This Too Shall Last

by K. J. Ramsey

  To dwell there, we first need to gain awareness that something is off. This may seem so obvious it hurts, but I think most of us spend a great deal of our mental energy suppressing awareness of how we feel. Where are you? Life will continue to bring up situations that evoke distress. Noticing our distress rather than dismissing or ignoring it is the first way we can respond to God’s invitation into the canyon of wholeness.

  Emotional awareness is an underdeveloped muscle for many of us, one that can feel uncomfortable to use. As you learn to use it, as you begin using the functions of your left brain to notice the world of your right brain, you will experience gains that make the cloud of suffering more navigable, calm more accessible, and comfort more palpable.

  One way I walk many of my clients through learning to be more aware of their feelings is by having them pay attention to their thoughts and how they connect to their physical sensations, as in the following exercise. We do not always have time to walk through a full exercise like this, but we can become more attuned to the distressing thoughts, sensations, and feelings we experience. When we take time to acknowledge how our bodies feel, we learn the feelings we so fear are not quite as scary as we thought. When we notice them, name them, and breathe deep in their presence, we invite the peace of God into the place of our pain.

  • What are some thoughts you keep coming back to about this (this situation, experience, memory, etc.)? Narrow it down to one recurring thought. I’m never going to feel better.

  • Now sit up straight with both of your feet planted firmly on the ground. Take a few deep breaths. In and out. Fully expand your belly and then let all of the air out. Take a few more of these deep breaths.

  • Recall the thought you just noticed a minute ago. I’m never going to feel better. Notice how your body feels as you dwell on that thought. What sensations are you experiencing? (Take a minute to slowly scan your entire body, from the top of your head to the soles of your feet.) A knot in my chest. Tightness in my shoulders. My body feels heavy.

  • Sometimes our physical sensations can guide us to recognizing and naming our feelings. What feelings might you be experiencing in light of these sensations? (You might want to utilize a feelings wheel or emotions list, which are readily available online, to name what you are feeling.20) Anxiety. Hopelessness. Abandonment.

  • Now that you have named some of your feelings, take a moment to acknowledge them. You don’t have to run away from painful feelings. As you take several more deep, full breaths, acknowledge the feelings you just named. One by one. (You can even say, “Hello, anxiety,” breathe deep for a few breaths to sit in its presence, then say, “Hello, hopelessness,” breathe deep for a few breaths, and so on.)

  Practicing mindful awareness of our emotions through exercises like this one or through cultivating a regular meditation or contemplative prayer practice can grow our capacity to answer God’s question, Where are you? As we identify the place we find ourselves in, we can remember he is with us. When we give our distressing emotions kind attention instead of dismissing them or shaming ourselves for having them, we extend ourselves the loving presence of the God who comes to find us, just as he came pursuing Adam and Eve.

  Suffering is a place we occupy. If we are not aware of the place we find ourselves in, we will be occupied by it instead. Counterintuitively, when we practice turning toward the place we fear, by naming our emotions and breathing deep in their presence, our minds calm down. We start to feel more like ourselves.

  Walking into cloud cover, onto the rough ground of our pain, brings us into the experience of grace re-creating us. Within the clouds, through our tears, we look for the shape of grace nourishing this dying world with new life.

  When the cares of my heart are many, ignoring their weight will only make them heavier. Finding my way to blue skies will only happen through first being honest about the clouded space I occupy. I have to acknowledge the lump in my chest telling me I might never finish writing this book. I need to notice the tiredness in my body, how I wake feeling like I haven’t slept at all. I must be honest about how little the Word sparked encouragement in my heart this week. I have to notice and name the things I most dislike in order to find grace right here. When my strength evaporates like dew in the desert, I need renewal.

  Today I felt darkness sticking to my soul. Self-doubt coiled around me like a boa constrictor, choking off my hope. I knew I needed to give my darkness space to breathe in the light alongside beauty. So after I noticed and named how I was doing, Ryan and I drove in search of light, to a botanical garden fifteen minutes away.

  As we stepped into the misty greenhouse world of cultivated beauty, I let out my first deep exhalation of the day. My sad, heavy eyes met a goodness greater than darkness in seeing mauve meet wine on arced petals. As I traced spiny stems adorned with minuscule pink orchids, I outlined a beauty larger than my inner despair and discontent. Marveling in the playfulness of white polka dots on emerald leaves opened my eyes to the wonder that all of this, including me, was dreamed and breathed by a God I cannot see.

  When the largeness of loss swells, and the knot in my chest becomes bars blocking me from hope, I study the order of small things. I stoop to the curve of petite petals, and in turning, they curve my soul—the magnificent grace of bending with the largeness in me to the glory I can see. Simone Weil writes that “the beauty of this world is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter.”21 When the smile of God feels hidden behind clouds of pain, grief, and self-doubt, the beauty of this world pulses with the energy of its Maker, whispering for us to come see.

