by K. J. Ramsey
Our unexamined assumptions about prosperity and affluence, however, are nowhere more powerfully exposed than when we have to deal with chronic physical pain. We pray for the sick and hurting, asking for God’s miraculous healing powers, and it is good and right that we do so. But when the cancer grows rather than disappears, when the soul-crushing pain that we experience doesn’t go away after a few days or months even after genuine prayers and belief, when the painful months turn into years and the years turn into decades, we very naturally struggle to know how to respond, how to think about God’s goodness in the midst of this unrelenting pain and suffering.
We desperately need these witnesses. We need those who have walked with Jesus not just during the triumphs but during the dark nights of the soul. We need those who have felt like nails were being driven into their skin, day after week after month after year, who even in the ceaseless pain somehow speak of the beauty of Christ, of God’s compassion and tender care. Such testimony is what we desperately need, because without it we do not see Jesus clearly, either for ourselves or for others. Hearing that testimony clears our ears to hear the gospel even through the pain and not only apart from it. Hearing it, we gain courage in our faith to face our particular trials and tribulations, our fears and frustrations.
With these comments in mind, I would like to introduce you to a good friend of mine. I remember meeting K.J. as a young college student when she was one of my students. Overflowing with intellectual gifts and physical energy, she was eager and willing to change the world. She worked hard, loved people, and was serious about her faith. It didn’t take long to realize she was willing to do hard things for Christ and his kingdom. And then, out of nowhere came pain that was both debilitating and frightening. She didn’t know why it was there, where it came from, or whether it would leave. What was she to do? Days turned into months, months turned into years, and now well into her second decade of dealing with chronic pain, I have watched this godly woman testify of God’s presence and grace not in any of the ways she hoped or expected, but all the more powerfully, speaking from her weakness rather than strength.
Why should you listen to K.J.? Because she bears witness.
This book is a wonderful example of speaking the truth both about the heartbreaking hardships of life and also about the surprising kindness of our God, who is not distant but personal, present, and active. K.J. does not allow us to pick between being honest about our pain or being attentive to God’s goodness. One doesn’t choose between these two. One cannot choose between these two. And K.J.’s witness helps us to see that God’s compassion, forgiveness, and power are in the midst of our weakness, rather than in its absence.
As she allows us to eavesdrop a bit on her pilgrimage with God, she also provides insights into this God’s character. This God is more gracious than you or I tend to imagine. Might it be that this God’s vision of the flourishing life differs from ours? Might it be that the good news we speak of is not always accompanied by affluence, health, and power but is genuinely discovered in weakness, need, and dependence?
K.J. is not running from God but has found the wonder of the divine embrace, and she invites us to feel the warmth of our God’s presence. As she encourages us to trust this God with our hardships, she also offers us words of courage and kindness. It takes courage to believe God when our lives are filled with hurt. And it takes faith and kindness to derive our true identity and comfort from our connection with him rather than from our ability to produce.
I encourage you to read this book slowly, prayerfully, and with hope. Let her story help you realize you are not alone. And let her testimony of God’s kindness in the midst of chronic pain also help you know that the triune God himself is with you and for you. My prayer is that K.J.’s book will help you learn to more confidently rest in the love of the Father, in the grace of the Son, and in the power of the Spirit.
—DR. KELLY M. KAPIC, Professor of Theological Studies, Covenant College
NOTES
1 Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2003), 180.
2 Ibid., 181.
3 For helpful background, see Michel Battle, The Black Church in America: African American Christian Spirituality (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006). For more on the function of witness amid suffering see Kelly M. Kapic, Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017), 152–54.
INVITATION
This book is not a before and after story.
I’m writing this introduction as cold immunotherapy drips steadily into my bloodstream to control a disease from which hundreds of people, including myself, have prayed for me to be healed. With an IV in my hand, nausea on my lips, and a roomful of other sick people in my peripheral view, I’m well aware that some diseases aren’t healed. Some hard things stay in our lives until Jesus returns, so I’m here to tell a story from the middle, where so many of us live yet so few describe.
Perhaps like yours, my middle story is messy, and I’m not sure I can bear the mud it has recently smeared over our lives. Today uncertainty and stress are drowning out the sound of the TV while I stare vacantly past my husband’s face into our turquoise curtains, the ones I have to pack into a box to put into storage for the second time in a year. We are losing everything, again. Our livelihood, community, and home just evaporated in less than twenty-four hours. I’ll leave the explanation of our loss at this: all too often those with the most power have the least awareness of how they wield it, and when this happens in the church, hurt is inevitable. When power blinds people from accounting for their sin, someone else will always foot the bill. In this case, it’s my family, and I’m staring absently at the curtains because I’m not sure I can handle the heartbreak of being plundered by the church we’ve given our entire adult lives to serve.
