by K. J. Ramsey
During the same trip to Chattanooga, I visited one of my college roommates whom I hadn’t seen in years and listened as she shared the surprising way time has shaped her. Wrapping her hands around a cup of Earl Grey, Elizabeth looked up with a mixture of wonder and amusement and reminisced, “When we were in college, I remember learning how suffering was part of the Christian life, but I had never experienced it.”
She carefully lifted her steaming tea and laughed. “I remember thinking I wasn’t ready for Jesus to come back because I wanted to get married and have kids. There was so much good I wanted to experience in life first!”
She nearly rolled her eyes, and a kind, self-deprecating smile swept across her face as she confessed, “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my, I hope suffering can wait for a while at the very least!’ ”
Tears formed in Elizabeth’s eyes as she looked into mine and shared how starkly the last several years had diverged from her expectations. Every six to twelve months for nearly a decade, she had faced another massive loss, trauma, or painful change that would remain part of her life forever. From years of aching for children, to feeling family relationships shift and splinter in the wake of shared trauma, to watching her brother lose his fight to aggressive cancer, Elizabeth had come to know intimately suffering was not a distant possibility or short-term delay she could conquer or simply move past on the way to all she wanted.
Instead, she shared, suffering had somehow brought some of the most beautiful relationships in her life. Wondering aloud, Elizabeth admitted she still found herself treating suffering like an obstacle or source of shame cutting her off from good. Setting down her tea, she conceded, “It’s hard to stay in the place suffering takes me.”
Suffering is like a terrifying mountain whose peak is covered in clouds. We find ourselves midway in an ascent we did not choose. The path is strewn with rocks and bordered by sudden cliffs. The way forward is uncertain, unsafe. Our lungs burn to breathe in the thin air. How did we get here? Is a rescue coming?
Suffering breaks our hearts wide open, and the overflow of sorrow, anger, and anxiety terrifies us. Both our raw tears and our apathetic silence startle us in their pure intensity. How far such feelings seem from hearts that trust their Father! Hopelessness terrifies us, we who are supposed to be marked by hope. The senselessness of suffering gnaws at our souls, making us feel helpless and stuck. All our prayers, all our tears, and all the books we read to make sense of the senseless cannot lift the cloud hovering over the purpose of our pain.
Even as we ache, our bodies remember their original intention—union with their Maker. They are vessels made to collect, retain, and run over with God’s love. We were not created to suffer; as my husband has said, we are haunted by our original goodness. We want to escape the terrible cloud of suffering because it feels antithetical to being human. We want to escape suffering because we were not made for pain. We were made for love.
We wish suffering were a fixed point in time we could get past, but it is actually a place we find ourselves. It is a country we visit without wanting to, sometimes for long seasons. It is the cloudland we step into when anxiety screams all is not well, illness threatens mutiny once again, and relationships remain tainted by lack.
Suffering is a place we will repeatedly find ourselves in as we journey toward the wholeness God has for us in his kingdom. Whether we try to escape it or pretend we aren’t there, suffering is a place we will repeatedly occupy as we await the return of Jesus and the restoration he will bring.
Suffering is not a detour or a delay but the place where Love finds us.
Suffering is a place where what feels like absence is actually a safe haven where the truest love is formed.
