by K. J. Ramsey
She entered the place of my confinement, the prison of my perceived uniqueness, and sat with a willingness to witness the desperation I felt. I don’t remember many of our conversations in those months. But I do remember weeping in her arms. I remember being allowed to be broken and hopeless. I remember that somehow among my stinging tears, the darkness of shame began to recede beside the gentle light of Sarah’s acceptance. The woman who sat by my side, who never judged my filth or weakness, who eventually would do my dishes and bring me meals, brought light by her willingness to sit beside my darkness.
In those months, with our life shattered again by sickness, while I was reeling alongside my husband with constant anxiety about our future, I started to encounter the mystery of joy in suffering by being held in the place where sorrow dwells.
Light walked past my defenses, entered my darkness, and let me weep.
Months later, while I was still crawling out of shame’s shroud, Sarah invited me into her own suffering. I was relieved to realize—shocker—that I wasn’t the only young person suffering. Sarah, luminescent in her work and in my life, had just returned home from a mental health scare, a story which is hers to tell. She needed company for the day, and since I still wasn’t working, I was glad to force myself out of the house, glad to return to her a small bit of what she had given me.
We sat shiva for shame in the afternoon light, watching Harry Potter in The Prisoner of Azkaban push back the dementors with the beaming glow of remembering what is good, of remembering he is loved. Seated on Sarah’s sage-green thrifted couch in bodies that had let us down, as women afraid of their brilliant potential flickering into darkness, we unknowingly created a dawn of hope simply by bearing witness to weakness instead of hiding in shame.
A year before, it had seemed easier to believe I was the only one suffering than to bear the weight of my uncertain future. I hid my pain inside and wore shame like a musty but warm coat, believing comfort probably wouldn’t come from anyone but the God who had the power to heal me if he wanted. Shame had long sold me the story that no one would comfort me. In that narrative, my capacity to access grace extended only as far as my tolerance for stress, which is, admittedly, not very far.3 It made the reach of grace the length of my arms. Thankfully, grace can reach farther and surprise us into receiving it.
The gospel offers a better story, read not only in black letters on white pages but in the bodies of believers, words made flesh in the places of our pain. The gospel plants the seeds of Christ’s life in our souls in the sowing of shared tears and the wordless resonance that happens when one right brain communicates love to another. Grace rises and reaches in the space between us.
Many of us have swallowed the seeds of our sorrow most of our lives, thinking hope was the possession of the strong and acceptance was the result of being worthy, not weak. We often struggle to experience the story of redemption as ours, because we have not experienced others as accessible, responsive, and engaged when we are weak.4 Our implicit memory of vulnerability and weakness is often linked with overwhelm, dismissal, and hurt, resulting in isolation. How did your parents or caregivers respond when you were upset as a child? How much room was there in your home for your tears and fears? How often were you responsible to comfort your parents for theirs? We all have been shaped by a story our parents unknowingly wrote for us.
We strain to experience God as with us and for us in our suffering because love is not simply a cognitive truth to assent to but a relationship to be reshaped by. Right knowledge of the gospel will never be enough to root the love of God in our souls and enfold our stories into the story of redemption. God is after our whole selves, sitting in the spot where our minds expect rejection, inviting us to new, embodied experiences to renew our minds and re-form our hope. God draws near to us, and he longs to do so by his Spirit through the presence of his people. He has not left us alone.
Suffering re-presents us to God and others to be shaped by a love that welcomes weakness. Sometimes it gashes and gnaws, because not everyone is ready to encounter weakness instead of fixing or judging it. Other times it terrifies but heals to let something hidden be seen. The welcome of weakness can be the most powerful exchange we’ll experience this side of Jesus’ return.
While I was wrestling with whether I would ever be able to work again, my husband felt pinned down by the boulder of our suffering. The helplessness of watching me get sicker alongside his powerlessness to produce a better life were slowly strangling him. I was the weak one, and Ryan felt the necessity to be strong. He sacrificed his dream of finishing seminary so we could live in a city where I could receive practical help from friends. Setting his career aside, Ryan worked a data entry job that was so boring, his supervisor advised employees to watch movies while working just to stay awake. At home, I was barely able to walk to the bathroom without help. While our friends were starting businesses and families, we seemed immobilized by my disease. We were exhausted, souls sprawled on the separate mats of our perpetual vulnerability, unsure how to keep wrestling our individual challenges, let alone stand with each other to step toward a future that appeared bleak.
We didn’t realize we both were sick. We barely had categories for depression and trauma and the way suffering like ours can erode trust and hope. Sadness and fear stood between us, and eventually, in the desperation of not feeling supported by each other, we told a friend we wondered if Ryan was depressed.
“You should talk to Kevin Eames,” he said. “He’ll be able to help you understand what’s going on.”
Our friend shared that Kevin had struggled with depression, and since he was a psychology professor from the college we had graduated from, we instinctively trusted that he’d probably be a safe person with whom to share.
