There are seasons that do not resolve quickly.
I have sat with enough people, and lived enough of my own life, to know that some difficulties are not problems to be solved. They are seasons to be endured. Carried. Slowly moved through.
We are not always good at this. We live in a culture that prizes resolution. That treats suffering as a problem requiring a solution. That becomes uncomfortable with grief that lingers, with questions that remain unanswered, with pain that does not respond to the usual remedies.
And so we reach for explanations. For frameworks. For something that will make sense of what we are experiencing and tell us when it will end.
Sometimes those things help. But sometimes what we need is not an explanation. It is a presence.
I have come to believe that one of the most profound gifts we can offer another person in a hard season is simply to remain. Not to fix. Not to explain. Not to rush them towards resolution. But to stay.
This is, I think, something of what God does.
The Scriptures do not promise that hard seasons will be short. They do not promise that suffering will always make sense. What they promise is presence. Emmanuel. God with us. Not God above us, directing events from a distance. But God with us, in the middle of it.
I have found this to be true in my own life. Not always in the way I expected or hoped for. But true nonetheless.
There is a difference between being rescued and being held. Rescue removes you from the difficulty. Being held sustains you within it.
Both are gifts. But I have found that being held has taught me things that rescue never could.