Dr. Daily is a pediatric cardiologist, and Dr. Devers is a psychologist. Both authors are evangelical Christians writing from within the community they describe. The narrative voice that follows is Dr. Daily’s.
The first time I watched Inside Out, my kids were piled all over the couch beside me. Like most parents, I expected what Pixar movies usually deliver: something entertaining enough to keep the kids engaged while I half-paid attention in the background. But something different happened.
As the movie unfolded, I found myself unexpectedly emotional. And then, toward the end, I was surprised to find myself crying. Not the quiet kind of tearing up you try to hide from your kids but rather, uncontrollable tears that caught me completely off-guard. I wasn’t entirely sure what had affected me so deeply, only that it had touched on something that felt profoundly true.
Sadness is not the enemy of faithfulness, and the impulse to suppress it may do more harm than the grief itself.
Near the film’s end, Joy realizes she has misunderstood something fundamental about Riley’s emotional life. Throughout the movie, Joy treats Sadness as a problem, as an emotion that needs to be managed, contained, or kept out of the way. At one point, Joy literally draws a circle on the floor and asks Sadness to stay inside it so she won’t ruin things.
But when Riley’s world begins to unravel, it isn’t Joy who ultimately helps her reconnect with her parents. It’s Sadness. When Riley finally expresses how much she’s hurting, her parents pull her close, and the family begins to heal. Sadness—an emotion that had been treated as a problem to be managed—turns out to be the bridge back to connection.
Reflecting on that scene, I have come to realize why it moved me so deeply. In many ways, the church treats sadness the same way Joy does. We contain it. We manage it. We draw circles around it with well-meaning theology and ask it to stay put. Pixar explored this tension so thoroughly that they returned to it in Inside Out 2, where Anxiety joins Riley’s emotional landscape. But the original film’s central insight remains the more urgent one for the church: sadness is not the enemy of faithfulness, and the impulse to suppress it may do more harm than the grief itself.
I see this play out often in my work. As a pediatric cardiologist, I care for children with complex congenital heart disease. Much of my work is hopeful. I get to celebrate with families when babies survive difficult surgeries or when teenagers who once struggled to breathe begin living full lives. But my work also places me in hospital rooms where families are experiencing unimaginable grief.
In the pediatric cardiac ICU, there are moments when the room becomes very quiet. The machines hum softly. Parents sit beside the bed of a child who has fought for every heartbeat. When friends and family arrive, they desperately want to help. They want to say something—anything—that might make the moment feel less unbearable. So they say the words they know.
“God’s got this.”
“Don’t worry, God has a plan.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”
These words are almost always spoken by people who care deeply and who wish there was something they could do to take the pain away. No one says them out of cruelty. They are attempts to bring order to a moment that feels chaotic and terrifying.
Standing in those rooms, though, I’ve often noticed something. The parents rarely look comforted. Most of the time, they simply nod politely because what they’re experiencing in that moment is not confusion about God’s plan. It’s grief. And grief doesn’t need to be explained. It needs to be seen.
Why We Rush Past Sadness
Why do we respond to suffering this way? Part of the answer lies in human psychology. When someone we love suffers, we experience what psychologists call empathic distress, or the discomfort that comes from witnessing another person’s pain. Because that feeling is unpleasant, we instinctively try to reduce it. Sometimes we offer solutions. Sometimes we search for meaning. And sometimes, we reach for explanations that restore order to a situation that feels chaotic.
Within Christian communities, this impulse often takes a spiritual form in phrases like “God has a plan,” “Everything happens for a reason,” or “He’s in a better place.” These phrases reassure us that the world still makes sense, the universe is fundamentally fair, and tragedy fits into some moral equation. When Joy insists on keeping Riley’s memories golden, she’s doing the same thing we do when we rush to theologize someone’s suffering: preserving the belief that everything is under control.