Rather than the place we lose our selves, suffering is the place we find them.1
Suffering brings us to the threshold of who we are becoming. It walks us to the edges of our hearts, confronting us with the vulnerability we would normally want to ignore. It shoves us to the margins of our relationships, where our sadness or lack of improvement frustrates those we know. It elbows us into the borderlands of our relationship with God, where things we used to find comfort or joy in now feel empty. It presses us to the periphery of our personalities, where we’re fine one moment and full of fear the next. Suffering brings us to liminal, transitional space.2
The French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep coined the term “liminality” to describe a stage in rites of passage, such as the transition from childhood to adulthood, when we are not one thing but we also are not the other.3 In liminal space we are “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention.”4 I am someone with a disease, and I am more than my disease. I am capable, and I am limited. I have deep hope, and sometimes I’m hopeless. I exist in the space between the poles of my experience, and suffering creates startling polarity. In suffering that lingers, we experience an ongoing, shifting sense of who we are, sometimes reconciling ourselves with our pain and sometimes distancing ourselves from it. Rather than a one-time biographical disruption, long-term suffering can be a continuous, unfolding disruption.5
Suffering repeatedly brings us to liminal spaces where we stand at the threshold of who we were and who we are becoming, and the experience can be mystifying and terrifying. We are no longer the people we were before suffering started, and we long for the freedom we thought we had before things became so hard. You might wonder if you just need to grit your teeth until God finally returns to make everything right.
Priest and author Richard Rohr describes the distress we feel in the liminality of suffering: “Liminality occurs when you have left the tried and true, but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. If you are not trained in how to hold anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait, you will run . . . anything to flee this terrible ‘cloud of unknowing.’ ”6
When we experience suffering that does not cease, we sometimes feel locked in a soundproof room. We kick and pound against the walls to escape, but all our efforts to stop the experience of suffering leave us with bruises and disappointment instead of rescue and relief. Our cries ricochet off the walls, making us question whether God or anyone hears us. Feeling abandoned in cloudy circumstances that seem to stretch on forever is almost too hard to bear. In resentment, defeat, or exhaustion, we stop crying and start numbing. Cue Netflix. Pour another glass of wine. We numb, pretend, and ignore the pain and place of suffering because we feel incapable of facing our clouded lives. Deeper still, we fear being cut off from God’s love.
Suffering places us in obscurity, where we cannot see God’s purposes or presence clearly. When all the hard things stay in our lives instead of fading into the past, we may repeatedly experience what Christians through the ages have described as a dark night of the soul.7 Here God can seem distant, joy a lost jewel, and faith a pile of disassembled parts. We wonder if God has abandoned us. Or is he punishing us?
We were made for union with God and beautiful connection to one another, but suffering can make us feel utterly disconnected. Because every relationship in our world has been fractured by sin, we all find ways to manage the vulnerability of disconnection. We were made for relationships, but because of the fall, our relationships are never adequate to fill the gaping hole in our hearts, the desire for belonging and security. Underneath our fear in suffering is our deepest desire to be known and loved by God. We so fear being met with an eternal darkness that we anesthetize our anxiety with beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes that give a temporary hit of relief but never satiate our deepest need.
When the fog of suffering hovers over our lives, we are often subconsciously shoved back in time to places of earlier wounding. Our early experiences, including ones we don’t have words for or have downplayed as insignificant, steer our way forward through the fog. We respond to the confusing pain of suffering in the ways we responded in childhood to being neglected, intruded
upon, overlooked, or abandoned.
Evil distracts us from turning toward the place we fear by whispering the original lie of self-sufficiency. We assume our private pain is faithlessness to hide or a burden to shoulder alone. If we cannot keep ourselves from suffering, if we cannot summit the mountain of pain, we will at least privatize our suffering until it can be conquered.
We come to the place of suffering sweating under the weight of the jam-packed baggage of strategies we’ve used to cope with insecurity our entire lives. The tools we use to escape or dispel the fog of suffering are the same we’ve always used to try to protect ourselves from pain in life. Whether you view yourself as strong and secure or frightened and weak, you have found comfort in patterns of relating, in possessions, and in belief systems that temporarily shield you from the harshness of feeling disconnected from God and others.
Suffering unpacks our baggage, exposing the strategies we’ve always used to keep ourselves from feeling vulnerable. We spend so much of life busying ourselves to avoid feeling empty, amassing wealth to avoid feeling out of control, reading books to avoid seeming incompetent, and growing a career to avoid feeling purposeless. We find security in power, knowing the right answers, appearing interesting, and filling our time and bellies with exciting experiences and flavors. We fill ourselves with all that is not God to stomach the emptiness of not having what our souls were made for—perfect, complete, faithful love.
