Information alone rarely reaches a person in deep pain, because pain changes the question that person is asking. A frightened person is not mainly asking whether something is true. They are asking whether anyone sees them. Kori Porter, now a campus minister at Princeton University, learned this from the receiving end, more than once, before she ever came to faith. This guide stays with those moments a little longer than is comfortable. It is built for one reader working slowly or for a small group meeting once. It asks two things: that you grieve what it cost Porter to be handed facts when she needed to be seen, and that you let that grief change how you show up for someone who is hurting.
Read each section before you answer its questions. If you are in a group, nobody is required to share anything personal. You can answer the questions about Porter’s story and keep your own story to yourself. That is a full way to take part.
The room she was left in
At sixteen, Porter believed she was pregnant. She went to a center offering free tests and did not know at first that it was a Christian ministry. While she waited for the result, a worker asked whether she would have an abortion. Porter said yes. The worker showed her a film, then, in Porter’s words, “left me in the room, no explanation, no conversation” before coming back to ask the same question. Porter’s answer did not change.
Pause on what that scene was like from inside it. A sixteen-year-old is waiting to learn whether her life is about to change. A stranger shows her disturbing images and walks out. Porter does not say the worker’s convictions were wrong. Her charge is narrower: “the point was, she didn’t minister to my pain. What she did was just put this bandaid over and hope that it would like shock me into the reality.”
She then names what the moment needed: “But when you’re in despair like that, like you can’t just throw things at people and hope that they stick, but you gotta take time to minister to that person’s heart and that person’s pain point.” Notice the word despair. She was not a person missing data. She was a person without hope, and nobody in that room asked about it.
The cost is easy to skip. The worker probably went home believing she had done her duty. The girl went home more resolved and just as alone. Both sides of that story deserve grief.
What the void was asking for
The clinic was not the first time Porter needed to be seen and was not. As a child she sat beside her grandmother in an old Mississippi church and watched a faith that seemed real. Her grandmother would call out the name of Jesus in her highest worship, and Porter says “she also said it to calm herself down.” She remembers it plainly: “And so she would just say, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
Then her grandmother died at 59. Her stepfather died after HIV became AIDS. Porter describes what those losses left behind: “I think really created this void that I needed someone near me and I needed those people to be my people that I could hold onto.” The people who held on to her were drug dealers, dropouts and ex-felons. She is honest that they gave her a community she was looking for, and honest about where the church was during that season: “If the church doesn’t disciple, if the church doesn’t reach out, then the world will, and I found my place in the world.”
Lisa Fields, the founder and president of Jude 3 Project, hears in this story something Christians often miss about people far from God: “many times people are looking for acceptance, validation, identity.” If that is true, then a grieving teenager making dangerous choices is not first of all a problem to correct. She is a person whose losses have no place to go. Fields puts the task simply: “you have to identify what the pain point is.”
This is the heart of the lament. Porter’s grief was visible. Her behavior announced it. What she needed was someone near her, and for years the people nearest her were the ones leading her further from life.
The night no one picked up
At eighteen, Porter was living in Cleveland with her biological father, whom she had been kept from since age twelve because of physical abuse. After another fight, the police came and they lost their apartment. On a night of heavy snow, she slept in a car. In the early morning she tried to reach someone: “first I called my mom, I called some pastor people I knew no one picked up.”
Read that sentence again before you read what happened next. Pastors were on her list. No one answered. That may not have been anyone’s fault at three in the morning. It still belongs in the story, because it is the same ache as the clinic room and the years after her grandmother died: a person reaching for someone, and the reach landing on nothing.
So she prayed the only way she knew, the way her grandmother had. She told God the truth about her life, including that she was struggling with suicidal thoughts. She describes asking with her heart, saying “that I need somebody and that I need you, particularly Lord, to come into my life and to help me.” And she describes what she received: “there would be no reason to have peace at that moment. But calling upon his name, it gave me peace.”
This is Porter’s account of her own experience, and it should be received as testimony, not turned into a promise that every desperate prayer will feel like hers did. Some people cry out and feel nothing for a long time. Scripture makes room for that too, as the next section shows.
If you are carrying thoughts like the ones Porter describes, please do not wait for the right person to call you back. In the US you can call or text 988 at any hour to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and you can tell a counselor, a pastor or someone close to you today.
Friends who sat, and friends who spoke
The book of Job holds a picture of both kinds of response Porter received. When Job’s friends first arrive, they do something right. Job 2:13 says, “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.”