This is suffering I didn’t expect to linger. I set out several months ago to write this book mostly intending to share stories from the past decade of living with an incurable, painful autoimmune disease and the grace that has sustained me along the way. I never imagined that while writing a book about finding grace in suffering, I would feel so bereft of grace because of suffering incurred in the body of Christ herself.
I’m not sure where grace is today, and I snap out of my trance in sudden anger, desperately wanting the thundering pain in my head and heart to be heard. I sling words at the walls and at my husband, Ryan, messy and unapologetically aggressive words, brash strokes telling the darkest story I fear is unfolding. I am honest, and I am hopeless.
Then I’m weeping and empty again, feeling as alone as a leaf floating in the middle of a lake, with no wind to blow me toward shore. I’ve used all my words, and I know this silence is going to deafen my hope. I’m heading somewhere dark, a mental exile that is hard to return from.
A few hours ago, my husband and I texted an older couple about going over to their house. They are the sole people in our new city, beyond our personal therapists, with whom we have fully shared what is happening.
“They said we can come,” Ryan mentions from the other side of the couch.
With the salt of my tears drying and my hopelessness absorbing all the oxygen from our soon-to-be-packed rental house, I feel the smallest swell inside. Ninety-one percent of me doesn’t want to go. Ninety-one percent of me doesn’t want to recount the rupture of our dreams or let other people hear me hurl my honest faithlessness at the sky. But in ten years of existing with profound pain, I’ve learned to listen to the 9 percent of me that wants connection as the wisest part of who I am.
So I find myself on a couch facing Tom and Sue with a pile of used tissues accumulating between me and my husband. We’re speaking our shock and sharing our tears, perhaps more raw and undignified than you might imagine a pastor and a licensed therapist to be, and they’re listening. They’re listening long and listening well. Our resounding pain hangs in the sticky silence of the May evening, but rath
er than dampening hope, this silence amplifies it.
Silence makes space for story.
Tom’s face is squirreled in hesitancy. He’s telling us about researching his family history and the encouragement he’s been finding in the records of his ancestors. He pauses. “I don’t want to be trite,” he reassures. I can tell he doesn’t want to cover our pain with a pretty spiritual bow. Hearing we don’t mind, he tells us about his Quaker forebears in colonial Virginia. The British government had passed a law requiring all colonists to have their children baptized in the Church of England, and the punishment for refusal was a fine worth an entire year’s wages. Rooted in their convictions, his ancestors paid the fine and absorbed the relational fallout in their community, a great cost that spiraled into years of suffering.
Tom recently procured his ancestors’ last will and testament. From the perspective of the end of their lives, they knew that the goodness and grace of God had encompassed their entire lives, including their many years of suffering.
Looking down at my bare feet, I trace the lines of Tom and Sue’s Persian rug while listening; its pale blue, rust, and pink are pockets of reprieve for my tear-tired eyes. I look up and nod as Sue says something in reply to Tom. Yes, this is, surprisingly, an encouraging story.
A thought pops into my head: I’m going to be okay.
And I know that’s why we came, even when I didn’t want to, even though I cursed the body of Christ all the way there, because 9 percent of me knew that it was in her midst that I would find grace. Not grace that fixes our pain. Not grace that rescues. In fact, I still don’t know how this new storyline of our lives will work out—how our bills will be paid, how our hearts will mend, or where we’ll lay our heads in a month. This is grace for today. Grace that sustains. This is grace that can come only on a couch, through personal presence, with vulnerability on full display.
If my experience of suffering and the stories of the numerous clients I’ve counseled are any indicator of what your life might include, then you’re likely also midstory in circumstances you did not choose, wondering when and how your suffering will end and where grace will come if it doesn’t.
Our society loves tales of rising heroes. We’ve so fused our American Dream with the risen Christ that when suffering enters our lives and does not leave quickly, all we know how to do is hide, judge, or despair. We’ve reduced the gospel to rescue, power to privilege, and hope to swift healing, reducing ourselves in the process. Western Christendom has long treated suffering like a problem to fix and a blight to hide. Eugene Peterson was right: “It is difficult to find anyone in our culture who will respect us when we suffer.”1 When our storylines do not match the arc of triumph we’ve come to expect and revere, we can feel stuck on the outside of both our communities and God’s grace.
You don’t need another before and after story; you need grace for the middle of your story.
If you are hoping to learn how to save yourself from your suffering, this book is going to disappoint you. If you want to be impermeable to pain, this book will probably make you mad. If you are looking for easy tips to move from groaning to glory, you might just want to give your copy away right now. But if you, like me, keep finding that all the faith you can muster won’t push your suffering over the edge of the cliff into your past, then I’d like to invite you to sit down at that fearsome ledge instead.
All I have to offer you is an invitation.
In these pages is my outstretched hand. Instead of claiming to have solutions, I’m inviting you to sit in the places where I’ve found sustaining grace, grace that is upholding me even now while my world seems to fall apart yet again. I’m no rising hero; I’m a chronically ill thirty-one-year-old who in the last decade has spent more hours sick on a couch than standing in the workforce. But it’s on couches, through tears, that I’ve come to see that living with suffering that lingers can mean more fully receiving God’s presence that lasts.
