The Ministry of Staying

From David McCloud’s message at Christchurch on August 30. He preached it. I’ve been chewing on one piece of it all week. — Jeff Reed

There’s a moment in Job almost nobody quotes, because nothing happens in it.

Job has lost everything. His children, his living, his health. Three friends hear about it and travel to him. They see him from a distance and barely recognize the man. Then they sit down on the ground next to him for seven days and seven nights and not one of them says a word, because they can see how great his suffering is.

Seven days. They got it perfectly right.

Then somebody opens his mouth, and the next thirty-odd chapters are three men explaining to a grieving father why this is probably his fault.

We all remember the speeches. The speeches are the warning. But those first seven days were the best thing they ever did, and that’s the part we skip.

I’m the guy who opens his mouth

I need to just say this plainly, because otherwise this post is me telling you to be better at something I’m bad at.

Sunday David McCloud pointed at a name in Colossians 4 I’d read past a hundred times. Aristarchus. He shows up five times in the New Testament and never says one recorded word. He’s just there… the riot at Ephesus, the ship to Rome, and here, in the cell, listed as a fellow prisoner. Which isn’t an honorary title. It means he’s in there too.

David called it the ministry of staying. His presence is a present.

And I sat there thinking: I am the opposite of that man.

I talk. It’s most of what I do for a living and a fair amount of what I do for free. When somebody hands me something heavy I can feel the machinery start up… the useful thing to say, the story that rhymes with theirs, the angle they might not have considered. I’m good at it. That’s the problem. Being good at talking has let me skip the harder thing for about twenty years.

I have sat with people in the worst week of their life and filled the silence because I couldn’t stand it. Church, that’s not ministry. That’s me managing my own discomfort with somebody else’s pain as the occasion.

Why we do it

Most of us don’t fail at this because we’re cold. We fail because sitting with someone in pain is genuinely uncomfortable and talking makes the discomfort stop.

Watch what actually happens in the room. A friend tells you something devastating. Inside of ninety seconds you’ll feel the pull toward one of four things: a solution, a silver lining, a story of your own, or a reason this might be happening.

All four close a gap that just opened. All four move the moment away from their pain and toward something you can manage.

Which reframes the whole question, doesn’t it. The rush to fix usually isn’t generosity. It’s relief-seeking. And the relief I’m seeking is mine.

Job’s friends are the proof. They were extraordinary while they were only sitting there. They fell apart the second they started explaining. And the explanations weren’t stupid, either. They were tidy, theological, and confidently wrong about a man they were looking straight at.

What it actually costs

Let me be honest about the price, because “just be present” sounds like the easy option dressed up as the humble one.

Staying costs hours you don’t get back. It costs the small social credit of being the person who showed up and didn’t perform. And it costs the specific discomfort of sitting inside a problem you can’t fix while every instinct in you says do something.

Mostly it costs repetition, and that’s where I quit.

Almost everybody shows up in week one. The meals come. The texts come. The room is full. Week six is empty. Month four is emptier. And the grief isn’t smaller in month four, it’s usually worse, because the noise stopped and now the person is alone with it.

Aristarchus shows up five separate times, across years, in five separate disasters. That’s not a gesture. That’s a pattern, and the pattern is the whole gift.

What I’m going to do about it

Church, here’s what I’m actually trying this week. Not a system. Four things I can do badly and still get right.

Go, and say the small true thing. I heard. I’m so sorry. I don’t have words. Then stop talking. The urge to fill what comes next is the one to fight.

Don’t explain their suffering. Not God’s reasons, not the lesson, not the good that’ll come of it. I don’t know, and it isn’t the hour even if I did.

Make it concrete. “Let me know if you need anything” hands the work to the person with the least capacity to do it. “I’m dropping dinner Thursday, leaving it on the porch, you don’t have to talk to me” takes every barrier away.

And put week six in the calendar right now. This is the one I think matters most. Set a reminder for a month out and another for three months out. You’ll be one of the very few still there, and that’s when it counts.

The half I’m worse at

There’s a second half to this and it’s harder than the first.

You need an Aristarchus. So do I. And you don’t get one by accident.

That lone-wolf instinct runs deep in me. Handle it privately. A real Christian should be able to carry this. Admitting the weight would be a kind of failure. And then there’s Paul, writing from a prison cell with his name on half the New Testament, closing his letter by naming the people holding him up. Not embarrassed about it in the slightest. He seems to think it’s obvious.

So the next move might not be finding somebody to sit with. It might be telling one person the real answer to how are you. Not the summary I’ve been handing out for months. The actual answer.

That’s not weakness. On the evidence of Colossians 4, that’s how this was always supposed to work.

So… who’s your Aristarchus? And whose could you be, starting this week?

Tell me Sunday. I’d like to hear it.

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