When suffering has shaken someone’s faith, including your own, the first thing to offer is presence: staying close, letting the pain be as heavy as it is, and grieving honestly. Arguments have a place, and they can help, but usually later, once the hurting person is the one asking. Underneath both is a hope that does not depend on anyone explaining the loss. It depends on God keeping his promises. This guide practices that order: comfort, then honest questions, then hope.
You can work through it alone with a notebook or with a small group over one or two sittings. Every reflection prompt is optional. Nobody owes the group their story, and a person can sit through a whole session without saying a word.
When a believer says the arguments felt heavy
This study grows out of a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation. Lisa Fields had just finished a series on the problem of evil that covered the free will response, the greater good response and process theology. Then she brought on her friend Michael Roses, a pastor’s kid and a committed Christian who says plainly that theology and apologetics are not his interest. She asked him what he thought of the series.
His first answer was honest: “I felt like it was a little heavy.” He added that it was “a heavy 15 minutes.” The discussions sent him into some self-searching about why he avoids these subjects, and he named what he found: “I am a control freak to a degree. And so I try to assist God.” He fears running into an idea that could undo him. In his words, “I never want to encounter something that will shake my faith.”
Look closely at that confession, because it explains a habit many believers share. Roses is not a skeptic. He believes Jesus died for his sins and rose again. His resistance comes from a sense that his faith stays safe only if he guards it himself, by keeping dangerous ideas at a distance. That instinct shapes how we treat our own doubts, and it shapes what we reach for when someone else is hurting.
For a moment of quiet observation: think of a time when a true statement about God felt heavy rather than helpful, whether you were the one hearing it or the one saying it. You do not need to write down the details. Notice what made it heavy. Was it the words, the timing, or the person who said them?
Sit before you speak
Lisa Fields names why arguments usually miss in the first wave of loss. In a crisis, she says, “this argument is way more so emotional than it is logical.” She pictures explaining the free will defense to someone whose child just died, and her verdict is short: “nobody wants to hear that.” What the moment asks for is simpler: “That’s the time for you to hug. That’s the time for you to cry.”
Job’s friends started well. “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). The book is a long poem, and its arc is clear. The friends’ trouble begins when they start explaining, and by the end God says they have not spoken rightly of him (Job 42:7). Their silence was the most faithful thing they did.
A practice: the quiet visit
Choose one person you know who is carrying a loss or a hard season. Before you visit, call or text, decide three things:
- You will not explain why it happened, and you will not offer a verse unless they ask for one.
- You will do one ordinary, concrete thing they do not have to organize for you, such as bringing food, running an errand or sitting with them while they handle a task.
- If you run out of words, you will let the silence be. If you need a sentence, Fields offers one: “I can’t identify with your pain, but I can sit here and cry with you.”
Afterward, notice where you felt the pull to explain. That pull often tells you more about your own discomfort than about what they needed.
For groups: someone in the room may be in fresh grief. Do not turn their pain into the lesson. If they want to talk, listen. If they want to stay quiet, protect that. And if anyone shares that they are being abused or are not safe at home, the conversation shifts to safety and practical help. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
When the questions arrive
Fields says grief moves: “grief is in stages.” At some point a hurting person stops crying out and starts asking. Her counsel is to “meet them at the stages they’re at,” which can begin with nothing more than “man, I don’t understand this with you.”
Psalm 13 shows that movement inside a single prayer. It opens with an accusation that Scripture records without rebuke: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). The psalmist does not soften the question to make it more polite. He brings it straight to God. Lament is a form of prayer the Bible preserves on purpose, and it does not treat this honesty as a lapse in faith.
A shared reading for groups
Read Psalm 13 aloud, one verse per person, around the room. Then read it a second time with different readers. As you listen, mark the word or line where the psalm changes direction. Most groups find it at the start of verse 5, with the word But. Talk together about what comes before that turn and what comes after. What has changed? What has not? Notice that the question of verse 1 is never answered. If you are working alone, read it aloud twice yourself and mark the turn on the page.
Do arguments ever help?
Here is the strongest challenge to everything above. Roses’s caution may be reasonable, and arguments do sometimes help people who are suffering. Both are true, and the conversation itself shows it.
Start with Roses. He is clear about his limits. If an atheist wants to debate the existence of God, he says he is not the right person and will point them to someone who is. He would rather talk about what God has done in his life. That is a fair division of labor. Not every Christian is called to debate.
Yet the same Roses found one argument helpful. Of the greater good response, he said, “that’s more so the argument that I agreed most with.” It fit his experience. Looking back on situations where he felt harmed despite good intentions, he could see where God had opened a door or made a way. For him, the argument put words to something he had lived. It came afterward, in hindsight, and it came from inside his own story rather than from someone standing over him.
