This Too Shall Last

by K. J. Ramsey

  There is a bigger, truer story than shame, striving, and hiding.

  Suffering makes us want to hide, but God pursues us in our naked shame so we can be known and clothed. When Adam and Eve deflected God’s healing pursuit after their sin, he pursued them and provided for them anyway, clothing them in animal skins to cover their vulnerable bodies outside the safety of the garden.11 Later God provided the lasting clothing for our shame, the righteousness of his Son, who came to live in a fragile body like Adam’s and Eve’s, like yours and mine, in a world where shame appears to hold the power over the possibility of what our lives could become.

  We often feel crushed by the weight of our suffering—with no other response possible but to hide or give up or pretend we believe—because we forget our pain started in a story bigger than personal failure or inadequacy. We see our days descending into a darkness we fear, and we don’t remember our lives are woven into a story larger than the sum of twenty or eighty years.

  Your life is part of a story larger than your own, but if you do not hear and remember and tell the bigger story, you’ll stay confused, lost, and weary. When you only see the pain of your past and present, you are wandering without the map to your future joy and future home. You’re a desert in a drought, crumbling and cracked and in need of the rain of reminding and remembrance.

  There is a love that transcends time. There is a story larger than the reality you see.

  To find our way through the shame of suffering, we must look to another’s shame lifted up. We must remember the story where pain was born in sin, shame came from a serpent, and God came to find us.

  There is a story that transcends our suffering by entering into it.

  The gospel is good news for sufferers, not only because it makes joy in suffering possible but also because it creates and demonstrates our joy through God’s great grace of entering a body that would groan, cry, and die. The gospel establishes a pattern of incarnation as the right response to suffering. Instead of dropping a word of truth, we should be compelled by the gospel to stand in each other’s suffering, in bodies displaying God’s truth, in our willingness to be honest about darkness, death, and the defeat we feel.

  A larger story encompasses our stories of suffering. To inhabit and experience the story that is far better than self-sufficiency, we have to learn how to tell the time in light of where Scripture says we exist in the bigger story of God’s love.12 It’s not just Thursday; it’s Thursday in redemptive history, in a story where Jesus came but has not yet returned.

  God entered the human story in the body of his beloved Son to provide the clothing for our shame we could never sew with our grasping, fragile hands. He doesn’t turn away from our shame; he pursues us in it with loving sight and his own body. In John 19, we read that when Jesus was crucified, the soldiers stripped him, took his clothing, and divided it among themselves by casting lots. They put him to open shame. Jesus hung on a cross—naked and exposed—so you and I could be clothed in his love.

  We lose hope in navigating our stories of suffering because we need to know, feel, and experience the story that God has drawn near. This is the context of the unfolding story of this book and the unfolding story of your suffering: God has drawn near in the presence of his Son and his people and has provided the clothing you need to be whole. Where we attempt to cover our own shame, Jesus became shame for us.

  One day Jesus will return with power to reclaim all that feels lost to shame and suffering. His warm, wounded hands will hold our downcast faces, looking us in the eyes with respect for the pain we’ve endured; and with the utmost gentleness, he’ll wipe every tear from our eyes. Death, grief, crying, and pain will be done.13 God will return to live with us forever.

  Here in the space between Jesus’ resurrection and our final tears, we have to remember the time we are at in the story. Shame will try again and again to disorient and disconnect us from the hope God has provided, but its defeat is certain. When we remember to tell the time, we remember our individual stories are part of the larger story of humanity broken, beloved, and redeemed. We have not been left alone in our suffering. Rather, we’ve been pursued by the God who made us, clothed by his own experience of shame, and invited to be known in the weakness we most fear.

  Here in our hurry and hiding, we are invited to the grace of being known. The wounds of suffering require dressing we can’t apply or change on our own. The story of love can’t be lived with spoken truth but hidden hurt. God is moving us from hiding to honest, from naked to clothed, from ashamed and alone in singular stories to attached and amazed in a shared story of his solidarity with suffering and his unending commitment to redeem us in love.

  NOTES

  1 Not all shame is inherently bad. It’s a biological response meant to protect us from harm and abandonment. Even so, evil uses it to powerfully disrupt our ability to be grounded in the love of God and other humans. In his book The Pandora Problem, E. James Wilder makes a helpful distinction between relational shame and toxic shame. Relationships require shame to maintain health, and we each need to foster the skill of giving and receiving healthy shame messages to acknowledge the truth of how we are living alongside the hope of where we are headed. E. James Wilder, The Pandora Problem: Facing Narcissism in Leaders and Ourselves (Carmel, IN: Deeper Walk International, 2018).

  2 Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 24.

  3 Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t): Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough” (New York: Gotham, 2008), 13.

  4 Thompson, The Soul of Shame, 67.

  5 Judith Lewis Herman, “Shattered Shame States and Their Repair,” in Shattered States: Disorganised Attachment and Its Repair, ed. Judy Yellen and Kate White (London: Karnac, 2012), 160–61.

