WILDERNESS BETWEEN PRAYERS

The following imagery, brought to life through the lens of Mitchell Royel, was captured amid the vibrant pulse of the fashion district. And as we take it all in, we're moving to the rhythm of "Goodbye" by Crunkz — a melody that perfectly underscores this moment.

Church, we need to talk this morning. We need to open up our hearts and let the Word do some work in us, because there is a lesson we keep missing — and it's costing us the very thing we say we are. A family.

We call ourselves a body. We stand up here Sunday after Sunday and we sing about it. We say we are one body in Christ. But we've got to ask ourselves the honest question: do we know what to do when one part of that body is broken? Do we know how to move when one of our own is bleeding out in grief right in front of us — even when that grief doesn't look the way we think grief is supposed to look?

Because here's what we've noticed. We are wonderful at celebrating. We know how to throw a party when the baby is born. We know how to shout when the promotion comes through. We know how to line up for the potluck. But when the phone rings at 2 a.m., when the news comes that shatters somebody's whole world — that's where we get clumsy. That's where we start fumbling. And that's where, if we're not careful, we do more harm than the silence ever could.

And sometimes — and this is the part we're going to lean into this morning — sometimes the person who is grieving doesn't show up with tears running down her cheeks and arms open wide, ready to receive our love the way we'd like to give it. Sometimes she shows up sharp. Sometimes she shows up cold. Sometimes she shows up picking fights we don't remember starting, going quiet in rooms we didn't know were charged, and making us feel like we've done something wrong when we don't even know what it is.

That's what we're talking about today. Not just how we carry people through grief. But how we carry people through grief when they're making it hard on us. When it is costing us something personally. When the grieving person is directing their pain straight at us and our community.

So let's grow up into this together this morning. Let's become the kind of church body that knows how to love people even when loving them is uncomfortable.

Now, before we go any further, we want to be clear about something. The story we're about to tell is a fictional illustration — a parable, if you will, set in the language of a community that could be our own. This is not a real person. This is not a documented situation. Any resemblance to someone you think you know is purely coincidental, and we want to name that plainly from the start.

We are using this story because storytelling is one of the oldest and most sacred teaching tools in all of Scripture. Jesus never stood up and said, "Let me give you a theological abstract." He said, "A man had two sons." He said, "A woman lost a coin." He said, "A Samaritan was walking down a road." Stories open doors in us that arguments never can. So we're going to walk through one together this morning — a hypothetical, a constructed scenario, a fantasy of sorts. Not because it's somebody's business to expose, but because truth sometimes wears the clothes of story to find its way into our hearts.

With that said, let's begin.

Let's start in Romans. Paul gives us a string of instructions in Romans 12, and we love to quote the ones about being fervent in spirit and joyful in hope. But right there in verse 15, tucked in among all of it, is a command we tend to skip: "Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep."

Now notice — we're good at the first half. Rejoicing with the rejoicing, that's easy. That costs us nothing. But weeping with those who weep? That asks something of us. That asks us to set down our own comfort, our own agenda, our own need to fix and explain, and simply lower ourselves down into the pit where our brother or sister is sitting.

That's the work. And it is holy work.

We've got to understand that when Paul says weep with those who weep, he is not saying show up, offer a Bible verse and a casserole, and then get back to our regularly scheduled lives. He's saying let their sorrow become our sorrow. He's saying we hurt when they hurt. That is what a body does. When we stub our toe, the whole body stops. The eyes water, the hands reach down, the mouth cries out. The body doesn't say, "Well, that's just the foot's problem." No — the whole body feels it.

Paul makes this plain in 1 Corinthians 12:26. "If one member suffers, all suffer together with it." All of us. Not the grief committee. Not the pastoral care team. All of us.

But here's the part we don't usually talk about. What happens when the suffering member is lashing out at the rest of the body? What do we do when the toe that's hurting is kicking everyone else?

That's our question this morning.