Look at the reason the verse gives: they saw. Their silence came from seeing. Then they began to talk, and for many chapters they explain Job’s suffering to him. Much of what they say about God is the kind of thing believers say in any age. Yet Job answers them, “I have heard many such things: miserable comforters are ye all” (Job 16:2), and at the end of the book God says they did not speak rightly of him (Job 42:7).
Job is poetry and wisdom literature, and its friends are not simple villains. But the book does show a pattern worth seeing: true-sounding statements, applied to a sufferer without understanding his case, can wound. Their problem was not that they had words. Their words stopped them from seeing him.
Paul gives the church a plainer instruction in Romans 12:15: “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.” Weeping with someone has no shortcut. You cannot do it by handing them a resource and leaving the room.
And Scripture gives hurting people words for the nights when no one picks up. Psalm 13:1 begins, “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” A lament psalm does not pretend the absence is not there. It brings the absence to God by name.
Was the content ever the problem?
It would be easy to conclude from this story that truth does not matter, only kindness. Porter’s own story pushes against that. Months after the snowstorm, two campus ministers explained the gospel to her clearly and in detail. The truth that Christ bore the wrath due to her, which she had never understood, was what broke through.
What was different was the posture of the messenger. One of them did not argue with her. Porter says, “So he actually credited me, my Christianity, he didn’t try to argue with me about Christianity.” He asked simple questions until she noticed for herself that she could not answer them: “I internally felt like, man, this man may know more.” Then he invited her in.
Fields refuses to throw away the tools. “Yes, tools are helpful, but it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be present,” she says. Her order is the point: “When people are dealing with real pain, the tools assist, but presence comes first.” Porter says something similar: “it’s just very rare that just throwing information and facts that people are gonna do any real hard transformational work.” Then she says what does the work: “You have to dwell amongst people and be for people and let them know that you love them.”
So the honest answer to this guide’s question is not that facts fail. It is that facts handed to someone in despair, by a person who has not shown they are for them, usually do not land. The cost of skipping that step is a person left alone in a room with the truth.
A practice in two parts
First, a lament. Read Psalm 13 aloud, slowly, all six verses. Then write your own short lament using its movement: a question of how long, a plain description of what hurts, a request, and, only if you can honestly say it, a line of trust. You may write it about something in your own life or on behalf of someone like the sixteen-year-old in the clinic room. You do not have to finish with trust if it is not there yet. Psalms of lament exist for exactly that. Keep what you write private unless you choose otherwise.
Second, a week of seeing. Think of one person you know who is carrying something heavy. This week, have one conversation with them where you offer no article, no verse and no advice unless they ask for it. Ask one question about how they are actually doing, then listen until they finish. Afterward, write down two things: what you learned about their pain that you did not know, and what you were tempted to say instead of listening. If the conversation reveals that someone is in danger, being harmed, or thinking about ending their life, your job changes. Help them reach real help right away, including 988 or, for domestic violence, the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.
Questions to discuss or carry
- Porter says the clinic worker did not minister to her pain. What do you think ministering to her pain could have looked like in that room, without the worker giving up her convictions?
- Job’s friends sat in silence because they saw his grief, then spoke in ways that wounded him. What changed between the silence and the speeches?
- Porter’s old friends filled a void the church left open. What would it take for a church to notice a grieving teenager before someone else does?
- The campus minister credited Porter’s faith instead of arguing with it, and she discovered her own gap. Why might that approach have opened her more than a correction would have?
- Fields says tools assist but presence comes first. Where are you most tempted to let a tool stand in for presence?
- Psalm 13 lets someone complain to God without resolving the complaint quickly. What does it mean for a community to allow that, instead of hurrying a hurting person toward the happy ending?
If you are leading a group
This material touches teenage pregnancy, abortion, drugs, grief, homelessness, physical abuse and suicidal thoughts. Some people in your group may carry one of those. Say at the start that no one has to share personal history, and mean it. Steer discussion toward Porter’s story and the Scripture unless someone freely chooses to go further.
If someone does share something painful, resist the urge you are studying. Do not answer it with a verse or a quick lesson. Thank them, and stay with what they said for a moment. If what they share suggests present danger, follow up privately and help them reach a counselor, a pastor or the crisis lines named above. A study session is not the right place to handle a crisis, and a group leader is not a replacement for professional care.
Give the lament practice real time, perhaps ten quiet minutes. Silence will feel long. That is part of the lesson.
Porter’s story ends in faith, and it is good news that it does. But do not let the ending erase the rooms along the way: the clinic, the funerals, the car in the snow, the phone calls no one answered. Someone you know may be in one of those rooms now. The question to carry out of this study is not what you will tell them. It is whether you will be the one who picks up.