  6 Ibid.

  7 Thompson, The Soul of Shame, 25.

  8 My older brother and younger sister both have autoimmune diseases, along with a wild number of others strewn throughout both sides of our family tree. One time my sister’s doctor actually told us, “So, basically, your family has pretty f’d-up genes.” Usually when I share my family history with a new doctor, they look dumbfounded and say something like, “Wow. I’ve never seen a history quite like this before.” It’s super fun.

  9 Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila Craighero, “The Mirror-Neuron System,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004): 169–92.

  10 I wish more Christians knew that suicide is not the result of a lack of faith or a lack of truth. Suicide results from complex pain in broken bodies aching for redemption. We remain a people of hope when we are honest about hopelessness. If you are feeling hopeless, please share with someone. If you can’t bring yourself to share with someone you know or don’t have anyone to call right now, you can always call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline anytime, day or night, at 1-800-273-8255. You are worth every awkward, hard conversation. Your life matters.

  11 Gen. 3:21.

  12 I am not sure where I first came across the concept of “telling the time,” of remembering where we are as saints in redemptive history as a central means of knowing how our stories are part of God’s larger story. I think it was probably while studying at Covenant College, perhaps under Dr. Kelly Kapic. Bryant Myers also refers to our need to “know what time it is.” Bryant L. Myers, Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practices of Transformational Development (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2009), 21.

  13 Rev. 21:4.

  CHAPTER 3

  TRIUNE LOVE

  You Were Made for Relationship

  To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. . . . Love is my true character. Love is my name.

  —THOMAS MERTON, NEW SEEDS OF CONTEMPLATION

  I’m hiking to a waterfall with friends, glancing at yellow trail markers on trees as I soak in the scent of ponderosa pines and marvel at the sight of their towering sple
ndor. Light pours through the heavy canopy of branches above like small streams of heaven into the darkness of the thick forest. I’m nowhere more alive than with my feet on the spongy softness of pine needles, my eyes dancing in the glory of green, and my fingers pointing out the tiny theophanies of small, wild things.1 The mountain bluebird’s shy song joins the sparrow’s ringing refrain, their melodies merging in a chorus of joy. I smile in the freedom of creatures who sing, sustained and fed by God. My mind lights with Jesus’ reminder to “consider the birds of the sky: They don’t sow or reap or gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth more than they?”2

  As I turn my daydreaming mind from the bird-filled trees back to the trail, though, I no longer see my friends.

  I call out, but no one answers.

  Where can they be?

  My heart beats faster as I turn my head from side to side, searching the forest for faces.

  Maybe they kept going without me, since I walk a little more slowly than they do. Sometimes my arthritic gait slows me down.

  I keep walking, trying to calm my pounding heart, hoping I’ll find my friends around the next turn in the trail, laughing and calling for me to catch up.

  I reach the next bend and the next, and they are still nowhere in sight. The sparse forest light that was enchanting now seems threatening. It’s dark out here, and eerily quiet. I stop walking to listen for noises of people, but all I hear are the birds, which frankly are now the farthest thing from beautiful or encouraging. I’m alone, and unlike the birds, I am not built to survive by foraging, thank you very much.

  I keep walking for a few minutes, but the trail is blocked by a large fallen log, moist and decaying in the damp air. I try to cross it, but it’s too big. I can’t get my legs up high enough to straddle its heft. My arms are too weak to hoist myself up. I shove branches aside, looking for a way around the impasse. Thorns scratch my hands and arms, and branches snap against my face, as I struggle through the thickness with fury and alarm. Why couldn’t they just wait for me?

  I’ve found a way around the log, but in my slight detour I’ve lost the trail entirely.

  Where are they?

  I scream. I yell. I start to cry.

  I’m alone in a place I usually love, and I’m not sure which way to go in the haunting amber glow of sunset that is pulling the little light left into a dark, cavernous night.

  This is how suffering can feel.

  Suffering is like a forest whose light is threatening, a place we lose our companions. We panic as we wonder if we will ever find a way out. When suffering invades our lives, we feel lost, left behind by the church while they keep blissfully hiking toward a waterfall of grace we fear we’ll never reach.

  The thing is, we aren’t the only ones who are lost.

  Without a theology of suffering rooted in a relational understanding of personhood, the whole church loses her way to her true hope and home. The church has swallowed self-sufficiency as the goal of living, and in doing so, she struggles to nourish saints with the food of communion. The church puts herself in a wilderness by allowing her life to be guided more by the storylines of individualism and shame than the story of communion. In this wilderness, we’re unable to hear each other’s cries for help. We stare admiringly at solitary pine trees, pondering their longevity and assuming that strong, faithful lives grow in the soil of our individual determination to be rooted in biblical truth.

  When we do not have a theology of suffering rooted in communion, we are left with platitudes, empty promises, and people wandering instead of wonder-ing. We become lost in the forest of unexamined individualism, hiking toward a waterfall that will never satisfy eyes made to dance and glow in the glory of communion.

  We are all lost. Rediscovering the goal of our personhood rooted in the inner life of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is where we will be found.