So here is our fictional illustration — our imagined parable, a scenario we're constructing as a teaching tool, with no basis in any specific real person or real event.

Imagine a young woman. Let's call her Abby. Abby is part of a church not unlike ours. She's been coming for a couple of years, found her footing in community, volunteered in the children's ministry, came to the midweek gatherings. She wasn't perfect, but she was growing. And the church loved her.

Then one ordinary week, without warning, Abby's boyfriend died. Suddenly. Shockingly. No goodbye. No time to prepare her heart. One moment he was there, and the next moment she was standing in the wreckage of a future that would never come. And because this is a story designed to be layered, let's say that this young man she loved carried a complicated image — someone whose reputation was mixed, someone that some people in that church community had privately questioned. His story was not clean. His past was not simple.

So now Abby is grieving someone controversial. She's carrying a loss that some people around her don't quite know how to validate. And that ambiguity — that complicated grief — has lit something inside her that is equal parts devastation and rage.

And here is where our story turns into its real lesson.

Abby starts coming back to church. And we, the church, we are relieved. We think, good, she's here, she's showing up, we can love on her. But something is different. Abby is not the Abby we knew. She's cool where she used to be warm. She snaps at volunteers. She sends short, terse messages when she used to send long, grateful ones. She posts things on her personal pages that feel like indirect jabs at the community. She stops signing up for things she used to show up for, and when someone reaches out to ask if she's okay, she responds in a way that feels like a door being slammed.

The microaggressions start showing up — not just from the people around Abby, but from Abby. The cold shoulder in the lobby. The pointed comment in the group chat. The quiet withdrawal that somehow manages to feel aggressive all at once. The eye rolls. The whispers. The way she tells a mutual friend that "this church" didn't really show up for her — even though people genuinely tried.

And the church? We don't quite know what to do. Some of us get our feelings hurt. Some of us pull back, thinking, we tried. Some of us start talking among ourselves. "What did we do? We did nothing wrong." "She's being ungrateful." "How long are we supposed to just take this?"

And here is the moment, church. Here is the exact moment we've been building to all morning.

That is the moment we have a choice. And the choice is this: do we make it about us, or do we see what is actually happening?

Because the real issue is grief. That is the thing underneath all of it. Behind every slammed door and sharp word and withdrawn volunteer, there is a girl who watched the person she loved disappear from the earth without permission. There is a girl who is so broken she doesn't have the language to ask for help, so instead she is pushing to see who will stay. She is testing us. She doesn't even know she's doing it. Grief does that to people.

Proverbs 14:13 says, "Even in laughter the heart may ache, and the end of joy may be grief." And we would add to that: even in anger, the heart may be mourning. Even in coldness, the soul may be crying out. Even in the microaggression, the passive-aggressive post, the icy silence — there may be a person whose grief has run out of better options.

Now, we are not saying that all behavior gets a free pass because someone is grieving. We are not saying there are no conversations to have or boundaries to maintain. What we are saying is that the first thing — the very first thing — we have to do is correctly diagnose what we are dealing with. Because if we respond to Abby's grief as though it is a church conflict, we will fail her. And we will fail ourselves.

Job said it plainly in Job 6:2-3. "Oh that my vexation were weighed, and all my calamity laid in the balances! For then it would be heavier than the sand of the sea; therefore my words have been rash." Job was saying, if you could feel what I feel, you'd understand why my words are rash. He was naming something true about human grief: it doesn't always come out clean. It comes out sideways. It comes out sharp. And the people around Job, instead of receiving that, started defending themselves and correcting him and managing their own reputations. And God, at the end of that book, said — they did not speak what was right.

We do not want to be those people.

Jesus Wept —
Even When It Was Complicated

Come with us to John 11. This is the shortest verse in all of Scripture, and it may be one of the most powerful. Verse 35. "Jesus wept."

