Recently, while providing pastoral care to someone facing an especially difficult season, the person said something I have heard in different forms many times throughout my ministry: “I don’t know how people get through something like this without the Lord, without faith, and without a church family.”
I understand the question. When life becomes heavy, like when we are grieving, frightened, exhausted, or facing circumstances we cannot change, we naturally wonder how anyone manages without something larger than themselves to hold onto. But if the question is how we make it through life’s hardest challenges entirely alone, I am not sure that we do.
It is hard enough to make it through some seasons with the Lord, with faith, and with a church family. There are burdens so heavy that personal strength, positive thinking, and determined self-reliance are simply not enough. Perhaps we were never meant to carry them alone.
That may be one reason the old hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” continues to speak across generations. Joseph Scriven wrote the words in the nineteenth century, but they did not come from a sheltered or uncomplicated life. Scriven knew grief, disappointment, poverty, and loneliness. His hymn was not written by someone offering easy answers from a safe distance. It was written by someone who had discovered that prayer does not always remove our troubles, but it gives us somewhere to take them.
Again and again, the hymn offers the same invitation: “Take it to the Lord in prayer.” Those words echo Paul’s counsel in Philippians 4: “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” Paul does not say there will never be anything to worry about. He does not claim that faithful people will avoid anxiety, grief, or fear. He says that in everything, we may bring our lives before God.
The hymn puts it this way: “O what peace we often forfeit, O what needless pain we bear, All because we do not carry Everything to God in prayer.”
I have often stumbled a little over the phrase “needless pain.” Not all pain is needless. Some pain is the cost of loving deeply. Grief is real. Illness is real. Family conflict, caregiving, vocational uncertainty, financial pressure, and concern for our children or parents are real. To be clear, those burdens are not evidence that we have failed to pray. But we sometimes add another burden to them: the belief that we must manage everything by ourselves.
Many of us were formed to be self-sufficient. We learned to keep going, solve the problem, remain dependable, and avoid becoming a burden to others. We may be the person everyone else counts on. We may have grown so accustomed to carrying responsibility that we hardly know how to admit when it has become too much.
Prayer does not mean pretending the burden is light. Prayer means refusing to carry it alone. The hymn begins, of course, with friendship: “What a friend we have in Jesus.” In John 15, Jesus tells the disciples, “I do not call you servants any longer … but I have called you friends.” A true friend is someone before whom we do not have to pretend. We do not have to tell Jesus everything is fine when it is not. We do not need polished words, perfect theology, or unwavering faith. We can come to Jesus with our full selves. When we are angry, afraid, exhausted, confused, or grieving.
Hebrews tells us that Jesus understands our weaknesses. Matthew records Jesus saying, “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens.” First Peter invites us to cast our anxiety upon God because God cares for us. Jesus knows. Jesus welcomes. Jesus cares. And often, Jesus carries us through the friendship of other people.
A church family cannot fix every loss or answer every question. We will not always know what to say. But we sit beside one another. We pray when someone else has no words. We bring a meal, make a phone call, offer a ride, share a memory, or simply remind one another: You are not alone.
Faith does not make us invulnerable. Having a church family does not make life painless. Prayer does not guarantee that everything will turn out as we hope. But together I think they testify that no burden must be carried out in isolation, after all we have a friend in Jesus.
Whatever you are carrying this summer, the concern you cannot solve, the relationship you cannot repair, the grief that keeps returning, or the future you cannot control, hear the promise beneath this old hymn: You are not carrying it unseen. The friend we have in Jesus is already near. God’s care is already surrounding us, often taking flesh in the prayers, presence, meals, phone calls, and quiet companionship of a church family. Faith does not make the burden disappear. But it reminds us that even when we feel most alone, we have not been left alone.
Perhaps that is how we make it through, not by becoming strong enough to carry everything, but by being held within a love stronger than anything we carry. What a friend we have in Jesus.
Grace and Peace,