  What the weary and broken and secretly apathetic and pious alike need today is not more prodding to believe God is good. From cradle Christians to those flirting with entering the church’s front door, from the poorest to the richest, from the cynic to the pastor, we all need to be captivated by a love greater than our guilt. We need to be captured by the story where individual effort melts in a rushing river of shared grace. We need water that flows when we are fragile, grace that girds when we are weak, hope that holds us when our hands are empty, holiness that hears and shatters our pride, and a faith far deeper and more mysterious than a mere affirmation that God is good. We need to be pulled into God’s goodness in embodied experiences reflecting who he is.

  “What we need today,” Scottish theologian James Torrance writes, “is a better understanding of the person not just as an individual but as someone who finds his or her true being-in-communion with God and with others, the counterpart of a Trinitarian doctrine of God.”3 The church desperately needs a revised anthropology, a fuller vision of ourselves as embodied and relational and our stories as beautifully, inextricably bound together in a larger story of love.

  To find our way through suffering, we must trace the contours of how God made us for relationships in bodies shaped by relationships. After God made sky and earth out of formless emptiness, spoke light into being, and channeled water and dust into sea and soil, before birds and trees had names, he said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.”4 God stooped to the dirt of his brand-new world and breathed us into being to reflect his relational likeness. We were made to reflect the “us” and “our” of the God who created all things by the power of his voice and breath.

  As Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God is a community of love—one God yet three particular persons relating to each other in perfect unity. The best summative description Scripture gives of God is love. John tells us in 1 John 4:16, “We have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and the one who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him” (emphasis added).

  God’s inner nature and activity of love reveal the most fundamental ground and goal of our existence. The triune God is the reality in which “we live and move and have our being.”5 Dallas Willard’s words help us imagine the goodness of the Trinity’s constant communion: “Think of the most vibrant personal company that you can imagine, and multiply that by a factor of infinity, and you have begun to get a glimpse of what God is doing, where he is, what he was doing before the foundation of the earth, and what he will be doing forever. That is the being upon whom a life without lack relies. Such a life is guaranteed for those whose minds are set upon this God in faith.”6

  This is our end—sharing in God’s absolute, eternal delight.7

  We were created as an overflow of the eternal joy existing between Father, Son, and Spirit in their perfect love for one another. Our existence is pure gift and generosity, springing from love rather than need. As my mentor, systematic theologian Kelly Kapic, writes, “The God who did not need to create, who is eternally complete in himself, is the God who does create, who continues to uphold what he created, and who takes a personal interest in each life and molecule of creation.”8 That we embodied breaths of dust9 even exist is a wonder beyond our comprehension. Love created us, sustains us, and invites us into his joy.

  We were made in the image of the God who is relationship. The image of God is not simply in you and in me. It is in us. The reflection of God’s well of inner love is most visible in how you and I relate to one another; his light of love is refracted and its color formed in our shared presence.10 The breath of God enlivening our dust into love is most visible in the space shared between us. We most reflect God not simply in our individuality but in our interdependence.

  Being made in the image of the God who is love means being made for relationship.11 The goal of living as a person created to reflect, radiate, and receive love can never be self-sufficiency. It has to be communion.

  As psychology professor John A. Teske writes, “. . . we are ourselves only in communion. What
we are about is outside ourselves, is other. What we are, even as our individual selves are not internal spaces, connected to each other, but literally, and externally, composed of each other. We redeem each other bodily.”12 We become most human, the radiant reflections of God, through relationship.13 Communion is the substance, sustenance, and resolution of humanity, the invitation to share in the eternal joy of God. It happens—we become most fully human—through interdependence. We most reflect and radiate our glorious God not when we are standing strong, tall, and self-sustained but when we hold each other up in respect and self-giving love.

  Being human is about living in relationships that affirm and contribute to our uniqueness and unity, relationships that empower through self-giving, relationships where dignity and individuality are upheld and nurtured, relationships where we encounter one another with reverence. Theologian Serene Jones affirms this, writing, “God created me among us, me inseparable from us, me for us and them for me.”14 When we relate to one another with sacred attention, we step into the light of who God is. God’s inner life of love is reflected in our gazes and glances, our words and shared silences, our prayers, tears, and sight, our long hugs in the terrors of the night.

  We were made for communion, and our bodies, brains, and even the most primal patterns of human development show relationships are the center of our existence. From conception to death, we cannot survive or sufficiently develop outside of relationship. Who we are, both in our understanding of our identity and in our ability to regulate the basic functions of living with hearts that beat and lungs that breathe, comes into being only through relationship.

  Every human is born into the vulnerability of dependence; our experience with one another forms the structure of our brains and the possibility of our thriving.15 We are born with an innate longing and need for connection, demonstrated in the formation and energetic flow of our infant brains to attach to our parents or primary caregivers.16 We were created to form a secure sense of self and worth in the matrix of eye contact and being heard, held, and soothed. Our earliest moments and months form the foundation of a lifetime of being able to trust and love both humans and God. Our relational experiences shape our mind’s capacity to experience God as trustworthy, loving, and present—or not.