Now let's set the scene, because it matters. Lazarus is dead. His sisters Mary and Martha are devastated. And here's the thing we've got to sit with — Jesus already knew He was about to raise Lazarus from the grave. He knew the miracle was coming. He knew this whole scene of sorrow was about to be swallowed up in resurrection joy.

And He wept anyway.

He didn't march in and say, "Why are you all crying? Don't you know I'm about to fix this?" He didn't lecture them about their lack of faith. He didn't rush past their pain to get to the good part. No — verse 33 tells us He was "deeply moved in spirit and troubled." The Son of God stood at the tomb of His friend and let the grief move through Him.

That is our model. Not the fixer who explains away the pain. The Savior who enters into it.

And notice something else about that story. When Jesus showed up late, Martha met Him with what almost sounds like an accusation in verse 21: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." That is grief talking. That is the raw, unfiltered, "where were you" of a broken heart. And Jesus didn't rebuke her for it. He didn't say, "I don't appreciate your tone, Martha." He received it. He let her be angry. He let her be confused. He let her be human.

So when Abby — our imagined, fictional Abby — comes back to church and her grief comes out sideways and it lands on us, the first question we ask ourselves is not "what did we do to deserve this?" The first question is: what is she carrying? And how do we become safe enough for her to set it down?

Because what Martha and Mary needed from Jesus was not correction. It was presence. And what Abby needs from us is exactly the same thing.

Now somebody in the room is already thinking: but how long do we do this? How long do we absorb the cold shoulder and the jabs and the passive-aggressive withdrawal before we're allowed to say enough?

Let's go to Ecclesiastes 3. The Preacher tells us, verses 1 through 4: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die... a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance."

A time to mourn. God built it into the rhythm of the world. Mourning is not weakness. Mourning is not a lack of faith. Mourning is a season, and we do not get to set the calendar for somebody else's season. We do not get to rush a soul through winter just because our own comfort is ready for spring.

And here's what's hard about walking alongside grief when it's being expressed as anger or withdrawal — it requires us to hold two truths at the same time. The first truth is that Abby is not responsible for our emotional comfort. The second truth is that we are not required to absorb every misdirected arrow without any wisdom or care for ourselves either. Mature love holds both. We stay. We remain gentle. And when it is appropriate, in the right season, with the right hearts, we have honest and loving conversations. But the timing of that matters enormously. We do not confront grief mid-sob. We do not demand accountability in the valley.

Paul tells us in Galatians 6:1 — and this is the verse right before "bear one another's burdens" — "Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted." Restore. In gentleness. With eyes on our own hearts. That is the order of operations.

So we make room. We make room for the long grief, the messy grief, the grief that comes out sideways. We do not put a stopwatch on sorrow. But neither do we disappear from the grieving person's life because their grief is making us uncomfortable. We stay. We adjust. We pray. We trust God with the timeline.

Jesus stands on the mountainside in Matthew 5, and He starts listing out who is blessed. And listen to verse 4. "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."

Church, hear that. There is a blessing in the mourning. There is a nearness to God that we only find in the valley. The psalmist tells us in Psalm 34:18, "The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit."

So when we sit with someone who is crushed — even when they are crushed and swinging — we are sitting on holy ground. God is near to that person. And if God is near to the brokenhearted, then the question we've got to ask ourselves is simple: do we want to be near where God is? Because God is not up on the mountaintop avoiding the difficult, complicated people. God is in the valley with them. God is at the tomb. God is in the room where the grief has curdled into anger. And if we want to be where He is, we've got to follow Him there too.

Lamentations 3:32 says, "Though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love." Even in the grief He causes — even in seasons that are painful and confusing and costly — God's steadfast love is the anchor. And we are called to reflect that same steadfast love to the people in our community.

Steadfast. Not conditional. Not "we'll keep showing up as long as she's pleasant." Steadfast.

Now let's turn to the passage we read at every wedding and forget at every hard moment. 1 Corinthians 13.

We love verse 4. "Love is patient and kind." But watch what Paul says next. "Love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful."

