friend can carry alone. Helping someone find a counselor in that season is part of loving them well, and taking that step is no failure of faith.
What he does show is where to begin. Start from what you cannot know, offer what costs them nothing, and plan to stay. Most of the damage done at a grieving person’s side comes from friends trying to finish something that will not be finished on their schedule. The best help comes from friends who accept that it may never be finished, and who stay anyway.
