by K. J. Ramsey
People who are suffering don’t need fixing. They need presence. We need to be encountered not as problems to fix but as people enduring meaningful stories through which we all can behold a better, truer light. When we encounter suffering in each other’s strained faces, we stare our own fear of inadequacy in the face. When we show up anyway, we say with our bodies that experiencing suffering matters, that we each matter, not for how perfect we are but for existing.
The exchange of vulnerability into love requires a receptive rather than reactive presence. My husband once defined this in a sermon as forbearance: maintaining an anchored presence in order to receive another person as they are, rather than reacting or retreating, and to hold their story as sacred. Receptivity creates the atmosphere in which love can re-form our memories and hope. When we are receptive, Dan Siegel writes, the “muscles of the face and vocal cords relax, blood pressure and heart rate normalize, and we become more open to experiencing whatever the other person wants to express. A receptive state turns on the social engagement system that connects us to others.”22 Perhaps the best way we can develop forbearance and extend hope, then, is by paying closer attention to our bodies in the presence of pain and vulnerability—ours or someone else’s. To connect, we need to be aware of our body state and pay attention to it so we can shift it toward calm.
Those who want to extend comfort would do well to first notice their own discomfort. The discomfort of witnessing someone else’s weeping or hearing someone’s hopelessness is natural and normal. Most of us have had little practice existing in these liminal spaces. Notice your discomfort by checking in with your body. Are your shoulders starting to feel tense? Do you feel like escaping? Are you crossing your arms while you listen, unconsciously protecting yourself from absorbing some of the suffering spewing your way? You can notice how your body is responding to the situation you are in, not to judge your discomfort but to shift from unintentionally distancing yourself from someone’s pain to entering into it. To grieve with those who grieve,23 you have to allow yourself to be affected by someone else’s suffering instead of rushing to reduce the pain.
Notice your physical tension and squeamishness, but also notice how quickly you want to say things like, “I understand,” “It’s going to be okay,” and “At least it’s not . . .” Our swift verbal responses to others’ suffering betray an inadvertent, sweetly worded selfishness of reducing our own discomfort when we intended to reduce theirs. This doesn’t mean you can’t use words to respond to the pain you encounter. It means you have a responsibility to pay closer attention to the reason you use the words you do.
We who want to receive comfort must also notice our discomfort, surprising as that might sound, considering we feel all too aware of how hard things are. By noticing the sensations in our bellies, the flow of our breathing, the tightness of our muscles, and the shape of our posture, we can better sense how safe we feel to share. By slowing down our breathing or even taking a moment to collect ourselves privately, we can try engaging in conversations that previously may have felt too vulnerable.24
We won’t encounter the whole gospel in our suffering unless we encounter one another in pain. Suffering becomes a sacrament when we acknowledge we each come with empty hands. Our hands can’t dismantle the pain suffering brings. Perfectly worded prayers probably won’t be able to peel back the darkness. Our lovingly prepared casseroles and pies don’t carry healing powers. Facing each other’s pain requires facing the fact that only God can heal disease, quell fear, and set captives free. While we wait, we together behold the mystery that in our fragile bodies Christ already dwells.
Our crosses are too heavy to hold on our own. Even Jesus needed help carrying his. Why would we expect ourselves and others to carry crosses alone, when not even our Savior did? The weight of our burdens will crush us if we try to stack it into a story by ourselves.
Letting others’ hands come under the weight of our stories is the only way to allow this present weight to expand us to hold the “absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory.”25 This is how “we do not give up”26 while “we always carry the death of Jesus in our body, so that the life of Jesus may also be displayed in our body.”27 No one can weave their story into the story of God making all things new without others witnessing their story and remembering it as a true part of something bigger. No one can experience the shattered pieces of their life becoming essential parts of a mosaic of grace and glory without others naming the colors, applying adhesive, and envisioning the larger picture God is forming.
We simply can’t always remember on our own that Jesus holds our lives in a bigger story. As Andrew Peterson writes, “We all forget from time to time, and so we need each other to tell us our stories. Sometimes a story is the only way back from the darkness.”28 When my own memory fails me, I need others to remind me what is true. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “Therefore, the Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth. He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation. He needs his brother solely because of Jesus Christ. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure.”29
When my faith is fragile, I need others to have faith on my behalf.30 Faithlessness and doubt should never be shamed; they should be a reminder to us all that we are part of a body that needs every part to remember, breathe, and walk in the rhythms of grace. As Kelly Kapic writes, “One of the regular ways the body of Christ maintains its health, even as parts of the body are attacked with disease [or depression or any suffering], is for the other parts to carry some extra weight.”31
So who is holding your story with you?32
Whose hands are you inviting to tenderly touch the wounded places in your life? Whom will you trust to see you so fully and consistently that they can see the faith at the core of who you are and remind you of it when your eyes only see darkness? No one person can do this for us, and in some seasons of our lives it will take great creativity and courage to seek and find people willing to hold some of the weight of our pain. If Christ loved you enough to die for you, will you not offer yourself the grace of being known?