Love does not insist on its own way.

That is the heart of everything we're saying this morning. When our sister is grieving, love does not insist on its own way. Love does not need to be comfortable. Love does not need to be thanked. Love does not need the grieving person to manage our feelings on top of her own. Love sets its own preferences down and takes up hers.

Verse 5 says love "is not irritable or resentful." Grieving people are hard to be around sometimes. They cancel plans. They don't return calls. They snap. They pull away. They post things that sting. They leave conversations feeling like accusations. And real love — the love Paul describes — does not keep score. It does not tally up the wounds and decide at some point that the math no longer works. It does not get resentful when the love is inconvenient or costly or unreciprocated in the short term.

This is the love that separates a genuine community of faith from a social club. A social club loves you as long as you're pleasant. The body of Christ loves you in the valley. Even when the valley is messy. Even when the valley is loud. Even when the valley is directed at us.

And verse 7 — "Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." Love bears. Love endures. Love believes the best about Abby even when Abby is not making it easy to believe the best. Love hopes that this season is not permanent. Love holds on.

Bear One Another's Burdens — Especially the Awkward Ones

That brings us to the verse we want to build a whole church culture on. Galatians 6:2. "Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ."

We fulfill the law of Christ — the whole law, everything Jesus stood for — when we bear one another's burdens. Not when we sing the loudest. Not when we give the most. Not when we have the sharpest theology. We fulfill His law when we get up under the weight that is crushing our brother or sister and we help them carry it.

And notice — a burden is not something we carry for someone permanently. It's something we carry with them, alongside them, until they're strong enough to walk again. That's what we're called to.

Not to fix it.
Not to explain it.
To shoulder it together.

Now let us say something plainly: Abby's burden is grief. But from where we're standing, it can look like conflict. It can look like drama. It can look like a church problem that needs to be managed or mediated. And if we only look at the surface — if we only respond to what we can see — we will treat the symptom and miss the disease entirely.

There is a woman behind the behavior. There is a broken heart behind the sharp words. There is a person who lost someone she loved and is now pushing against everything around her because she is trying to survive the unsurvivable. And our job — the sacred, holy, inconvenient job of this church body — is to see her. Not just her behavior. Her.

James 1:27 tells us that pure religion, real religion, the undiluted version of our faith, is to "visit orphans and widows in their affliction." The word visit there in the Greek is episkeptomai — it means to look upon, to inspect, to come alongside with care and attention. Not a drive-by. Not a text. Not a meal dropped at the door so we can check the box. To look upon someone in their affliction with intention and care.

So we look upon Abby. We see past the passive-aggressive post and we see the affliction. We see past the icy greeting in the lobby and we see the grief. We look at her not with frustration, not with defensiveness, not with the eyes of people who have been personally wronged — but with the eyes of a community that knows what is actually happening here.

Now we come to the hardest word, and we're going to say it plainly. When Abby is aiming her pain at our church, it is still not about us.

We know. We know. It feels about us. It lands on us. It costs us something. Some of us have had our feelings genuinely hurt. Some of us have felt unfairly accused, quietly dismissed, talked about in ways that weren't fair. And those feelings are valid. We are not standing up here saying our feelings don't matter.

What we're saying is they cannot be the primary thing right now.

Philippians 2 tells us to have the mind of Christ, and what is that mind? Verses 3 and 4: "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of us look not only to our own interests, but also to the interests of others."

Count others more significant than ourselves. Not because our pain is not real. But because in this moment, hers is louder. In this moment, her world has collapsed in a way that ours has not. And the mind of Christ says — I count her more significant than my own discomfort right now.

Let us think about Job's friends for a moment. Job 2 tells us that when Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar arrived and saw Job's suffering, they sat with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him — "for they saw that his suffering was very great." Seven days. Silent. Just present.

They did great in those seven days. They did exactly what they were supposed to do. It was when they opened their mouths — when they started defending God's logic, when they started explaining Job's suffering, when they started managing their own theological reputations — that they ruined everything. And God, at the end of the book, said to them: "You have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has."

