If we cannot trust God to keep bad things from happening to us or to those we love, how do we trust God at all?

After typing that question, Tish Harrison Warren read it aloud and got up from her computer where she worked daily on her book Prayer In the Night. It took a week before she was ready to continue writing.

“That’s why you have to write this book,” she told herself, ​“because everything else you were dealing with is trying to avoid this question.”

In her book, and in her interview with Nathan Foster this week (one of her most real and honest, she mentioned), Tish explores where to find comfort when life has us lying awake worrying and weeping.

It’s tempting (at least for me) to try and figure things out before we write or share publicly, or to have a solution before we visit someone in pain. But the gift of writers like Warren is that through writing they feel their way toward an answer and share their journey for the reader’s benefit. You might say it’s the gift of presence in the form of words on a page. And whether through the written word or sitting with someone in silence, it’s often our presence — Christ in us — that comforts more than any neatly wrapped explanation ever will.