You are worth being known, no matter how exhausted, defeated, or disappointed suffering and your life story have made you feel. The risk of being known and the challenge of seeking people who are safe and kind enough to hold your story with care will be worth the effort. At times it won’t seem like it, but there will be people who listen. There will be people who love. And love will make space for hope.
When the burdens of our hearts are many, when the despair of the present moment makes us wonder if we can keep trying or keep living, the community of faith can bring light into our darkness. To receive their light, sometimes we have to tell them how dark things have become. Like Henri Nouwen writes, “One very important way to befriend our sorrow is to take it out of its isolation, and share it with someone who can receive it.”33
Sometimes you have to do what I did even this week: tell some of your friends you are struggling to hope on your own and ask them to offer their presence in a simple way to remind you of the truth that you are never forgotten nor forsaken. This week, that looked like asking for quick phone calls to pray together. Instead of wallowing under the weight of my present darkness, I listened to the voices of my friends, and the light started to feel real, true, and tangible again. Was I ashamed to tell them I felt that weak? Yes. But in naming and sharing the dark, I put myself in a position to receive grace that was farther and deeper than my arms could reach. When I am willing to share my weakness, I am willing to let grace rush under my tired arms until they are strengthened to lift in prayer on their own again.
In the presence of other Christians, people in whom Christ dwells, with the seed of sorrow not swallowed but revealed and planted in the dirt of
our inability to save ourselves, we digest a better story. In kind faces, long conversations, and tears shed but not shamed, we absorb the nourishment our bodies most need to become the remade, redeemed, resplendent selves Christ bought.
Unless a seed falls to the ground, unless the shame of our old self dies, it remains by itself. But if it falls, if we relinquish control for connection, the seed of suffering eventually cracks open under the moisture of our tears and attention. From the rent edges of its hardened exterior, this seed—scorned for years by family, and most deeply by ourselves—sprouts a root of new life.
The fallow soil of our lonely disappointments and desperation, tilled, tended, and watered by tears, touch, and sight, becomes rich as spring earth, the freshly fertilized land of a sustained life. The seed of our sorrow—relinquished, sown, and cracked open—becomes another shoot of a greater Vine, the fruited plant of abiding in Christ.34
The person who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly. The person who sows generously, even the scattered seed of sorrow and weakness—not strength, not wealth—will reap generously. And God, the generous, attentive, patient Gardener, is able and willing to make grace overflow to those who sow, so that in every way, in every relinquished story, tear, and fear, those with empty hands will have everything they need to do the good work set before them. He provided the seed and its sustenance all along.35
This planting won’t always feel pleasant. There’s pain in the scattering of seed, in the breaking open of our old, dead self. But later the sowing and tilling and tending yield the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have embraced it.36
Our tender branches, upheld by the ancient Vine and supported by other stretching, spanning branches, are pruned in patience by the Gardener himself so they will bear fruit. Fruit bursting with sweetness from sorrow. Fruit that lasts. Fruit named love. The fruit of a new self that looks like Jesus, trusts him, and extends his love to a world that needs it.
NOTES
1 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), 112.
2 Again, bless my pretentious heart.
3 Jeffrey Zimmerman and Marie-Nathalie Beaudoin, “Neurobiology for Your Narrative: How Brain Science Can Influence Narrative Work,” Journal of Systemic Therapies 34, no. 2 (2015): 59–74.
4 Sue Johnson, Created for Connection: The “Hold Me Tight” Guide for Christian Couples: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2016).
5 The Eames’ lives have more than slightly resembled Job’s. Kevin had diabetes from early childhood on and fully expected to not live beyond age thirty. His first wife died soon into their marriage. Kevin and Lisa’s third-born, Daniel, had a rare condition that made him unable to speak. Daniel died in 2013. Instead of pushing others out in anger, the Eames have always made space for anger and pain to become wonder. Kevin died while I was writing this book, and I am honored to include you in his and Lisa’s legacy of love.
6 2 Cor. 12:9.
7 Rom. 8:6, 11.
8 1 John 3:14.
9 Col. 3:3.
10 Rom. 6:6.
11 Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul, 229.
12 Col. 3:12–13.
13 Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe about Ourselves (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 118.
14 Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation (New York: Bantam, 2011), 21.
15 Ibid., 59–63.
16 Siegel coined the phrase “feeling felt,” which he uses throughout his work, as in Mindsight, 10.
17 Ibid.
18 Paul J. Zak, “Why Inspiring Stories Make Us React: The Neuroscience of Narrative” (February 2, 2015), National Center for Biotechnology Information, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4445577/. Article from Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science, vol. 2015 (January–February 2015), provided by the Dana Foundation.
19 Ibid.
20 Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul, 137–38.