Come sit on my couch at the ledge, just like I’ve sat on countless couches across from my spouse, friends, therapists, pastors, and clients. You’re not on the outside here. Settle in. Push up the pillows just how you like them. Wrap that blanket over your legs. You might not feel comfortable yet, but I know there’s grace for you here.
I can’t offer a way to make your pain past-tense, but I can offer my presence. I won’t make you hide your hard things. Tears and expletives are welcome here. It’s difficult to look suffering in the face, and throughout this book we will name our hard things with courage, and sometimes it might make you squirm. But with my words of all the ways I’ve been sustained in a story I never would have chosen, I hope you’ll feel a greater Presence sustaining you.
Maybe you don’t know if this couch is for you. Maybe you don’t think your hard things are hard enough to matter, or perhaps you picked up this book to help someone else. This couch is for you too. You are more than welcome here. As you thumb through these pages, you’ll encounter something you may not like but do need: the truth that the weakness hidden in the hollows of your soul is the place where God wants to show his strength. To be human is to be vulnerable, and I think you’ll find your story in these pages as well.
Together, seated on what some might call a sideline, we’ll witness a mystery illuminated.
We’ll find that the pain we wish we could end, the pain most books on suffering promise to turn into a shiny transformation story, is actually the place we can encounter the most grace. Seated by the ledge where we’ve exhausted ourselves trying to push away suffering, we’ll see that pain embraced and accepted provides a panoramic perspective of the dawning of God’s new world.
We’ll watch for the dawn while acknowledging the dark. And as the black and blue of night recede with the radiance of the rising sun, we’ll realize we’re in the company of Jesus.
On the couch by the ledge, in a place most Christians want to rush right past on their way to glory, we’ll see glimpses of a glory already with us. We’ll encounter a truth best seen seated: that the greatest story ever told is of a God who so loved the world that he chose to suffer for it. We’ll see what we can’t see when we’re busy searching for the purpose in our pain or hustling hard to prove how valuable we are for God’s kingdom. Suffering has always been God’s means of rousing a sleeping world with his love.2
The world will keep shouting at us to stand, jeering and leering that weakness is shame, but Love already came to the couch to sit in the place of our pain. While the world has always worshiped strength, God chose weakness to display his love. The spectacle of God’s love was never power or prestige but descent. And it’s those who wear the spectacles of tears who best glimpse this beautiful descent. God became human, with blood that would spill and a heart that would break, to unite us to love that lasts. The One with power gave it up so that in our powerlessness we could know his presence.
Somehow it’s when we’re seated instead of standing, well aware of our lack of strength, that we can most clearly see his. Because Jesus chose weakness, it’s where we can receive strength. Suffering can be the place we wake up to the power and presence of Christ.
So listen to this more closely than to those who taunt or judge, including yourself: “God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God has chosen what is insignificant and despised in the world.”3 The parts of your story that seem to be keeping you from strength and significance are what God calls chosen and valuable. If you keep turning the pages of this book, maybe by the end you will too.
Here on the couch, I’ll tell you a story truer than my pain, greater than my woes, and more lasting than all that is disappointing you. You’ll see the surprising truth that the parts of our stories we most fear—and even most hate—are the places we can most be enfolded into God’s lasting story of love. We’ll find that the body of Christ holds the grace we need when suffering lingers—grace embodied in the life of Jesus, who chose to absorb all t
he pain we cannot handle, and his abiding presence in us by his Spirit and with us through his people, imperfect though they may be. We’ll learn that our brains and bodies were always meant to flourish in relationships, and that suffering invites us to sit in the space where we can be made whole. Grace exists in the space between us.
I pray that the space between us in these pages makes grace as tangible as the paper on which these words are printed. I pray that the small space we share through these chapters reveals the larger space within you, around you, and underneath you where God’s grace is more present than we can imagine. And I pray that seated together on the couch of this shared story, we both behold the sacred mystery of Christ in us, the hope of glory. The beauty of the dawn will overcome this night.
And one day soon, we will rise. We’ll trade our places on this couch for honored seats around a table. We’ll sit, with bodies that no longer ache and minds that no longer fear, and instead of pain, we’ll share laughter. The tears we needed to glimpse grace will be wiped away by Christ’s tender, scarred hands. And we’ll watch with wonder as God hurls death like a fireball into a fathomless sea, never again to be seen. Wrapped in the bright linen of our perseverance, we’ll see earth and heaven newborn. And from the silent spaces of sorrow within and between us will rise the most stunning song.
Glory will be our sun. Joy will be our inheritance. God will be our king.
With his words of “well done” still ringing in our ears, we’ll look at each other with smiles and see. This couch was a throne all along.