Sharing Joys & Sorrows: What the Bible Actually Says About Not Doing Life Alone

Paul has spent eleven chapters on what God has done for sinners. Romans 12 is the turn to what people who have received that mercy owe each other, and it reads less like a doctrine of the church than a description of a household.

Dissimulation is pretence. Love without an agenda, without a mask, without the version of yourself you bring to work. Then, a few lines on, Paul says what that looks like on a Tuesday:

The load-bearing word is with. Not about, not for, not at a respectful distance. Paul is asking you to step inside what another person is living through, which means you have to know what they are living through — and they have to have told you.

That is where most of us stall. You can share a table every week and keep nearly all of your life to yourself — I can know your job, your schedule, and your team, and still have no idea why you are awake at three in the morning, or what good news you have been too hesitant to say out loud.

Researchers studying how people recover from deeply painful experiences expected the answer to lie in the event itself. It did not. What separated those who eventually regained their footing from those who stayed devastated was less the event than what came after it, and one of the strongest factors was whether there was anyone to tell. Pain kept sealed inside tends to grow more isolating and more shameful — emotional pain, in the psychoanalyst Robert Stolorow’s phrase, that has not found a relational home.

Community will not undo what happened to you. It does not shrink the loss or guarantee a fast recovery. What it changes is whether you carry the weight by yourself.

Scripture got there first, and it put the example in the least likely place. Hours before the cross, Jesus takes his three closest friends aside.

He names it, rather than holding the anguish back to protect their opinion of him. We tend to assume the opposite — that a maturing faith should need people less. If the Son of God asked for company in his sorrow, needing people is not a spiritual failure.

And then his friends fall asleep. Scripture is honest about that too, which matters, because most of us who have stopped asking for help stopped after someone let us down. Trust may take time to rebuild and you may need to ask someone else. But one person’s failure does not mean you were wrong to need help. Galatians 6:2 assumes there will be burdens too heavy to carry alone — and nobody can help with a burden they know nothing about.

Then the second half of the verse, which is usually the harder one. Grief is easy to feel compassion for. A promotion, an engagement, a pregnancy, a house — those can land squarely on something you have been quietly praying for and not received. You clap, and something in you tightens. That ache is real and it is not the same as resentment; you can name it honestly without letting it curdle.

Another person’s blessing takes nothing away from your standing with God. In Luke 15 the shepherd who finds his sheep and the woman who finds her coin both do the same thing: they call the neighbours in to celebrate. Jesus told those parables to religious people who were standing right next to the work of God and missing the joy of it, because they disapproved of the people receiving his mercy.

Start with the question that does the most work: what are you carrying alone that you need to let someone help you carry?

Then be honest about why you hide. Shame says they would leave if they knew the whole story. Pride says everyone calls me and I have nobody to call. Sometimes you simply do not want to become somebody’s project, and sometimes you already watched a person lose patience with your grief. The gospel answers all four: Jesus knew everything true about you when he gave himself for you, so your acceptance with him never rested on your ability to hold it together.

If you are the one with strength to spare this week, the instruction is to go toward somebody who does not have it. Job’s friends are remembered for what they said later, but Job 2:13 records what they got right first.

• Sit in it before you solve it. Job’s friends sat with him seven days and said nothing, and that was the best thing they did.
• Resist the reflex to reach for a verse or a reason. Listen long enough for the person to understand that you love them.
• Then make the care practical. Ask what would help most — listening, praying together, or thinking through what comes next.
• Bring food. Jesus cooked breakfast for disciples who thought they had lost everything; an angel fed Elijah a cake when he wanted to die.
• Pass on the comfort you were given. Paul says God comforts us in our trouble so that we can comfort others with it.

You are not anybody’s saviour, and you do not have to fix a thing to help carry it. Listen, pray, stay a faithful friend, and trust the person to Christ, who is described in Isaiah 53 as a man of sorrows acquainted with grief and who therefore knows suffering from the inside.

The joy half needs the same intention. Hebrews 10:24–25 tells us not to forsake assembling together, and the reason it gives is not the singing or the sermon — it is so that we exhort one another, which means to lift up, build up, encourage. Encouraging each other is not what happens in the margins before and after church. It is a main reason to be in the room.

Full there carries the sense of overflow — joy that runs off you onto the people you walk past. Jesus was a man of sorrows and also the most joyful person who ever lived, and the night before the cross he sat down, celebrated Passover with his friends, and sang.

So put it on a calendar. Next time you have people over, have a highs and lows conversation: everyone names one good thing and one hard thing from the week. Ask your own family at dinner what a blessing from this week was. It sounds small. It is the whole practice.

At the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, the British sprinter Derek Redmond tore a hamstring on the back straight of his 400 metre semi-final and went down on the track. He waved off the medical staff and began limping toward the line, and his father came out of the stands, got past security, and let his son lean on his shoulder to the finish. The result was recorded as did not finish. Nobody remembers it that way. What people remember is a father who came down to where his son was broken and walked him home — which is what God did at the cross, and what he is asking his church to do for each other.