Part 7: Staying Leaving and the Harder Questions
THE AIR WE BREATHE Part 7: Staying Leaving and the Harder Questions
People in difficult situations inside Christian communities tend to get one of two kinds of advice. The first is stay. Persevere, commit, work through it, because running from difficulty is rarely the answer. There's genuine wisdom in this, and genuine love often motivates it. But when it's offered to someone in a genuinely harmful situation, it can function as a way of asking them to keep absorbing damage in the name of faithfulness.
The second is leave. You deserve better, no community is worth your wellbeing. There's genuine love in this too, and sometimes it's exactly right. But offered without discernment, it can short-circuit something the person needed to work through, or deprive a community of the presence it most needed. Neither answer, given as a rule rather than in wisdom, actually serves the person asking. And the stay-or-leave question may not be the most important one to consider.
The Christian tradition has a word for the slower, more demanding work of sitting with a question long enough for the noise to settle and something truer to become audible: discernment. Our strongest feelings in moments of pressure and pain carry the weight of our unprocessed history along with the current reality. The decisions made from the most acute point of pain aren't always the ones that, looked back on later, seem wisest.
There are situations where staying, remaining present and continuing to be true to yourself and your convictions, is the most faithful and most costly thing a person can do. That’s not staying as silent compliance, or as indefinitely absorbing harm, but staying as a form of loving, clear-eyed patience that doesn’t abandon the community to its worst tendencies. Jeremiah didn't leave Jerusalem when it would have been easier and safer. He stayed, weeping over the city, speaking into a situation that showed no signs of responding. He authentically carried and expressed the grief of what was being lost while remaining present to the people losing it.
Staying well requires clear self-knowledge about what you can sustain, it’s not the call to martyrdom, or to bitter resignation. It also means finding the places where genuine life exists within the larger structure, even if those places are smaller or less central. And it requires, above all, a settled clarity about why you're there. Clarity that can survive the seasons when nothing seems to be changing and the cost of being present is steep.
But there are also situations where leaving is faithfulness, just a different kind. When staying requires a degree of self-betrayal that can't be sustained without serious damage to your integrity, health, or capacity to continue doing what you're called to do, then leaving isn't running away. When the community has made clear, through sustained pattern rather than momentary difficulty, that it has no genuine interest in changing what needs to change, then the question is whether the community is in a position to receive what you carry, and if not, whether continuing to offer it in this context is stewardship or simply damage.
Leaving well, when leaving is right, means as far as possible leaving without bitterness, which doesn’t mean leaving without grief. Grief is appropriate and healthy and shouldn't be minimised. But bitterness is grief that has curdled into something that eventually damages primarily the one carrying it. It also means being honest with yourself about what you're leaving and why. Not the version most flattering to yourself, but the version that’s most honest. And it means, if at all possible, leaving well, in a way that holds the door open for future conversation, not because the community necessarily wants that generosity, but because it’s good for you.
Underneath the stay-or-leave question, though, there's a harder, but very important one: what am I carrying out of this, regardless of whether I stay or go? The most important thing about these situations isn't what they do to our circumstances, but what they do to us. The fearful patterns they can produce. The subtle contractions that happen within when we've been hurt enough times. The places we stop going, the risks we stop taking, the parts of ourselves we quietly retire because offering them has been so costly.
This internal landscape is what we bring into every subsequent relationship, every subsequent community, every act of leadership or service of love. The invitation is to carry this experience into the light. To find the trusted companions, the counsellors, the friends secure enough to hear and hold our story without flinching. To do the necessary, often slow work of processing what happened honestly enough that it doesn't simply go underground and shape everything from there.
What you've lived through has given you something others need. The sight to name what's happening. The compassion that only comes from having experienced these dynamics yourself. The wisdom that only comes from having been somewhere and survived it and understood it. The question is whether you'll carry it as a wound that keeps reopening, or as a scar that has become part of the particular strength of who you are now. That choice, more than any other, is yours to make.