So we found ourselves on a couch, facing Kevin and his wife, Lisa, slowly describing the darkness that felt like an invisible opponent we could never beat. Kevin made coffee and handed us ceramic mugs steaming with the subtle fragrance of nuts and chocolate, and we settled into the comfort of the Eames’ unhurried presence. Over the hours of that first night in their home, we shared our story of suffering, my disease, our losses, and the nameless numbness that was making Ryan feel like a shell of himself. They had nothing to gain by having us over but made room for us anyway, never once indicating discomfort with what we shared or mentioning how late it was getting.
I stared into the inky residue at the bottom of my earthen mug, wondering if darkness would ever stop being the baseline of our life. Kevin’s voice grabbed me out of my Neitzsche nonsense, as he said firmly to Ryan, “If you weren’t depressed, I’d be concerned.”
Kevin named what he saw and normalized what he knew.
Ryan and I glanced at each other in surprise, forming half smiles of relief. Instead of fear, we both felt validated and somehow closer. Kevin and Lisa had listened to us as though we were the most important story they could ever hear, leaning in, asking questions, and responding with emotion. And in their warm attention, more space was formed between me and Ryan to welcome each other like we were being welcomed.
The Eames made space for us to tell the truth about our story, the raven, throbbing truth that makes a lot of people squirm and pull out their shiny platitude swords to fight back the darkness they fear. Over time we’d learn that Kevin and Lisa had so persistently named the darkness in their own lives that they could sit with enough patience and love to help you name the dark and light in yours.5 Theirs was a presence that formed space in our souls to remember the bigger story surrounding our lives, not by fearing the darkness but by naming it together.
Weakness is where Christ’s power is perfected.6 We like thinking community forms around our strengths, but in Christ the wonder of wholeness is welded through shared weakness. Most of us wander through life disowning or hiding half of what we’ve lived, afraid that showing the dark will distance us from the light. But we can never be whole or wholly known without seeing and sharing both our strength and our weakness.
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One irritating grace of suffering is that it makes it difficult to keep ignoring or hiding weakness. Its persistent presence can be the rudder that turns us toward the place we naturally avoid, the place we can be most known.
We whose suffering lingers are often forced to see and share the weakness within, placing us in a position to recognize, accept, and offer the very thing that ignites communion. Without ongoing suffering, it’s easier to keep hiding behind hurry. But when life keeps erupting with pain and loss, weakness demands a response. Suffering demands a reaction from all who encounter it—despair, apathy, or hospitality. In exposing our weakness and need, prolonged suffering is like gravity, planting our feet on the ground of our vulnerability, demanding honesty about where we are. Suffering repeatedly asks us to sit where others may be too busy or fearful to pause—to take part in the exchange that most reflects the inner life of God.
In my weakness, I am positioned to experience the glory of communion. In all of our continuing weaknesses, we are continually repositioned to experience the exchange of vulnerability into love.
On our own, we resist repositioning. We scurry from vulnerability like mice in a cat’s shadow. Shame is the silent narrator of our old selves, the invisible puppeteer dancing our lives into dim corners. The story of shame is always working to disrupt the flow of energy in our minds, to divide us from one another, and to isolate us from hope. You’ll recall from the previous chapter that without outside intervention, our minds are tangled into pathways of disconnection and disintegration. Without Christ, we are fixed on the path of that old story, with minds set toward death. But the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is living in us, bringing life where there was decay.7 And we “know that we have passed from death to life because we love our brothers and sisters.”8 Love is the expression of our life, and yet it can feel like water to our oil, fleeting and fearsome to receive.
In Jesus we are invited to a new relational reality, to put off the old self of hiding and withholding and to put on the new self of receiving and giving. Without new relational experiences, we’ll habitually stumble down old paths to dark corners, stuck in self-protection and scarcity. Because we live in the already and the not yet of God’s kingdom, we already have the Spirit needed to walk in love but learning to walk takes time, and this ground will stay rocky until Christ returns. Because of this, our new relational reality will often feel uncomfortable, like being stretched.
Learning to inhabit our new selves—the life “hidden with Christ in God”9—will take time, will feel like losing control, and will require our attention. Though our old self has been crucified with Christ,10 it will take time for our old brain to die.11 The silent narrator of shame will keep whispering that safety is in the shadows, but in Christ we can listen to and respond to the voice of God’s love calling us to light. The networks in our brains that shaped us to repel love and protect self may be accessible and operable until we die or Jesus returns. But death no longer rules us or our bodies, as much as it feels like it does. We must consider ourselves dead to sin—dead to the patterns and pathways that divide us from others, keep us in hiding, and enslave us to shame—and alive to God in Christ. We are alive to what does not come easy: “compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another.”12
The shape of our new life in Christ, the life suffering and death will never defeat, is formed and fortified by the posture we take toward relationships. Love won’t come easy, and it often will feel like exposure. Love will look like weakness and sometimes feel like dying. A soul alive in Christ allows itself to be repositioned. The Spirit turns us toward the place our old self would naturally resist, and our consent will be the continual reversal that forms the love of Christ into our memories, our neural networks, our innermost being.