  Awareness of my emotional state brought me there. Noticing and naming my darkness compelled me to give it space to dwell alongside beauty and light. Holding both within view brought my eyes back to the grace that God’s presence and power sustain everything.

  Cross the threshold into the place of your pain. Recognize the ground. Embrace the mystery of the place you find yourself. The cloud of suffering is a place we cannot understand, yet it is for our good. God never takes us there to torture us. And the cloud never stretches on forever, even though it feels like it might.

  Within the transitional space of suffering, our communion with God is being formed and strengthened. Every adequate developmental relationship requires transitional space, where a child can learn how to explore and to be alone.22 Suffering brings us to the transitional space in our relationship with God where we learn to trust and stand in who God is forming us into, our truest selves in Christ.23

  With the cloud over the purpose of our pain, we stand in the reverberating truth of Job’s words at the end of his long experience of suffering. Job realized he could not understand or define the hand of God in his pain. He said, “Surely I spoke about things I did not understand, things too wondrous for me to know.”24 Instead, he worshiped.

  In suffering’s clouded place of mystery and worship, we are changed. In the place of mystery, pain becomes a passage.

  Our suffering is the dying of an old world and the emergence of a new one. Out of chaos and cloud, God forms the stunning shape of our new hope and new world, our union with him. When we find ourselves in the fog, we stand where ordinary time and space become occupied by the coming King whose reign will never end. When we cross the threshold into the fog, we step into the thin space where this world—and our selves—are being healed by the coming of God’s love.25

  Walk into the barren, empty places of your pain, because this is where God will fill you with himself.26 This liminal space is where we hate to go but where God is always leading us.27 Don’t run from what does not make sense or try to explain it away. Dissonance is the birthplace of all abiding Christian hope. Embrace mystery as the place God dwells. Embrace your suffering as the paradoxical place where you will be made whole.

  “When we were children,” Gerald May writes, “most of us were good friends with mystery. The world was full of it and we loved it. Then, as we grew older, we slowly accepted the indoctrination th
at mystery exists only to be solved. For many of us, mystery became an adversary; unknowing became a weakness.”28 We have to become like little children again, with all of their vulnerability and wonder, to see mystery as a place of possibility. These are the ones Jesus said the kingdom of God belongs to—the little children with wonder in their eyes, looking at Jesus like he’s a friend.29 The cloud of suffering is a threshold you can cross, a place you can choose to occupy, a space where you become like a little child to be made whole. The cloud is where you learn: the kingdom of God belongs to you.

  NOTES

  1 My friend Adam Young has a brilliant podcast with a title similar to this phrase, The Place We Find Ourselves. Adam’s podcast explores themes similar to the ones in this book, around the integration of narrative, theology, psychology, and interpersonal neurobiology in the healing of trauma. Adam Young, The Place We Find Ourselves, https://adamyoungcounseling.com/podcast/.

  2 Limen in Latin means “threshold.”

  3 Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (New York: Routledge, 2013), 10.

  4 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 2011), 95.

  5 Marja-Liisa Honkasalo, “Vicissitudes of Pain and Suffering: Chronic Pain and Liminality,” Medical Anthropology 19, no. 4 (2001): 319.

  6 Richard Rohr, “Grieving as Sacred Space,” Sojourners 31, no. 1 (January 2002): 22.

  7 Gerald May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection between Darkness and Spiritual Growth (New York: HarperOne, 2004), 26.

  8 Kelly M. Kapic, God So Loved, He Gave (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 37. Here Kapic references Martin Luther’s insights on original sin.

  9 As my North-Carolina-born-and-raised mother-in-law would say, bless my [ridiculous] heart.

  10 John Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 229–30.

  11 May, Dark Night of the Soul, 2–3.

  12 Ibid., 72.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Ibid., 51.

  15 Dan Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life (Colorado Springs: Waterbrook, 2000), 21.

  16 David Brooks agrees, writing, “Finally, suffering shatters the illusion of self-sufficiency, which is an illusion that has to be shattered if any interdependent life is going to begin. Seasons of pain expose the falseness and vanity of most of our ambitions and illuminate the larger reality of living and dying, caring and being cared for. Pain helps us see the true size of our egotistical desires.” David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life (New York: Random House, 2019), 37.

  17 Eph. 4:22–24.

  18 May, Dark Night of the Soul, 73.

  19 Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1983), 238.

  20 You can’t know what you don’t name. Here is an excellent feelings wheel to use along with this exercise: https://www.thejuntoinstitute.com/blog/the-junto-emotion-wheel-why-and-how-we-use-it.

  21 Simone Weil, Waiting on God, Routledge Revivals (New York: Routledge, 2009), 60.

  22 Jack O. Balswick, Pamela Ebstyne King, and Kevin S. Reimer, The Reciprocating Self: Human Development in Theological Perspective (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 75.