Sometimes the most powerful ministry we have is the ministry of the closed mouth and the open presence. Sometimes we serve Abby best when we stop explaining why her behavior is inappropriate and we simply decide that she is worth more to us than our pride is.

Now, we want to be pastoral and practical here for a moment, because this is not just poetry. We are talking about real community dynamics that real churches navigate.

When a grieving person in our community is directing their pain toward us through microaggressions — the passive-aggressive comment, the cold shoulder, the withdrawal, the indirect accusations, the social media post that is clearly but deniably pointed at someone in our circle — here is the wisdom we want to offer.

First, we name what we are seeing, privately. Not to the group. Not in the chat. We name it privately in prayer and in the leadership spaces where pastoring happens. We say: we believe Abby is grieving, and we believe some of her behavior is an expression of that grief, not a genuine reflection of who she is or what she truly thinks of us.

Second, we do not match her energy. We resist every temptation to respond to the passive-aggressive with the passive-aggressive. We resist the group conversations that drift into complaint. Romans 12:17 — "Repay no one evil for evil." Verse 21 — "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." We choose good. Over and over. Even when it costs us.

Third, we keep showing up. We do not disappear from her life because she has gotten difficult. We send the text. We hold the door. We say her name warmly in the hallway. We do not perform love — we actually practice it, in the small, ordinary, consistent ways that compound over time into something that cannot be denied.

Fourth, when the season is right — and wisdom, not pride, determines the season — we have a gentle, loving, honest conversation. Not "here is a list of how you've hurt us." But, "we see you. We know this has been one of the hardest seasons of your life. We want you to know we're not going anywhere. And we also want to say, gently, that we'd love to find a way to be close to you again. Is there something we've done that has made it hard to let us in?"

That is a conversation grounded in love, not in self-protection. And it leaves room for her to be honest without being ambushed.

Proverbs 15:1 says, "A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger." We are in the business of soft answers. Even when we haven't done anything wrong. Especially then.

Let us finish our fictional story, because it does not end in conflict.

Imagine our fictional community around Abby decided, collectively and quietly, that they were going to absorb the discomfort and stay. They didn't talk about it publicly. They didn't put out a statement. They just kept showing up — to the lobby, to the group chat, to the serving schedule, even when Abby's name was conspicuously absent. They prayed for her. They left the door open.

And one Sunday, months later, Abby walked back in and sat down in a section near some of the women she had been coldest toward. And at the end of the service, she found one of them, and she said, simply: "I know I've been hard to be around. I'm sorry. I don't really know what's been happening with me."

And that woman looked at her and said what we all pray we would say: "We know. We love you. We're just glad you're here."

That is the story we want to tell. That is the ending we are working toward. Not the ending where the church got its feelings validated. The ending where the grieving girl came back home.

Isaiah 61 says the Lord came to "comfort all who mourn... to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit." That is the work of God. Ashes into beauty. Mourning into gladness. Faint spirit into praise. And we get to be His hands in it — if we stay long enough, gentle enough, present enough to watch the transformation happen.

So this is our prayer this morning. Let us be the church that weeps with those who weep — even when the weeping comes out looking like anger. Let us be the church that makes room for long seasons of complicated grief. Let us be the church that correctly diagnoses what is happening before we decide how to respond.

Let us not make it about us when someone's pain is aimed at us, and let us not disappear when staying is hard. Let us be the community that Abby — real or imagined — can come home to. Let us be the kind of people who see past the behavior to the heartbreak beneath it. Let us extend the grace we ourselves have been given, freely and without condition.

Because we are a body. And when one part suffers, we all suffer with it. And when we bear one another's burdens — even the awkward ones, even the costly ones, even the ones that leave marks on us — that is when, and only when, we fulfill the law of Christ.

Let us go and be that church.

Amen.

-Pastor Mitchell Royel