by K. J. Ramsey
29 Siegel, Mindsight, 211.
30 Curt Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2010), 133.
31 Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1983), 228.
32 Henri J. M. Nouwen, Here and Now: Living in the Spirit (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 54–55.
33 Nouwen writes that the real danger is to distrust our desire for communion. In the absence of connection, we begin to shame ourselves for wanting it. But desire for love and connection is our God-given longing for home, for himself. Nouwen, Here and Now, 56.
34 Cloud, Changes That Heal, 70.
35 1 Cor. 12:14.
CHAPTER 4
EMOTION
Present to Pain, Receptive to Grace
Pain—is missed—in Praise
—EMILY DICKINSON, POEM 604
My eyes are worn out from crying.
LORD, I cry out to you all day long;
I spread out my hands to you.
—PSALM 88:9
I wake in pain. My feet hit the cool wooden floor, rigid from heel o toe. I walk slightly crumpled to the safe cushioning of the couch, where I can sink again.
The Word says joy comes in the morning, but I can’t remember what it feels like to wake without weariness.
The world is waking in the cobalt blue of predawn, and I want to wake too, out of the stupor of a body that hurts, out of the soul fatigue of longing that, like embers, grounds me in the ashes of my own sadness. I want to want Jesus more than the elimination of pain and the alluring light of my phone, so I turn thin pages to the Psalms, where I learn to want. My wanting is feeble, but in trading scrolling for approval on a screen for listening to the Person who bound himself to my pain, and me to his life, I feel a rising warmth. On the pages of my journal I let my deep-blue feelings merge with tangerine hope, forming desires into words that liberate and lift, the pen my confessor, the pages my sanctuary.
Morning is where I learn to want instead of long, and words form into hope like steam. I wake in pain. With words chosen, absorbed, and formed, I rise in hope.
Pain isn’t the enemy, but it does feel like it. We tend to look at our discouragement as a problem to be solved instead of a place to be comforted. If pain precipitates a struggle to believe God is good, we think it must be a problem to push away. The main way most Christians know how to cope with difficulty is to paint pain with truth. When we see hopelessness in the eyes of our friends, we remind them God is faithful.
“He’s working all of this together for your good.”
“You just have to believe he has a purpose for your pain.”
“You have to believe God is sovereign.”
What if our reminders of truth are rough brushstrokes over a masterpiece-in-progress that must be witnessed to be made whole? What if our quick insistence of God’s goodness is keeping us from experiencing his presence in the places we most fear he has abandoned us? What if our fear of facing suffering is keeping us from living?
While snow still coated the St. Louis ground in the winter of 2011, I finally found the first job I loved, a job that used the degree I had fought to receive, the credential that signaled to my soul I was a fighter who wouldn’t let sickness keep her from achieving her dreams. After a short, depressing stint as an underpaid temp at a hospice organization, I found a position working for our church’s community development nonprofit. Writing fundraising letters and stuffing envelopes and occasionally consulting about asset-based strategies felt like a stamp of approval. I mattered. I could contribute to the world. I had insight to offer and skills to use. The economy and my body couldn’t hold me back.
Each day, I’d drive past Forest Park, where svelte runners in leggings and shorts started to seem less like objects of my envy and more like a possibility of my future. I’d glance at Washington University and picture myself in a classroom, deep in debate, head turned up in the glory of thoughts coming together, getting a master’s in social work on the way to changing the world. Ryan and I joined a church small group, where, though we were the youngest by twenty years and the people were admittedly quirky, the burden of loneliness began to dissipate. I started to feel less afraid of paying the bills. On Saturdays we would wander the aisles of the Soulard Market hand in hand, splitting a croissant and gathering produce for the meals I’d create that week. On Sundays we had people to hug. We were no longer nameless faces with a flimsy future. We were making a life for ourselves, and I thought it was all straight from God’s hand.
With each passing day of winter’s long stretch to spring, wrapping my fingers around the black steering wheel became more difficult. The four-mile stretch between home and work started to feel like thirty. At work, I’d prop my chin up with my elbow and reposition and yawn my way through the day. The effort to keep my body erect embarrassed me; I wasn’t sure how to be a twenty-two-year-old and let my new coworkers see that my body felt seventy. I’d fight back tears on my way home, afraid of losing everything we had barely started to enjoy, and then I’d hobble my way up to our cheap second-floor apartment and sink into the couch until Ryan got back from his day at seminary. The clash between his days and mine was like crimson mixed with green. He’d come up the stairs exhausted but buoyant with hope about our future, only to see me on the couch again, having barely held back my tears until the warmth of his embrace.
Ryan couldn’t hold the full weight of my tears, and I couldn’t bear the pain in my body dimming the light of each passing day. We both felt the energy of a good future disintegrating in the void between our two polarized bodies. The fear, pain, and anguish of my body shattering the shape of our future was sucking all the oxygen out of our newborn marriage. Ryan’s empathy flickered like a candle near the end of its wick, and I added “pissed” to the top of the list of grievances I held against God but couldn’t acknowledge out loud.