We face the terrible mountain of suffering and try to either ascend or descend on our own. Holding the ambiguity of long-term suffering feels like death; so we try to create our own comfort, our own rescue.
We reach out with weary arms to peel back the curtains of darkness looming in our lives. But in our reaching, darkness thickens. Our methods of escape are the machine of our discouragement, because they inevitably turn us back to ourselves instead of toward the relationships where our hopes can be held. As Kelly Kapic writes, sin “actually bends or curves us upon ourselves (homo incurvates in se). We were designed to embrace God and others, but instead we are now consumed with ourselves.”8 To evade the cloud, we end up building fortress walls around ourselves, further distancing us from the love we long for. The ways we try to escape suffering exacerbate the suffering itself.
I tried to escape the cloud of my suffering through the twisted pride of uniqueness. When I didn’t see anyone else whose life looked like mine, I believed my suffering was something no one could understand. I thought I was the only one I knew who was so afflicted. I couldn’t bear the cloud obscuring the meaning of my pain, so in the absence of meaning, I created some. God must have a special purpose for my pain. While my friends were trifling away at things that surely didn’t matter as much, I believed I was special, awakened to the reality of pain in the world.9 By believing my suffering was somehow special, I set myself up to differentiate myself from others instead of attaching to them. By so wanting a purpose in my pain, I placed distance between myself and Christ’s body. In losing my old life, I needed purpose and identity, but I tried to find it by elevating my uniqueness. Here is sin: acquiring my identity in contrast and opposition to other human beings.10
Another way of trying to escape is believing a lie that goes like this: “I don’t get to share my suffering with others because I’m responsible to care for others. I just have to suck it up because other people need me.” Sometimes we avoid feeling the real pain and discomfort in our lives by trying to refocus our energy on others. Minimizing our suffering as though it were not important, or because we just don’t have time to feel sad, or because we should be strong for our families and friends is just another form of pride. When we distance ourselves from our pain, we end up distancing ourselves from everyone. Suffering set aside again and again to help others becomes a burning ball of resentment toward the people we love and the God who made us.
Most of us see the cloud over the purpose of our pain and try to blow back the fog by finding an explanation. We devour knowledge about our suffering because we fear we might be devoured by our suffering. The gray tinge of suffering leads us to color in our confusing circumstances with crayons of our own making. I think God is teaching me . . .
We think that if we could find the reason we’re stuck in suffering, maybe we could learn the lesson and leave. The lack of answers and largeness of loss pierce our bodies with the fury of chaos. The incessant urge to spiritualize pain undervalues our embodied experience of it. Searching hard for what God might be teaching us is more indicative of anxiety than faith. When we grasp for tidy lessons or search tirelessly for some hidden sin we might never find, we are doing penance for a pain God already carried. Searching for the hidden lesson in our suffering detaches us momentarily from feeling the pain, but feeling our pain is where we can be known, grown, and filled with the hope we need.
When we overspiritualize our suffering, we turn our hearts away from the sacred mystery of how God is forming us in our suffering. Reflecting on having cancer, psychiatrist Gerald May writes, “I don’t have to look for spiritual lessons in every trouble that comes along. There have been many spiritual lessons to be sure, but they’ve been given to me in the course of life; I haven’t had to figure out a single one.”11
In the absence of a lesson, we try to create our own purpose. No one wants to admit it, but sometimes we channel our frustration about senseless suffering into plans to dazzle the world with our overcoming. We’ll make something of our suffering; we’ll profit from the pain. We’ll find our own remedies and sell their half-acting good to others. We’ll buy the essential-oil starter kit, secretly hoping we’ll be the next success story on Instagram. Or we’ll be beach body coaches, exercising our way out of sadness, pumping past our lingering questions about why God would allow our stories to hurt. Trying to turn clouds into sparkling rain only further divides our hearts from hope that lasts. The cloud of suffering is too thick for our effort. All the effort will leave you empty, with the cloud still looming. What will you chase then?