“In our minds,” Curt Thompson teaches, “to be vulnerable is to sense the potential for danger.”13 Often, when we are on the edge of being known, of being loved, shame prompts feelings of vulnerability. The lower regions of our brains react swiftly to what seems unsafe, and when our focus of attention is on self-protection—and we often don’t realize it is—we cannot connect.14 We’ll never inhabit our new identity in Christ by sheer force of will but by encountering and extending our vulnerability with people who are likewise seeking to be made whole. We are slowly changed each time we acknowledge our vulnerability and impulse to self-defend and instead respond to our need to be known. Relationships coiled our minds into pathways of disconnection, and relationships will be what God uses to resurrect pathways of love and peace. Vulnerability experienced, extended, and received will be the communion bread and wine that continues to convert our dying, fragile selves into the unending likeness of Christ.
When we open ourselves up to being known, we open our stories and selves to be changed. As we share our stories, including our weakness, losses, grief, and hopelessness, and we are heard, our minds can experience new integration and well-being. (Recall the nine attributes of an integrated prefrontal cortex on pages 149–50 that offer and reinforce well-being.) When we share our sorrow and are received the way Kevin and Lisa received me and Ryan, our memories of what it means to be vulnerable are gradually changed. The more we share our stories and are received with compassion, the more our brains are shaped to anticipate love instead of rejection. When we allow others to bear witness to our weakness, we learn to relate to ourselves with kindness and hope. When someone listens and validates us as we tell our story, they ignite a new way of considering our story—as valuable, worth hearing, worth telling, worth living.
The brain’s mirror neuron system mediates an empathy we could not create or feel on our own. Operating across all five senses, mirror neurons cue us to the internal state of others. Through the brain’s resonance circuits, we instinctively imitate others’ behaviors and come to resonate with their feelings.15 Dan Siegel describes how we come to “feel felt”16 in the giving and receiving of our presence and stories, writing, “Through facial expressions and tones of voice, gestures and postures—some so fleeting they can be captured only on a slowed-down recording—we come to ‘resonate’ with one another. . . . We feel this resonance as a palpable sense of connection and aliveness. This is what happens when our minds meet.”17
As we share our stories and experience the listener as trustworthy, our brains release oxytocin, which researcher Paul Zak describes as “the neurologic substrate for the Golden Rule: If you treat me well, in most cases my brain will motivate me to treat you well in return.”18 Oxytocin helps us move toward one another, to share our stories and allow ourselves to be mutually affected by them. The embodied, neurochemical exchange of sharing our stories allows others to enter them, to experience what psycholinguists call “transportation,” when another person has emotionally stepped inside the world of the story they are hearing.19 The experience of resonance, of being heard and felt, unearths emotion and memory hidden deep in your right hemisphere and lower brain. It exposes the parts of your mind that most need healing, allowing the integration of layers of neural structures and systems, creating new pathways that previously did not exist.20 Being heard rewires your brain.
For this to happen, we have to shape our silence into sound. The seed of sorrow must be sown to grow new life. We can’t swallow our discouragement and expect to sprout hope. We have to allow ourselves to speak aloud the suffering our culture says should stay private. We have to let ourselves be seen, our stories be heard, our weakness be witnessed. We have to let friends into our dirty homes and ourselves into the homes of people we might barely know, just because kindness and hope could be there to discover.
Suffering must be shared, witnessed, and heard to be experienced as the fertile soil of Christ’s kingdom, the ground where God comes to find and remake us. The incarnation becomes our felt experience when we allow others to enter the world of our story. When we feel felt by another, over and over, the love of Christ becomes a truer reality in our lives
, the emotional memory of our brains, and the expectation of our hearts.21 We need the embodied experience of another’s welcome to better know the welcome of God, to let his love reverberate through our entire being so thoroughly and continually that we can welcome every part of our stories as contributing notes in the most stunning song.
To be changed by love, we must be willing to cross the threshold of our vulnerability, both as the one suffering and as the one sharing in their grief. When we encounter another’s suffering, we experience the vulnerability of being limited in the scope and scale of our capacity to assuage pain. Recently, Sarah told me something she learned while visiting me during that long disease flare. Being there was easier than she imagined or expected. Sarah said that for a while she struggled with visiting me in those cold, cloudy months, because she wasn’t sure how to help me. She wanted to encourage me but wasn’t sure what I needed or wanted. She recalled feeling anxious about coming over, wondering if there was anything she could bring or something she could do to help alleviate the pain and anguish I was feeling. Over time, as she kept showing up, she realized I didn’t need her to anticipate or fulfill my needs; I just needed her presence. And in the end, it was much easier to give that than to nervously try to figure out what would make everything better.
Often the pain that makes us feel most stuck is not our suffering; it is experiencing distress in the presence of people who expect us to get better faster than we can. I don’t need one more recommendation of a diet, essential oil, or book that might fix the agonizing pain I experience. Facing weakness without ameliorating it makes us anxious, even though most of us wouldn’t like to admit this or become aware of how true it is. When we encounter weakness, we sense the nearly invisible reflection of the weakness we all carry or might someday experience, and it makes us desperate to assert the little power we think we possess to keep the glare from scorching our socially-acceptable lives.