We quickly reached the emotional limits of our young marriage and found ourselves desperately emailing our pastors for advice. We set up a meeting with one of them in St. Louis and also started sharing about how bleak things had become with the pastor back in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who had married us. Walking into our pastor’s office in St. Louis felt like failure but created relief. I revealed the tears I had kept hidden at my desk down the hall, and Ryan wrapped words around the helplessness he felt watching me hurt. I don’t even remember that pastor’s name, but I remember his acknowledgment of our vulnerability breathed enough courage into us to let our new community see our struggle. Simple dishes of home-cooked Chinese food showed up on our doorstep, and Trader Joe’s frozen meals started to fill our freezer as our private sadness began to be shared by a small group of people we were just beginning to like, let alone trust.
It was uncomfortable and embarrassing but occasionally sweet, and the kindness infused us with just enough energy to move forward. With me unable to keep working, our seminary life in St. Louis was no longer affordable. God had called Ryan to become a pastor, and now it seemed he was allowing my body to turn Ryan’s calling into a taunting mirage. My hands couldn’t hold dishes at the sink, and our hearts couldn’t hold a dream dissolving. Our pastor in Chattanooga asked us to consider moving back to serve alongside him at the church we had helped plant during our engagement. There was no paid position, but there was the safety of familiar faces and friendships with enough history to hold our faltering faith and help my fragile body with the basic necessities of life.
Ryan and I started our marriage with burning ambition, but suffering forced us to uncoil our hands from our good dreams. We left St. Louis one year into marriage with open hands, broken hearts, and a cornerstone of acceptance that looked like resignation and felt like failure. Autonomy dies hard.
Suffering slows the pace of our lives by exhuming our vulnerability. Bodies and souls experiencing lasting grief, disease, discouragement, and disappointment cannot help but struggle. Anxiety rumbles. Irritabili
ty rises. Groans abound. Suffering affects us, no matter how much ambition we possess.
Suffering was slowing our life, forcing us to be unmasked and destabilized. While our friends seemed to be on an upward trajectory, we were spending our days growing accustomed to tears, palpable sadness, and the frustrating reality of having one spouse too sick to do more than exist. It was an existential crisis as much as a crisis of our faith.
Slowing down our life to the pace of my disease was simply the beginning of a terrible, beautiful descent into the place where, I would find, God had already made his home.
The deepest anguish of suffering involves coming up against the divide in ourselves between believing God is loving and feeling it is true. It’s the divide I encountered when sickness forced us to move back to Chattanooga for support, and the one you probably face again and again when life feels far from what you hoped it would be.
We learn early in life to dismiss our inner experience, thinking if we could believe the right things about God and pain and relationships, then our lives be good. In our churches, homes, and friendships, we are much more comfortable approaching God through the domain of intellect than the realm of emotion, not realizing emotion guides the flow of our lives whether we acknowledge it or not.1
Reframing our thoughts about God will never be enough to cross the divide between our painful experiences and God’s love.
Pain invites us into the canyon where we will be made whole. It brings us to the limits of our understanding of God and to the end of our sufficiency. Suffering walks us to the anxious edge of knowing God and asks us to instead be known by him. Our inability to think our way into hope is a grace, because hope comes through being known.
The divide in ourselves between our pain and our hope is illuminated by the divide in the hemispheres of our brains.2 Here is where knowing and being known come together and where pain can begin to be transformed into praise. In Psalm 86:11, in the middle of distress, David asks a striking thing of God: “Teach me your way, LORD, and I will live by your truth. Give me an undivided mind to fear your name.” To live by the truth, to find our way through the vast darkness of suffering, we need God to give us an undivided mind.
Our brains are made up of the left and right hemispheres, or sides. You’ve probably heard people refer to being more “right-brained” or “left-brained,” but both sides represent ways of knowing and being that must be brought together in order for us to live with any amount of well-being.
The right side of the brain is more active than the left in the earliest months of life, building the neural connections babies need to begin forming a relationship with their mother (or primary caregiver), themselves, and the outside world. The right side of the brain forms the connections we need to be aware we have a body full of sensations existing in time and space among other bodies thrumming with nonverbal communication. It gives us the capacity to grasp an overall sense of experience, including the social and emotional tone of the context we occupy.
The left side of the brain becomes active slightly later than the right and forms our linear, logical, lingual, and literal processing. It helps us make sense of our experiences, including God’s place in them, works hard to resolve any confusion we experience, gives us a sense of our individuality or separateness from others, and produces our ability to engage in right-versus-wrong thinking. The left side of the brain tends to dominate in situations in which we are searching for knowledge; not surprisingly, our questions of why suffering is happening and how we can make it stop certainly keep it firing.
Both sides of the brain are needed for us to be whole, but our culture fosters and rewards left-brained living, teaching us the path to security lies in knowing right from wrong. As we step into the gray fog of suffering, we come up against the limits of logical processing. Curt Thompson writes, “But when such analysis is the dominant mode by which we encounter other people or God . . . , joy becomes merely a defined concept. . . . However, the right mode of operation enables us to open ourselves to be touched by God and known by him in such a way as to become living expressions of love. The integration of the left and right systems is required to experience being known by someone else.”3
Expending vast amounts of mental energy on finding the reason you ache and grieve might be keeping you from being known and supported in your struggle. Grasping to find the purpose in your pain may be the very thing preventing you from experiencing comfort and even transformation in your suffering.
