This Too Shall Last

by K. J. Ramsey

  Our old self has clogged ears and cloudy vision, and in the darkness, we try to create the sound of belovedness on our own through both striving and self-rejection. We block God’s words of love in our ordinary lives through an incessant, unaware belief that God wouldn’t, couldn’t, be loving us in this and that we must make up for his absence in workaholism, image-maintenance, and a constant fear that guards ourselves against failure. We reject our own lives by not giving our weakness attention, our bodies care, and our relationships room to breathe and root.

  Relationships are often the places where we’ve incurred the most pain in life, and they are also the mysterious means God will use to reshape us to live in the story more lasting than pain. Some of us are in the process of being healed and restored from a lifetime of people wounding us. Not being heard, seen, and loved when we needed to be often leads to living hurt, ashamed, and isolated. Without meaning or wanting to, we perpetuate that storyline in the ways we relate with walls up and expectations of ourselves and others that are both too low and too high. Grace asks us to become aware of our tendency to resist love, stay stuck in self-pity, and treat others as both our saviors and ticking time bombs that will hurt us soon.

  Our old self stops our ears from hearing God’s voice of love in suffering, but in Christ we have been given a new self with new ears and eyes, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of Jesus.11 Our old self, with its plugged ears and poor vision, must be plunged under the cold, cleansing water of the baptism of repentance.

  Baptism signifies repentance, which biblically has its root in the Greek word metanoia, meaning a “change of mind” that involves turning from sin and turning toward God.12 In the baptism of Jesus and our own, we find the drowning of our old way of being and the rising of our new selves, turned toward God and aligned with his heart of love. We find a steady invitation from God to commune with him as his beloved children in the current situations and relationships in our lives. We glimpse the gaze of God toward Jesus and hear the blessing he bestows as ours when we reposition ourselves to be present in our ordinary, suffering-filled lives with an expectation to hear, You are loved.

  “God crosses the universe and comes to us,” writes Simone Weil.13 We think he’s far, but God has already come near in Christ and is always present, asking for our attention in our bodies, our circumstances, the beauty of his world, and our yearning for its renewal. The uniqueness of suffering is the continual grief it brings that can prompt us to turn toward the God who is already near. Godly grief really can produce repentance.14

  To be transformed by the renewing of our minds,15 we need to present our bodies, as they are now, in the circumstances they are in now, to God as places for worship and communion. We need to turn from the patterns of our old self that lead to disconnection from others and disintegration within our minds and turn toward God, others, and ourselves with expectancy that grace is here.

  In the exhaustion of pain, heartbreak, and ongoing weakness, turning can feel like the last breath that might kill us. We question how we can hope for connection when connection or its absence has left us wounded. How can we worship when we are being pummeled? Christ in us, Christ before us, Christ beside us.16 His faith, his trust, and his obedience in the hard places of his own humanity fuel us with grace to be faithful in ours. His belief in being God’s beloved is the grace the Spirit suffuses into our weary bodies as we turn to acknowledge that God is with us in every place, person, and moment we encounter. Turning is relinquishing the old self, letting our lust for comfort, protection, and prestige fall like dirty rags next to the water of our rebirth, and then inhabiting our new self by engaging with sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste the reality that God is personally present now. The shape of resurrection is formed in us as we treat our ordinary lives as worth experiencing.

  How do we learn to hear beloved even and especially in our places of suffering? We repent.

  Repentance. It’s a word that might make you instantly feel angry or transported back in time to a stuffy Sunday school classroom with flannel board depictions of Bible stories and little grace for being the stubborn, impetuous, or wildly curious child you secretly were inside. (Okay, maybe that was just me.) Repentance makes me think of sin, which reminds me of judgment, which makes me feel shame. And if you are like me, you might be starting to wonder if this book is going to end with you bleeding into a pool of guilt on top of the discouragement you already feel from prolonged suffering.

  What if everything we assume about repentance creates a sense of guilt and shame because we forget to put repentance in the context of communion with God and the great grace that invites, seeks, and restores us to love?

  What if there is more room for meaning and joy in our suffering when our lives are empowered by grace to turn and be present here and now in the mundane, repetitive parts of our lives we wish we could escape?

  What if repentance is the grace of God, attracting us to life, pulling us into a story where the weak and small matter, and turning us loose to extend life in every corner of creation that has been darkened by the curse of shame?

  What if I told you that instead of bleeding out with greater guilt than you already have, you could experience repentance as the continuous repositioning that transfuses you with the powerful, redeeming blood of Christ that will sustain you in your suffering and transform you into a person who believes they are loved?

  Repentance is turning, again and again, toward God, others, and our lives with our whole bodies, whole stories, and whole selves to live in the better story that we are united to the God who is present and who redeems. Repentance is remembering that all of life is an opportunity for communion and choosing to live as such right now.

