By David Zuccolotto, Op-ed Contributor
It was my first day in a psychiatric hospital. The nurse seated me in a break room, dropped three large binders of regulations on the table, and grumbled, “Today, you just read the rules.” Fifteen minutes later, the overhead speaker blasted: Dr. Strong! Dr. Strong! A bearded man in a white coat burst through the door. “Grab these straps, tuck your tie in your shirt, and follow me. A patient bolted from the hospital.”
I still carry that afternoon in slides. A woman running like a deer, hair loose and wild in the wind. Ten men in white coats sprinting after her across the parking lot. A struggle in a small, windowless room. Her face — fear, confusion, grief, all of it raw and unguarded. My own exhaustion afterward, sitting against the wall, feeling something I couldn’t name: a kind of vertigo I had never encountered in a textbook.
Here is what I had before that afternoon: a PhD, years of clinical training, more reading about psychological suffering than I could catalog. I could describe the neurological signatures of a psychiatric crisis. I understood the frameworks, the diagnostic categories, the treatment models.
None of it had prepared me for the moment. I was no longer reading about suffering.
I was with it.
That distinction — about versus with — turns out to be one of the most consequential differences in human experience. It shapes how we navigate our own pain, how we sit beside others in theirs, and how we understand what God Himself did when He looked at a broken world.
To live about life is to take up a position just outside it. The self stays intact, sovereign, slightly removed — able to describe, categorize, and explain from a safe distance. It holds a thesis. It manages a framework. There is genuine comfort in this stance: nothing you merely analyze can fully reach you. You have the map to your suffering.
To live with life is something entirely different. It means being inside the experience as a participant, not an analyst. You are exposed, touched, and changed by what unfolds, no longer the master of the frame but a creature within it. There is a difference between treating reality as an object to be known — cataloged, measured, held at arm’s length — and encountering it as a presence you must stand before, one that is not waiting for your verdict.
We prefer about. It is safer. It preserves the sensation of being above a thing rather than inside it. Nowhere is this more visible than in suffering. When pain arrives — our own or someone else’s — we reach almost instinctively for explanation. We theologize. We theorize. We trace causes, find meanings, build frameworks. Sometimes this genuinely helps. But sometimes we reach for explanation precisely because it keeps us at a bearable distance from the actual experience of the thing.
Suffering, however, has a way of making the choice for us.
No one in Scripture illustrates this more precisely than Job’s three friends.
Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar arrive with sound theology. Their doctrine is internally coherent, drawn from tradition, and — in a general sense — defensible. They believe in a God of justice. They believe the righteous are protected, and the wicked eventually fall. They have the map of how things work.
There is actually a moment in the story when they are at their best. Before any of them speaks, they sit with Job on the ground for seven days and seven nights without saying a word, because they see that his suffering is very great (Job 2:13). In that silence, they are genuinely with him. It is only when they open their mouths — only when they start to explain — that they leave.
Their error, when they speak, is not theological. It is relational. They are about Job’s suffering, not with him in it. When his anguish refuses to fit their categories, they do what people always do when the map fails to match the territory: they defend the map. Job must have sinned. There is an explanation available. They offer it, press it, and repeat it across 35 chapters of argument.
They never stop being analysts.
And the detail that stops me every time I read this story: God, at the end, rebukes them — not for false doctrine, but for not speaking of him what is right (Job 42:7). Their content was largely defensible. Their posture was wrong. They stood outside the suffering and explained it. They were correct about God and strangers to him simultaneously.
It is possible to possess every answer and be nowhere near the presence.
Job does something his friends never risk. He stays inside the suffering.
He argues with God. He demands. He protests. He makes accusations that have made readers uncomfortable for 3,000 years. He says things that sound, to the careful ear, like faith pressed to its outer edge. And yet — he is never about the encounter. He refuses the safe distance. He speaks directly to God rather than carefully about God. His anger, even, is a form of with.
Asaph, in Psalm 73, traces a similar arc. He nearly loses his faith intellectually — the wicked prosper, the righteous suffer, the moral calculus seems broken. But the resolution does not come through a better argument. It comes when he enters the sanctuary and stands before God. The framework does not change. The encounter does.
Job never receives an explanation. What he receives is God Himself. And at the end, he says the most astonishing thing: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you” (Job 42:5). That is not a report of new information. It is a record of a changed relationship — the movement from knowledge about God to encounter with God.
His friends stayed correct. Job became close.
Here is where the movement from about to with becomes genuinely uncomfortable.
We want to believe we can choose our way from about to with. So, we try harder — more prayer, more journaling, a longer quiet time, etc. We sit in the therapist’s chair or the church pew and tell ourselves: stop analyzing and just feel this. But there is a reason this never quite works. The part of you that narrates and manages your pain is the same part doing the choosing. You are using the armor to try to take it off, but it has to fail your first before you know it needs to come off.
I have watched this in people who carry deep, longstanding pain. They arrive articulate — able to narrate what happened with remarkable precision, tracing causes, cataloging effects, organizing loss into a coherent account. Sometimes that fluency is genuine progress. But sometimes it is a fortress. The story has been so carefully constructed, so thoroughly mapped, that the actual experience of the thing never needs to be entered.
Explanation has become the barrier.
The self manages, explains, and theorizes right up to the moment it cannot.
And then — not through decision but through exhaustion — something gives way. The armor fails. The control runs out. The person stops because there is nothing left to manage. In that gap, something like presence becomes possible. This is not giving up. It is something closer to what Job experienced: the collapse of the demand to have it all figured out, and the strange, disproportionate rest that follows.
The whirlwind does not arrive while Job is still building his case.
It arrives after.
Christianity makes a striking claim about where God stands in all of this.
He did not stay above the story.
The God who possesses infinite knowledge about human suffering — who can map it with precision — chose not to remain the transcendent analyst. In Jesus Christ, He entered the territory. He experienced hunger, rejection, grief, injustice, betrayal, and death. The creator walked with us. The map bled.
The Incarnation is, at its deepest logic, God’s refusal to remain about. And this changes the shape of Christian suffering — because it means that when we are driven out of our frameworks and into the raw experience of pain, we are not moving away from God. We are moving toward the place where He already stands.
Paul understood this when he spoke not of comprehending Christ’s suffering but of sharing it — the fellowship of his sufferings (Philippians 3:10). The goal is not a better theology of pain. It is communion inside it.
The Bible opens with God walking with humanity in the garden. Sin introduces separation — distance, exile, the long architecture of life lived about rather than with. The entire sweep of redemption is the story of God working, across centuries, to close that gap.
And the last promise of Scripture names it plainly: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (Revelation 21:3).
The whole narrative — from garden to exile, from cross to resurrection, from Pentecost to new creation — was always moving toward a single word. With.
That afternoon in the parking lot, running alongside strangers in white coats, I crossed a threshold I hadn’t known existed. I had possessed, for years, an extensive map of human suffering — the terminology, the frameworks, the categories.
What I did not know until I was inside it was the territory.
I have come to believe this is the invitation suffering extends to every one of us: not to understand pain from the outside, but to inhabit it honestly, and to trust that the God who entered it first is already there.
He knows everything about suffering.
He chose, instead, to be with us in it.
Dr. David Zuccolotto is a former pastor and clinical psychologist. For 35 years he has worked for hospitals, addiction treatment centers, outpatient clinics and private practice. He is the author of The Love of God: A 70 Day Journey of Forgiveness.