Related to that is our tendency to believe our attitudes or behaviors influence outcomes more than they actually do. “Just trust God more. Stay positive. Everything will work out.” These phrases may sound encouraging, but they can subtly imply that suffering might be preventable and stronger faith can somehow eliminate grief. Finally, we use religious language to avoid painful emotions. Statements like “She’s in a better place” or “Rejoice always” can sometimes function less as expressions of faith and more as attempts to move past discomfort as quickly as possible. Like Joy drawing that circle on the floor, we use theology to contain an emotion that frightens us.
None of this means the people who say these things lack compassion. Most care deeply. But the same empathy that motivates us to comfort someone can also motivate us to flee their pain.
When Words Become Harmful
Spend enough time around grief, and you’ll eventually hear someone say something like “God never gives you more than you can handle.” The phrase sounds biblical, but it actually misinterprets a passage that’s about temptation, not suffering (1 Corinthians 10:13). Anyone who has endured real loss knows that suffering often can exceed our ability to handle it. Grace meets us not in our strength but in our weakness.
Then there’s the phrase that grieving parents hear far too often: “God needed another angel.” The sentence attempts to impose meaning on a tragedy that defies explanation. Its logic quickly collapses, however. If God “needed” a child more than their parents did, the implication is that their death fulfilled some divine necessity. What was meant as comfort can instead deepen the wound.
Job’s friends made similar mistakes. They initially sat with him in silence for seven days, and that was the most faithful thing they did. But then they began explaining his suffering and theologized it into a framework of divine justice, and became a part of his pain rather than a balm for it.
The deeper problem behind our “comforting” clichés is not always bad theology. More often, it is our discomfort with sadness itself. The psalmists understood this, and did not rush past lament. “My tears have been my food day and night,” the writer of Psalm 42 confesses even while still clinging to hope. Scripture makes room for grief in a way that many of our churches do not.
What Real Comfort Looks Like
Real comfort rarely comes through polished explanations and seemingly spiritual phrases. Rather, it comes through presence. The most meaningful moments I’ve witnessed in hospital rooms are often quiet ones. A friend sitting beside a grieving parent. A nurse gently holding a baby whose life is slipping away. Someone placing a hand on a shoulder and simply listening.
Silence is often the right starting place. And when words are needed, they are usually simple, honest, and few. Comfort begins not with explanation but with acknowledgment. “I’m so sorry.” “This is incredibly hard.” “I’m here.”
In recent years, I experienced this firsthand, not as a physician, but as a patient myself. When I was diagnosed with a brain tumor, many people tried to comfort me with the same phrases I had heard so often in hospital rooms. “Don’t worry, God’s got this.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “God has a plan.”
I knew those words were spoken with love. But in those moments when fear and uncertainty felt overwhelming, they didn’t bring much comfort. For years, I had watched people try to manage grief the way Joy tries to manage Sadness. Now I understood what it felt like from the inside, to be the one sitting in the grief while the people around you instinctively reach for explanations that might ease the discomfort in the room.
The people who helped most, though, were the ones who did something much simpler. They sat with me. Some of them cried. One friend looked at me and said quietly, “I’m so sorry. I wish I could take this away. It shouldn’t be this way.” Those words didn’t explain anything. But they made me feel seen.
When Jesus arrived at Lazarus’s tomb, he already knew what he was about to do. He knew resurrection was moments away. And yet, standing before the grief of Mary and Martha, he wept (John 11:35). He did not rush to the miracle but entered the sorrow first. If the Son of God made space for grief before bringing hope, then perhaps we can learn to do the same.
The Courage to Let Sadness Speak
Joy spends most of Inside Out trying to keep Sadness contained—asking her not to touch the memories, not to interfere, not to make things worse. It’s only when Joy finally realizes she cannot fix Riley’s pain that she allows Sadness to step forward. And when Sadness does, something remarkable happens. Riley tells the truth about how much she’s hurting, and the people who love her pull her close.
In hospital rooms where children are dying, I’ve seen something similar unfold. When we stop trying to explain the suffering away—when we resist the urge to rush past grief—something deeper becomes possible. People cry. They hold one another. They tell the truth about what hurts. And connection returns.
Sadness, it turns out, is not the enemy of love. Sometimes it is the very thing that makes love visible.