Our unique ways of escaping and avoiding suffering are rooted in a self-sufficiency that will never be enough. And, hallelujah, this is good news.
Suffering is not a mark on the timeline of your life. It is not a season with a clear beginning and end, or a problem you can overcome. It is a place you will visit again and again, a place whose clouds threaten and frighten but whose landscape can bring you nearer to your true home.
“Sometimes the only way we can enter the deeper dimensions of the journey is by being unable to see where we are going,” Gerald May writes.12 In the cloud, our layers of striving are dissolved. Our carefully crafted self-image of success and independence is being worn away. All that is not our true self—the self hidden with Christ in God—is being removed, often in ways we cannot entirely see or comprehend. On the confounding ground of our suffering, we are being transformed in what sometimes feels like complete darkness. As May writes, “God darkens our awareness in order to keep us safe.”13 Under cloud cover, we find the limits of our old ways of knowing God. Identities built on striving crumble into dust. In the mist, God gently removes the tattered clothing we’ve sewn to cover our shame and re-dresses us in royal robes.
In the place of suffering, we are stripped of our attachments to all that is not God so we can attach to God instead.14 Communion with God is formed and strengthened in the cloud, not just in the sun. The cloudland we come to is both fierce and gentle, frightening and holy, confusing and creative. Therapist and author Dan Allender writes of this place as a desert we must pass through to find wholeness: “It is in the silence of the desert that we hear our dependence on noise. It is in the poverty of the desert that we see clearly our attachments to the trinkets and baubles we cling to for security and pleasure. The desert shatters the soul’s arrogance and leaves body and soul crying out in thirst and hunger. In the desert we trust God or die.”15
In suffering, God recapitulates and refines the stories of our lives, where our raiments of striving were first woven, bringing us t
o spaces of infant-like dependency that burn away our adult illusions of sufficiency.16 This is where we partner with God to “take off your former way of life, the old self that is corrupted by deceitful desires, to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, the one created according to God’s likeness in righteousness and purity of the truth.”17
The place where we feel abandoned is the place where we are transformed. Here “in the darkness, way beneath our senses, God is instilling ‘another, better love’ and ‘deeper, more urgent longings’ that empower our willingness for all the necessary relinquishments along the way.”18
The cloud of suffering is not a storm. It’s a shelter. It’s a studio. It’s the mysterious place where we are made new.
God is here. He has not left. He is like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, patiently waiting for his son to return. God is not on the other side of our suffering. He is in it. The invisible God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.19
We can’t inhabit and experience the place where God shelters and transforms us if we do not know where we are. Faith begins in recognizing the cloud and noticing we’ve lost our way. It is a response to the God who is more present than we feel, asking us to name the place we find ourselves in. Every day, God asks us to answer the question he asked Adam and Eve in Genesis 3: Where are you?
We locate the place we find ourselves in by noticing our emotions, our bodies, and our inner dialogue. Faith is a response that requires paying attention to ourselves.
A common bit of advice we get in suffering is to think more about others, to get our minds off ourselves. We are transformed not by thinking less about ourselves but by thinking differently about ourselves. Transformation happens in paying attention to our lives with kindness and compassion rooted in the care of a God who so loved us that he died for us. We are often taught holiness involves thinking less about ourselves and more about Jesus. We need Jesus—oh, how we need Jesus!—but we need him in the substance of our lives, in the emotional floods and deserts, in the places where we feel most abandoned, overwhelmed, and lifeless. Believing you need to think less about yourself may be leading you farther away from experiencing the presence of God refashioning you into the likeness of Christ. By judging our lives instead of inhabiting them, we miss dwelling in the place where God silently clothes us in his redeeming love.