21 Eric Johnson writes, “Empathic listening affirms the created goodness of the other by taking his or her emotions seriously and communicates that those emotions are meaningful—they signify values—even when they misrepresent current reality to some extent, because present emotional meaning often re-presents experiences from one’s story.” Eric Johnson, God and Soul Care: The Therapeutic Resources of the Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 447.
22 Siegel, Mindsight, 215.
23 Rom. 12:15.
24 And, of course, this is outside the context of relationships that have already proved themselves to be traumatic and abusive.
25 2 Cor. 4:17.
26 2 Cor. 4:16.
27 2 Cor. 4:10.
28 Andrew Peterson, The Warden and the Wolf King (Nashville: Rabbit Room, 2014), loc. 4599 of 8979, Kindle.
29 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), 25.
30 Kelly Kapic writes, “The saints speak to God for us when we struggle to believe and speak alone. Further, the saints are also called to speak to us for God when we seem unable to hear him on our own. Their prayers sustain our faith; their proclamation reignites our hope.” Kelly M. Kapic, Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 128.
31 Kapic, Embodied Hope, 126.
32 I came across this question a long time ago in a podcast interview of disability theologian John Swinton. While I’ve lost track of the interview, you can find more of Swinton’s thoughts on how our memories are held in our relationships in Dementia: Living in the Memories of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012).
33 Henri J. M. Nouwen, Here and Now: Living in the Spirit (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 50.
34 John 15.
35 2 Corinthians 9.
36 Heb. 12:11.
CHAPTER 9
THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS
Bearing Witness in Our Worship
He can no longer have God for his Father,
Who has not the Church for his mother.
—CYPRIAN (AD 423), “THE TREATISES OF CYPRIAN”
We who are many are one body in Christ and individually members of one another.
—ROMANS 12:5
Church is where I’ve felt most alone and most alive. Being in the space of worship places my soul in the center of the paradox of praise in a body holding pain. Others who suffer tell me the same: going to church can be incredibly painful and exquisitely beautiful when we are wrestling at the foot of the cross for the rest Jesus promised. On wooden pews or cloth-covered seats, among the bodies of gathered saints whose smiles and lifted hands seem to speak stories of gladness, a suffering body can feel like putty stretched and spread to the margins of the room.
How many times have I bawled in church? How sharply have I felt the searing heat of unhealed pain when the gospel accounts of Jesus’ healing ministry are read? How many times have I been asked by well-meaning Christians, “Have you prayed for healing?” as though in a decade of disease I’ve never thought to ask God to take away my pain?
How many times have my tears mingled with wonder that God chose to draw near to heal the divide I feel in myself from his love? How many times have my tears become prisms, liquid lenses of the mystery of the God who chose to suffer for love?
In the gathering of saints, the stakes of suffering seem high. What we believe collides with what we feel. We carry our unanswered questions and unrealized desires into the pews, where we encounter reactions and responses to suffering that can wound and divide or join and heal. I wonder how many people whose lives are lined by long-term suffering end up quietly leaving the church or barely coming at all, simply because being there is too painful.
A few years ago, I spoke with a friend who felt she couldn’t come to church anymore. She was suffering with two debilitating autoimmune disease
s and was on the brink of losing her marriage.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that God has nothing to do with our suffering,” she admitted. “It’s easier to believe that than to justify my experience.”
I didn’t judge her words then, and I don’t now. I’ve uttered similar ones in moments of despair. In a world that can crush and confound us in a million ways, hers is an understandable conclusion.
But at church, in pain, my heart gets turned inside out. Does yours?
The pain I don’t want crashes into the hope I long for. Maybe it’s because sitting still for an hour or two makes my joints stiffen. Maybe it’s because the anger that seems to live in a dark corner of my spleen occasionally surfaces at church like a drunk uncle at Christmas, ready to spew its most irrational objections and judgments at my more perky brothers and sisters. (Sometimes I think I might strangle the next person who looks at me with pity-eyes and asks, “Are you feeling better?”) Under the mud of pain’s irritability, I’m certain people are judging me for sitting through yet another song while everyone else stands. So I judge them back with a mostly-internal scowl. But really, the judgment I’m afraid to put into words is against God. If he is omnipotent, why am I suffering? If he loves me, why does he let me hurt? When the questions I normally hang in a closet in my soul get dumped onto a pew, I feel my emptiness. Sometimes I long to be filled.
Suffering can feel like being severed from joy, but sometimes the presence of pain in the place where I am meant to praise turns the coldest, darkest part of my heart inside out into a garment of love with a warmth only the desperate appreciate.
Suffering can be a thread that ties us together instead of a sword separating us from joy. We’ll only experience it as such, however, if the local church tells the truth about the place she finds herself in God’s story. Throughout this chapter, I’ll challenge you to hold hope for the body of Christ, even as we name the ways she has unknowingly failed us. For when two or three are gathered, Jesus is present. Jesus, who knows and values our pain more than we do, is present in the midst of his gathered, corporate body. Our innate resolve will never be enough to sustain our faith when suffering lingers, but in the body we will find grace. And I long for you to experience grace that sustains.