  Suffering and trauma have the power to scribble forsaken, forgotten, and worthless all over our hearts and brains, marking our memory and tuning its guidance of our everyday experiences into the overwhelming sound of shame. To hear the voice of love and to let our lives, stories, and brains be reshaped and rewritten by God’s presence, we have to pay attention. If we are not captivated by the story and presence of grace, we’ll live captive to the story of shame. Attention is the activity of repentance. It is “imagination put in the harness of faith,”17 the eager expectation that God is as present as he says he is and will do what he says he will do.

  We need more than preaching to ourselves to dwell in the truth that we are loved. Truth is more than a bandaid we place repeatedly over our fear with reminders of what is right. Truth is a Presence to absorb in embodied experiences that employ all five of our senses with the indelible ink that renames us loved and good. The graffiti defacing our neural pathways with the message that we aren’t really loved and aren’t really safe is scoured in the repentance of experiencing our everyday lives with attention, intention, and imagination. Directing our attention, Dan Siegel explains, has “the power to shape our brain’s firing patterns, as well as the power to shape the architecture of the brain itself.”18 Attention is the fertilizer that strengthens and nourishes our abiding in the Vine of Jesus and his body.

  If I want to hear God’s voice calling me loved in the middle of circumstances I can’t wish away, I paradoxically have to direct my attention to experience my circumstances more fully. My brain, body, and story will be changed not in simply pining after relief but in being present in my ordinary, often hard life because Scripture tells me my body and life are places God has chosen to indwell and redeem. Instead of trying to shield myself from all the bad things I seem to attract like fruit draws flies, I can shift from mindlessly detaching from my life to mindfully witnessing and encountering it as a place full of grace, meaning, and potential for goodness. Attention is faith embodied, the power the Spirit uses to retune our whole selves to the rhythm of grace inviting us to dwell in love.

  Will we turn—again and again—toward the place where we are named as loved and toward the God who speaks our name?19

  I come to the water like a baptism, to su
bmerge myself in a better story and to rise again, dripping, with a stronger song. The red bird of paradise flowers on my swimsuit are stiff and crinkly from my swim two days ago, but my spirit is flooded, my body awash with fear, anger, and a sprinkling of self-contempt.

  Ryan just reworked our budget, and I nearly had a panic attack considering how long it will take us to pay off debt we’ve accrued trying to treat and survive my illness. For all the frequency with which I preach the gospel that weakness is a place to know God’s strength, I’m still ashamed that in our weakness, we haven’t been able to maintain the standard of fiscal responsibility we inherited from our parents. We were prepared for a life of capably providing for ourselves, but no one prepared us for the poverty of my broken body. No one prepared us for a decade of deciding between getting treatment and buying groceries, knowing that choosing one means not being able to afford the other.

  White Protestant culture’s story that frugality married with effort produces success is a narrative we’ve tried and failed to fulfill. We look the part—educated, hardworking, churchgoing, and cloaked with pearlescent skin—but each MRI costs five hundred dollars, and each monthly infusion of immunotherapy retails at ten thousand dollars. Last year I counted the days I was sick with infections on top of my normal level of illness: five whole months out of twelve. Sometimes I wonder if money is the material in our lives most untouched by the gospel. In our bank accounts and leather wallets, we hide the last vestiges of individualism’s gospel that we each can secure a life with minimal pain on our own.

  Even though I’m too sick to be a character in the success story, I’m drenched by its shame.

  One thing my culture’s story got right is that effort does matter. What makes the difference is whom our effort is in response to. Are we reacting to our own cavernous emptiness or responding to a fullness sensed behind our bones and beyond our yearning? Am I trying to build my own blessings? Or am I answering a grace that stoops to places lower than I want to dwell, a God who crosses the universe to speak life in the silence of both beauty and affliction?20

  I know that without attention, I’ll keep living flooded by the shame of a story that’s not true.

  I come to the water to be baptized in a better story. With each barefoot step onto coarse concrete, I’m seeking a different kind of effort, the agency of attention given to a story where those who are weak are named loved. Plunging into chlorinated coolness, I start the slow trek of inhabiting my anxious body in the water’s enveloping grace.

  Elongating from torso to toes, my spine straight, I let the rhythm of the burden that brought me to the pool slow in the cadence of strokes and breath. My arms slice through blue water, and what was stressed becomes strong. With each gulp, I take in more than oxygen.

  This body

  is loved

  by God.

  The what-ifs and whys of our past, present, and future gradually hush alongside the inaudible wake of my deliberate breathing.

  Each inhalation an acknowledgment.

  This body

  Every exhalation a resolve.

  is loved

  Entire breath an attestation.

  by God.

  Lungs, mind, and heart fill in unison as slow motion matches patient breaths, carrying my whole body and whole self into the ancient story that’s always crossing mine. Where I strained, I now savor. The coolness between my toes, the tingling of muscles lengthening, the reverence of remembering: This body—the one that disqualifies me from prevailing standards of success—is loved by God. Six words, repeated, breathed, and absorbed, re-member me as a person sought, surrounded, and upheld by grace.