  23 Balswick, King, and Reimer write, “The true self is the authentic, spontaneous self, aware and comfortable with his or her uniqueness. . . . Transitional space allows for the expression of the true self. The false self results from a lack of transitional space.” Ibid., 76.

  24 Job 42:3.

  25 N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 259.

  26 As Ruth Haley Barton writes, “We cannot escape the fact that willingness to walk into the empty places is a precursor to finding God.” Ruth Haley Barton, Invitation to Silence and Solitude (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010), 88.

  27 Rohr, “Grieving as Sacred Space,” 22.

  28 May, Dark Night of the Soul, 132–33.

  29 Mark 10:14.

  CHAPTER 6

  FULLY HUMAN

  Jesus Joined Us on the Floor

  The Savior assumed a body for Himself, in order that the body, being interwoven as it were with life, should no longer remain a mortal thing. . . . He put on a body, so that in the body he might find death and blot it out.

  —ATHANASIUS, ON THE INCARNATION

  Only the suffering God can help.

  —DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, LETTERS AND PAPERS FROM PRISON

  The year I got sick, I was a resident assistant tasked with emotionally and spiritually supporting a group of nearly thirty college women. I spent hours each day in the library writing papers, the day punctuated by meals and coffee dates with women from my dorm. After copious amounts of tea sipped between fervid research binges, I would walk across the dark, quiet campus to my hall, where I would stay up even later attending to the tears of peers getting over breakups or venting anger about their roommates.1

  Suffering has an inelegant way of reversing relationships, and where I was used to being the comforter, I suddenly found myself learning the harder role of recipient. Out of nowhere the majority of my life consisted of crying tears of my own within the confines of four cinderblock walls, too sick on most days to even get out of bed. The body that had effortlessly carried me through the winding, steep paths of my mountainous college campus could now barely hold itself up in bed. The limbs that climbed limestone cliffs between classes now struggled to walk fourteen steps to the bathroom.

  At night I often couldn’t sleep because of pain, and after hours of no relief, I’d cry from the excruciation. One suitemate in particular would often find me awake in the middle of the night, weeping on the floor of our shared study room. Instead of turning the other way or quipping about how early she had to get up for an exam, Katie would join me on the floor, massaging my aching hands as I sobbed into her chest.

  In the first half of my college experience, I had started to better learn the gospel story, where weakness is welcome and hurt is held. But I didn’t know it yet in my limbs and ache and shame. I had to learn that on the floor, where Katie came to find me, willingly holding my weak body in her embrace. When I went to college, I signed up for an education of books and lectures. I didn’t realize the education I would need for the rest of my life was the nearness of Christ and his body to the indignity, brokenness, and shame in my own.

  This is grace: God joined us on the floor of this earth.

  God did not stay far from our pain. He did not judge it from a distance. He did not pity it from the other side of the universe. He became it.

  Grace is solidarity instead of scrutiny. This is the power that sustains us when suffering lingers.

  God took on the human condition you and I so struggle to bear so we could be enfolded in his love. “Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”2

  Many of us are confused about the purpose of Christ’s coming and the heart of our hope, often without realizing it, and the confusion amplifies our pain when suffering lingers. The very persistence of suffering might not fit with the hope we thought we had or the Jesus we thought we were serving.

  We’ll keep looking in the wrong places for grace in our suffering if we don’t reexamine and rearticulate the substance of our hope and the message of our Lord.

  Jesus said his Father’s purpose in sending him to earth was for him to bring the kingdom of God near to us.3 But our churches often collapse his message and our hope into salvation from sin. Many unintentionally reduce the gospel to a disembodied cure and moment of transformation, neglecting to give us the scaffolding of story and solidity of physical experience needed to build a life on God’s promises. Jesus came “to seek and to save the lost,”4 and he seeks and saves us into a new reality of experiencing his presence, memory, and story. We
are saved not only from sin. We are saved to join and enjoy a kingdom where Christ reigns in love, is restoring all that has been broken by the curse of sin, and is personally present in and among us.5

  In his coming, Jesus brought the kingdom of God near to us, so near that his Spirit now lives in us, comforting us and filling us with a presence that brings life. The kingdom of God is both our hope and the grace that carries us toward hope’s fulfillment. It is a reality we take part in now, even as we continue to feel the heavy weight of brokenness.6 Right now “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.”7 But the Father “has rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son he loves.”8

  The future of God’s good reign has already been set in motion with the resurrection and ascension of Jesus and the gift of his Spirit. Salvation is already here, but its fullness awaits Christ’s second coming. The wholeness of our salvation is a guaranteed reality that sculpts our present existence. As New Testament scholar Gordon Fee writes, our present is shaped by “the singular reality that God’s people belong to the future that has already come present. Marked by Christ’s death and resurrection and identified as God’s people by the gift of the Spirit, they live the life of the future in the present, determined by its values and perspective, no matter what their present circumstances.”9