“Are you still trying to maintain your integrity?” Job’s wife asks her suffering husband in Job 2:9. “Curse God and die!”

These harsh words are regularly cited as the ravings of an embittered woman whose faithlessness is condemnable. And, to be sure, her brief sentences brim with anger, perhaps even rage, and despair.

Of course they do.

Unnamed in Scripture, Job’s wife has just watched her family lose their herds, wealth, social status, and power. Her children are dead. Her husband’s health is declining. Job’s wife has been unable to stop any of it, so she cries out.

“What despair, what anger hides behind these two sentences,” writes Mélodie Kauffmann, winner of Christianity Today’s second annual essay contest for Christians who write in French.

Kauffmann, a nurse, finds a common thread between the anguish of Job’s wife and the suffering of patients’ family members that she regularly witnesses.

“In her terrible words, perhaps she’s just a helpless wife who can’t stand to see her husband suffering so much,” suggests Kauffmann. “And this is love. Clumsy, misplaced, without recoil—but love. Or at least sympathy … Job’s wife is deeply human. Are we ready to hear her human emotions?”

In our own seasons of suffering, and as we come alongside others in theirs, may we remember that God neither fears nor condemns our cries. Even when our faith feels like it is shattering, even when we want to give up, he remains ever present to us.