Longsuffering Care in the Face of Long Suffering

God has given us as human beings an amazing resilience in the face of crisis and acute suffering. When devastation hits, we can generally respond with strength, wisdom, and fortitude.

But when that crisis carries on indefinitely, when the suffering stays and does not dissipate, the ability to bounce back and keep on keeping on starts to crumble. So as those called to care for brothers and sisters who are suffering in a long-term, chronic way, how do we come alongside with comfort, hope, and help?

Allowing Space for Faith-Filled Sadness

Wise and Christlike care for chronic suffering can take many forms, and this post explores just one of them: allowing space for faith-filled sadness.

When the life-altering health struggles remain undiagnosed yet undiminished, when the search for a job drags on into years rather than weeks, when the never-ending pressures and heaviness of caring for a family member with special needs is compounded by marital conflict, when an aging parent (or spouse) forgets who you are…these are the faces of chronic suffering. There is a sadness and heaviness that may linger in the life and demeanor of a chronic sufferer, and that sadness does not always indicate a lack of faith in their heart. Caring well for them means making room for sadness and faith to coexist.

It has been said that the best thing Job’s three friends did was sit with him in silence for seven days (Job 2:13), and that everything went south as soon as they opened their mouths. Their faulty perspective was that suffering is directly correlated to sin; they believed that since Job was suffering, there must be sin for him to repent of.

We can be miserable comforters like them by making a similar faulty correlation and a similar judgment: the presence of sadness or grief always indicates a lack of faith or hope, therefore snap out of your grief and trust God. Instead, Scripture makes it clear that faith does not eliminate sadness but can be present even in great sorrow.

Grieving With Hope

When the Apostle Paul gave words by which the Christians in Thessalonica were to encourage one another (1 Thess. 4:18), he reminded them of the hope of the resurrection. His purpose in reminding them of that hope was so they could think rightly about their brothers and sisters in Christ who had previously died, namely that they “may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (v.13). Notice that in reminding them of the hope they had, Paul did not say it was so that they would not grieve, period, but so that they would not grieve in the same way as those who don’t share that Christian hope.

Paul assumes they would grieve and allows for that grief to remain—his admonition is not for them to stop grieving, but to grieve in such a way that demonstrates the hope they have. In this he makes clear that faith in the resurrection does not necessitate the absence of grief; rather, they can be fully trusting in resurrection hope while still grieving their loss.

Paul himself spoke openly and often of his own affliction and sorrow. In 2 Corinthians 4:8-9, he wrote that they were “afflicted…but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; struck down but not destroyed.” And in the same letter he also stated that they were “treated as…sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (6:8-10). Clearly, the presence of affliction, trouble, or suffering does not automatically indicate one is in sin; likewise, the sorrow and sadness that accompanies that affliction may in fact coexist with the joy and hope of Christ.

Joy is not merely the absence of sorrow, but the faith-filled confidence that God is good in the midst of the sorrow. The goal, then, is not necessarily to eliminate the sadness—because we might, like Paul, "always [carry] in the body the death of Jesus” (2 Cor. 4:10)—but to allow the life of Christ to shine forth through the darkness we carry.

Groaning and Waiting

Romans 8:23 is clearly speaking of believers in Christ “who have the firstfruits of the Spirit.” But even with the indwelling Spirit of God, we “groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” Groaning and eager waiting can both be present in a believer’s heart. Similarly, Jesus said “Blessed are those who mourn” (Matthew 5:4), not: Blessed are those who stop mourning and put on a happy face.

Certainly ongoing sadness in a believer’s life could be an indicator of a sinful lack of trust in God, but since it is not always that, we would do well as comforters and counselors to not assume too quickly that lingering tears are indicative of a lack of trust. Even if there is a struggle (or failure) to trust—which undoubtedly there will be sometimes—as caregivers we can still show a long-suffering compassion toward our brothers and sisters facing chronic suffering, so that what they experience from us is gentleness and patience (like Christ) and not condemnation and shame for their weakness in the face of their unrelenting suffering.

Author (and chronic sufferer) Karrie Hahn states it well when she writes:

Therefore, we model Christ and embody his care for his people when we, too, resolutely determine to face difficult things by entering into others’ pain. In other words, growing in Christlikeness means following in the footsteps of Jesus, whose love for others always came at a cost to himself. Let us then seek to step into the shoes of those who are suffering. Let us sit down next to them on the ash heap of their lives, listening to them until we are emotionally moved by what they have faced and are facing in their lives. Let us be sad with them and weep with them, lamenting the things that should be that are not and the things that are that should not be. Let us acknowledge with them that the world is broken and mourn that reality together as we await the triumphant return of our Lord Jesus.

Karrie Hahn, Limping Heavenward: Living by Faith in Comprehensive and Chronic Suffering, © 2025 P&R Publishing, p. 178

So as we walk with our brothers and sisters in suffering that may not end in this life, may we display the patience and grace of Christ by bearing the uncomfortableness of their ongoing heaviness or grief, even as we long with them for that Day when all that is sad will be made right in the presence of our Suffering Savior and Friend.