The Faithfulness Nobody Sees

There are two things people will tell you when your suffering has gone on longer than anyone expected, and I have come to believe both of them are lies, even when they are said with a kind Bible verse and a soft voice.

The first is some version of buck up. God ordained this season, so the most faithful thing you can do is stop asking why and start accepting it. The second is the opposite, and just as tidy. If you truly believed, if you prayed correctly, this would already be over. Both of these responses hand you a closed envelope and ask you not to open it. Both of them, in their own way, ask you to stop grieving, either because grief means you have not accepted God's will, or because grief means you have not trusted Him enough. I do not think Scripture asks either of these things of us. I think Scripture asks us to grieve as people who have hope, which is an entirely different instruction, and a much harder one to hold onto when a season will not end.

Prefer to listen? Listen to Episode 25 on the podcast, Lament + Light

A Hymn Written From Inside the Storm

I have been thinking about William Cowper this week. Cowper lived with depression for most of his adult life, not for a season of it, and there were long stretches where he could not get out of bed, and more than one where he tried to end his own life. He lived near a pastor named John Newton, the same Newton who wrote Amazing Grace, in a small English town called Olney. Newton did not treat Cowper's suffering as a project with a deadline. He simply stayed close. The two men began writing hymns together, and some weeks Cowper could contribute nothing at all, and Newton kept writing anyway and waited for his friend to come back.

Out of one of Cowper's darkest breakdowns came a hymn we still sing without a second thought. God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform. He was not writing that line from the far side of his depression, having finally arrived somewhere resolved. He was writing it from directly inside the storm, with a friend who did not require him to be well first. That is what faithfulness looked like for Cowper. Not the absence of the darkness. A hand still writing in the middle of it, held steady by someone else's presence.

The Faithfulness That Has No Dramatic Name

I have also been sitting with Hannah Coulter, whose suffering looks nothing like Cowper's. Hannah's losses do not arrive as one identifiable crisis. They accumulate slowly, across an entire lifetime. A husband lost to a war she never wanted him to go to. A second marriage to a man carrying wounds from that same war that neither of them ever fully names aloud. Children who grow up and choose paths that quietly grieve her, even though she never tries to stop them. An entire way of life that erodes around her, person by person, until she is one of the last ones left who remembers what it used to be.

There is no single dramatic season here. There is only the daily decision to keep tending what is actually hers to tend, the people in front of her, the land, the meals, the ordinary continuance of a life, while carrying grief that never fully resolves and was never asked to. By the time she is telling her own story, she is neither bitter nor falsely cheerful. She is simply a woman who kept choosing to love what was in front of her, decade after decade, without waiting for the losses to stop first.

If your own suffering does not look like Cowper's, if it has no single dramatic name, if it looks more like Hannah's, an accumulation of ordinary losses nobody else seems to notice, I want you to hear that this is not a lesser kind of suffering. It does not need drama to be real, or to be worthy of God's tender attention.

What Romans 8 Actually Holds Together

Romans 8:22-23 says the whole creation is groaning together, waiting, and that we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the redemption of our bodies. Paul does not treat the groaning as a failure of faith. He places it right next to the hope, in the very same breath. Both true at once. Not resolved. Not explained away. Held together, the way Cowper's storm and his hymn existed in the very same season of his life, the way Hannah's grief and her faithfulness existed inside the very same ordinary days.

This is not the same thing as God ordaining suffering and asking us to silently absorb it, and it is not the same thing as suffering being a problem prayer will eventually erase. It is something else. It is the honest condition of living in a world that is not yet made whole, walked through by a God who has not stepped away from the middle of it.

Second Corinthians 4:17-18 says something I misunderstood for years. Paul calls his own suffering light and momentary, and I used to hear that and think, mine does not feel light, and mine has certainly not been momentary. But look closer at what he is actually doing. He is not minimizing his pain. He is telling us what it is small compared to, an eternal weight of glory that outweighs it. That is not the same as saying the pain is not real. It is placing the pain inside a frame large enough to actually hold it.

The Good That Suffering Is Actually For

Romans 8:28-29 tells us God works all things together for good, and then tells us plainly what that good is. Being conformed to the image of His Son. Not the removal of suffering. The shaping of us into Christlikeness through it. Paul writes elsewhere of wanting to know Christ and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death. We are quick to celebrate the resurrection every year. We rarely sit with the fact that we were also united with Christ in a death, and that suffering is one of the actual places we come to know Him, not despite the ache, but somehow through it.

If we simply endure suffering silently, bracing until it passes, we never let it do this conforming work. Bracing does not produce Christlikeness. It produces hardness. And if we treat suffering only as a problem to pray away, we rarely stay long enough for the Spirit to finish what He is doing, because we are always trying to exit before the work is complete. Walking by the Spirit in the middle of real suffering means neither bracing nor escaping. It means letting the ache shape a deeper capacity for compassion, a more honest love for God and for the people around us than we may have had without this particular fire.

Faithfulness Was Never a Solitary Act

None of this means suffering alone, or that gritting our teeth in isolation is somehow more spiritual. Self compassion is not the same thing as self pity, and letting someone else see what you are carrying is not a failure of faith. Cowper had Newton. He never carried his storms without a witness. Hannah had her family, her neighbors, an entire small community woven around her losses even when no one could undo them. Neither of them was faithful alone. Faithfulness that lasts is almost never a solitary act, and if you have been quietly managing your suffering behind a closed door so no one else has to carry the weight of it, I want you to hear that this was never the model Scripture, or Cowper, or Hannah actually gave us.

The Long Middle Is Not the Failure

If you feel like you are doing your suffering wrong because it has not resolved, because you do not yet have a testimony with a bow tied on it, I want to say this plainly. The long middle is not evidence of weak faith, and it is not evidence that you have prayed incorrectly. Cowper spent decades in it. Hannah spent a lifetime in it. The middle is not the failure. The middle is where almost all of the actual formation happens, and rushing past it, or pretending you are further along than you are, robs you of exactly what God is doing there.

If any part of this is landing somewhere tender, if you are genuinely in a season that will not let up, I would love for you to join me for Seen in the Wilderness, a live two-evening gathering on August 27 and 28 at 3pm Pacific. I am not promising your suffering will lift by the end of it. That would be handing you the second lie in a nicer package. What I am offering is what Newton offered Cowper, and what an entire small community offered Hannah across her whole life. Presence. A place to actually be witnessed in your own long middle, instead of managing it quietly for one more season.