In Romans 12:2, Paul writes, “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God” (emphasis added). Being transformed in life and in suffering must involve renewing our minds to know and be known with undivided brains. Whole brains, whole hearts, whole faith. We need the right side of our brains to lean toward trusting the God who says he is good.
Left-brained living says knowledge is what we need to be secure, but the gospel says being known by God is the security we long for.
In chapter 2 we discussed the importance of remembering the time we are at in the story of Scripture. Like remembering the time, remembering the truth matters, but there is more shaping our ability to remember and believe than we realize. The canyon between our pain and God’s love feels wide because we each have a lifetime of experiences shaping our perceptions of God and our ability to navigate the rushing flood that seems to carry us into darkness.
Faithfulness in suffering requires radical honesty paired with remembrance of who God is. But how we “remember” God is far more complex than agreeing with the statement that God is good. Memory is forming the substance of your days and relationships every moment of every day, including how you experience God as either for you or against you, a concept we will explore in more depth in chapter 7.
You and I push away our pain by covering it with silence or an emphasis on truth that feels aspirational because we were created for communion but live in a story where independence appears to reign. The subtext of our suffering is shame—the dreadful sense that we are inadequate to deal with our lives. Individualism grasps for hope to respond to shame, producing social media slogans anxious to shine light into our shrouded souls: You are enough. You are enough. You are enough. The surprisingly good news is that we are not.
In the center of Scripture is a starkly different response to our suffering, a response that brings both sides of our brains together. The psalms show us being fiercely honest about not being enough is what creates and sustains intimacy with God. In chapter 2 we considered the way shame tells us a story that we will be alone, abandoned, and exposed, without any help but our own. The psalms offer a way to step into another story, where God pursues us with love, clothes us, and unites us to a power greater than our weakness. The Enemy is always leveraging shame to isolate us from God, ourselves, and one another. It masquerades as wisdom by stopping the flow of honesty in relationships through prioritizing the right words and thoughts about God over conversations seasoned with the salt and sweat of our humanness. The psalms invite us to be known by God in the substance of our inadequacy, and as they reveal our dependency again and again, trust becomes the structure of our souls.
We tend to hide our inability to cope with discouragement. The psalms provide an alternate pattern of basic, necessary, and transformative exposure. The witness of the psalms demonstrates remembering God in our pain by responding to him, the One who made us and seeks us. The psalms offer a conversational means of uniting mind and heart, honesty and truth, despair and hope, humans and their Maker.
We struggle to dwell in the tension between our pain and our need to praise, but the psalms hold us in a conversational traction. Kathleen Norris writes, “This is the danger that lies hidden in Emily Dickinson’s insight that ‘Pain—is missed—in Praise’: that we will try to jump too quickly from one to the other, omitting the necessary but treacherous journey in between, sentimentalizing both pain and praise in the proce
ss.”4 The psalms place us in paradox when we would rather detach from pain’s pressure, and they show it is only in candor with our Maker that pain can dwell with praise.
Others might not be comfortable with our most honest, desperate cries, but the psalms make it exceedingly clear God is. This is the prayer book of God’s people, written in the language of desire that situates our pain next to praise. Not hiding pain underneath praise. Not whispering about it. The psalms display God’s people attuned to their pain and willing to express it in striking vulnerability, defeating “our tendency to try to be holy without being human first.”5 They show us how to speak what seems unwelcome inside the doors of a church, to speak to God with frustrated urgency, as David did in Psalm 83:1: “Do not be deaf, God; do not be quiet.” This is not the language of presumption or arrogance; it is language of relationship, which lays the foundation of trust.
The language of the psalms is the primal language of need that forms trust, the relational matrix being created by the right hemisphere of the brain in a baby’s earliest months of life. Describing the relational language of the psalms and how it teaches us to pray, Eugene Peterson writes, “It is the language we use naturally at and around the great nodal points of human life when our being is emergent or centered or questioned or endangered.”6 In our culture we are much more conversant in language that distances us from our vulnerability, forming the bulk of even our prayers around ideas and requests more than the underlying reality that our existence depends on connection to another being.7 We don’t know how to communicate with God in the language of relationship, but the psalms offer us a way.
Here we find a response to God as the One who made us out of an overflow of his love, who is always seeking to enfold us in his care. The psalms show us how to acknowledge our pain with honesty. They teach us to approach God from the place of being undone instead of the prison of pretending we are self-sufficient and invulnerable. And in expressing our spitting frustration, derelict desperation, and arresting anguish, we mysteriously experience being heard. Relating to God as needy, moody, exhausted children forms hope, praise, and trust. Without vulnerability, the truth that God’s love is steadfast remains abstract. Tears, groans, and sighs create the relational atmosphere where we can allow God to parent us. Weakness acknowledged and expressed forms trust.