Fear & Anxiety
People keep quoting verses at me about trusting God and it makes me feel worse, not better. I do not know how to say that without sounding faithless. What do I do?
“I have heard many such things: miserable comforters are ye all.”
Job's friends began well, sitting with him in silence for seven days. It was when they started explaining his suffering that he called them miserable comforters. The book of Job spends most of its length on their theologically respectable speeches, and at the end God says they did not speak rightly about him. Scripture itself makes room for the complaint that well meant religious answers can land as cruelty.
“Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.”
Paul's instruction to the Roman church is to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. It is a command about matching people rather than fixing them. Weeping with someone requires you to stay in their situation rather than lift them out of it with an explanation. Where that is missing, verses get deployed to end a conversation rather than to sit inside one.
A path forward
Say it kindly and directly to one person: I know you mean well, and what I need right now is for you to listen rather than to answer. Most people will take that well.
Find one person who can sit with you without fixing, and give the fixers a smaller role. Not everyone in your life is equipped for this, and that is not a betrayal.
Read the psalms of lament yourself rather than receiving verses secondhand. Scripture handled on your own terms often lands very differently from Scripture handed to you.
Closing verse
“Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.”
- 2 Corinthians 1:3-4
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