Fields tells of arguments doing even more. Her New Testament class at the University of North Florida, taught by people who did not affirm the authority of Scripture, challenged the Bible and the goodness of God. “It made me cry. It made me frustrated. I didn’t wanna deal with it, but it tested my faith.” She read, talked with professors and worked through her doubts. Her conclusion: “every time you’re pushed, your faith is strengthened.” She urges the next step for anyone who cares for the hurting: “Meet them on the logical level with it when they’re at the logical place.”
So what shows the difference? Listen to how the question is asked. A cry repeats itself and does not wait for an answer. A real question pauses for one, follows up, and pushes back. One person may say why at a funeral and mean only that it hurts. The same person may ask months later whether a good God could allow this, and mean it as a question. That is the moment Fields has in mind when she says “it is important that you’ve wrestled with it logically so when they get to that point, you could deal with that on that perspective.” The work happens in calm seasons so it is ready in hard ones.
What avoidance costs, and what God keeps
Roses described his own habit candidly. When a thought becomes overwhelming, “I just kind of like tuck it back in, in the back of my pocket, my mind.” When Fields asked whether fear was behind it, he agreed: “I don’t wanna wrestle through it.”
Fields’s answer goes to the assumption under that fear: “God is keeping us not our knowledge.” If that is true, facing a hard question does not gamble your soul on your own cleverness, and the control Roses describes is not required of him. She adds a sensible limit. The wrestling should happen “in a safe place and read the right things.” Facing a question is different from feeding on whatever voice is loudest.
Optional reflection: if you have a question you keep tucking away, write it in one plain sentence. You do not have to answer it today or show it to anyone. Then read Psalm 13:1-2 and ask whether your sentence could be prayed as it stands.
If the one who is shaken is you
Roses told one more story, and it may help anyone struggling now. After a painful situation involving people in ministry, his faith was shaken so badly that he stopped reading his Bible. “I didn’t trust myself with it.” He had watched people who claimed the same book do harm.
He did not walk away, and he did not force himself to read alone. “I would make sure that I would be in every Bible study that my pastor had,” he said. He went to midweek services and to churches where his pastor was preaching. Sometimes he went home and read the passage he had just heard taught. The detail matters. He did not stop engaging Scripture. He changed how he engaged it, reading through a teacher he trusted until he could read on his own again. For someone who calls himself a control freak, that was a real surrender: letting another person carry part of the load.
The same principle covers professional care. Jude 3 Project holds that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, and that God works through trained counselors and clinicians. Roses leaned on a trusted pastor. Someone else may need a counselor or a doctor, and that is another way God keeps his people. If grief or depression does not lift, or if your pain ever includes thoughts of not wanting to live, talk with a counselor or doctor. You can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, at any hour.
A small step, only if it fits: name one person who could be for you what Roses’s pastor was for him, someone safe and steady in Scripture. You might only ask whether you can read alongside them for a while.
Hope that does not hurry
Psalm 13 ends this way: “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation. I will sing unto the LORD, because he hath dealt bountifully with me” (Psalm 13:5-6). The psalm never answers how long, and nothing in it says the trouble has ended. The turn is toward God’s mercy. Hope arrives before the circumstances change.
At the end of the episode, Fields turned to a song about a day when God will make all things right and death itself will be done. Scripture holds out that hope: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away” (Revelation 21:4). Revelation is apocalyptic writing, full of symbolic images. Read beside Psalm 13, this verse answers the psalm’s question in a different way than we expect. It never says why. It says how it ends: the grief of verse 1 will not last forever. That promise explains no particular loss and guarantees no healing on our timetable. It gives a hurting person something to lean toward while the answers have not come.
Questions to sit with
- Roses called the arguments heavy, and he is a lifelong believer. What does his honesty suggest about how arguments land on people who are already hurting?
- Job’s friends did well while they were silent and went wrong once they started explaining. What do you think changed when they began to speak?
- Roses found the greater good argument helpful when he looked back on his own story. Why might the same argument sound different coming from someone else at a funeral?
- How might you tell when someone has moved from needing presence to wanting to work through a question? What would you watch or listen for?
- Fields says, “God is keeping us not our knowledge.” If you believed that fully, what would change about how you handle hard questions?
- Psalm 13 turns toward hope without answering its own question. Is that kind of hope enough for you right now? It is fine to answer no, or not yet.
For groups: let these questions stay open. If someone says the hope feels thin to them right now, do not rush to correct them. The psalm itself spends four verses in that place before it turns.
Before you close the page
If someone near you is hurting, make the quiet visit described above, and leave your explanations at home. If you are the one who is hurting, pray Psalm 13 in your own words, as honestly as the psalmist did, and let verses 5 and 6 be something you lean toward. Roses put it plainly: “people are really going through real stuff.” Meeting them there, slowly and without pretending, is where this kind of care begins.