  When I started swimming again this winter, a quarter of my mental attention was spent trying to not think about the lifeguards judging my clumsy form and the soft shape of my overweight body. Today I’m setting my mind elsewhere, recalling the concept of mental models—how our brains create parcels of patterns of neural firing in response to our environment.21 Instead of judging my body, I’m pondering how every space we enter prompts a particular parcel to wake up in our minds, which guides our response to that place, what it means and represents to us, and how we are supposed to feel while there. It’s why entering a grocery store can mean feeling overwhelmed or why going to work might mean feeling lonely. It’s why being at the gym in the pool means I’m wading through shame as well as water.

  The brain’s innate neuroplasticity, its ability to form new connections and patterns through intention, repetition, and relational attunement, reminds me that how I encounter a place offers possibility to positively change while there.22 With kindness, attention, and imagination, places that previously evoked shame can begin to elicit safety, hope, and joy. Taking a sip from my water bottle at the pool’s edge, I set out to swim the next five laps, creating a new memory of this place and my effort in it as good and strong.

  As I push off the pool’s edge, I spring into my own story, to memories of water and myself in it as resilient. While my arms and legs propel me forward, my mind traces time backward to a summer spent as a lifeguard on a reservation in North Carolina. The stamina formed almost fifteen years ago through long laps and youthful pluck stirs new hope in me now. My body remembers being strong and courageous. I follow the map of my memory farther, to girlhood summers spent dancing in shallow water, toes touching cerulean vinyl and arms lifted in pirouettes of praise. Now I paint both the water and my mind with words, joining past and present in a rising resilience that proclaims this body is loved by God.

  I came to the water like a baptism, to be drenched in the story deeper than my fear and shame, consenting to be changed. Movement is prayer, memory a font, attention a sacrament. Thirty minutes later I step out of the pool into a shaft of late afternoon light, more wholly believing the words Jesus heard at his own baptism as true and as mine: You are my beloved; with you I am well-pleased. Drying off with a warm towel, I make a promise to myself to come back this Thursday if I am at all able.

  As the apostle Paul writes, we don’t give up. “Even though our outer person is being destroyed, our inner person is being renewed day by day.”23 Because the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead lives in me, I will never give up on experiencing my life as a place bursting with the grace that turns death into life. New life is possible and immanent in our affliction because God created us to share in the redemptive suffering and resurrection of his Son through communion with Christ and his body. When we don’t give up on our lives as places to find grace, God resurrects the flow of energy in our minds to experience him as near and good and ourselves as loved. This is repentance.

  The potential for resurrection is woven into the fabric of our being. Neuroscience has been revealing that our brains retain the ability to grow new neurons throughout adulthood, a process called neurogenesis. In 2017 neuroscientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham found that as adult-born neurons connect to existing neural networks, older neurons die off.24 And in 2019 neuropathology researchers in Spain found that the hippocampus, the part of the brain most operative in our memory, has the potential for abundant neurogenesis throughout the life span.25 Our brains are wired to take the path of least resistance, the most energy-efficient way of responding to the world around us, but to change and grow, we have to do what does not come naturally.26 Repentance, forming our minds into the shape of resurrection, requires doing what does not come naturally. Neurogenesis and, really, new life in Christ require shifting from our automatic, mindless way of reacting to life to an intentional posture of mindfulness and receptivity. Our minds are renewed with the brain’s ability to rewire (neuroplasticity) by directing the focus of our attention.27 Our old memories, along with the neural networks that have been shaped by shame, are transformed as we engage life with intention, as we learn to pay attention to what we are paying attention to, and as we place ourselves in embodied experiences of grace, vulnerability, and connection. The old passes away as new neurons and neural networks are formed in our continual turni
ng toward the space between God, others, and ourselves as the ground where grace is born.

  God forms the rising resilience of our new self as we take our everyday, suffering-filled lives and present them to him as places where stress can be soothed in the context of new love and connection. We learn to hear beloved in our suffering when we turn to the unhurried rhythm of grace pulsing through both solitude and community.

  The practice of spiritual disciplines places our hands on the reality of the kingdom, allowing our time and space to be intersected by God’s reign and presence. The classic spiritual disciplines practiced by Christians throughout the ages offer us embodied habits that reshape us as whole people created for love, capable of love, and secure in love. Describing the wealth of practices available to grow our awareness and our abiding in God’s love is far beyond the scope of this small book, but Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline is a wonderful place to start familiarizing yourself with practices Christians have used for centuries to dwell as beloved.28

  Spiritual disciplines form the habit of repentance. The practice of disciplines like contemplative prayer (such as the breath prayer I did while swimming) teaches us to focus our attention, tolerate the present moment, and treat ourselves and others with less judgment.29 As we turn toward God through spiritual disciplines that expand our capacity for calm in the midst of stress, we grow in our capacity to activate our brain’s social engagement system to seek safety and solidarity where we used to automatically shut down.30 Slowing down paradoxically builds our capacity to persevere and connect.