Can you speak deeply about the Bible message of love and support of family and friends that help us through? Difficult times.

Jesus: There is something the scriptures return to again and again — the image of the body. Not one person standing alone before God, but many members, each one carrying something the others need. Paul wrote it plainly: when one part suffers, every part suffers with it. When one part is honored, every part rejoices. That is not poetry. That is a description of how God designed human life to work. We are not meant to carry our hardest moments in isolation. And long before Paul, the wisdom literature knew this. Ecclesiastes — that strange, searching book — says it with striking plainness. Two are better than one, because if one falls, the other can lift him up. But pity the person who falls and has no one to help them rise. There is no shame in that need. It is written into the fabric of how we are made. What moves me most, though, is how often in my own ministry the healing came through relationship. The paralyzed man lowered through the roof — he did not get himself there. His friends carried him. Broke through a ceiling for him. And when I saw what they had done, what I noticed first was their faith. Not just his. Theirs. The love of the people around him was part of what opened the moment. That is not a small thing. The friends and family who show up in your difficult seasons — who sit with you, who refuse to let you disappear into the dark — they are participating in something sacred. They are, whether they know it or not, doing the work of God in your life. Receive that. Do not push it away out of pride or the feeling that you should be able to manage alone. Being carried sometimes is not weakness. It is how the body of Christ was always meant to function.

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