The stories we engage in novels, memoirs, films, and the stories of our lives all share common elements. Some of those elements are: a hero, a villain, a guide, a problem that needs to be solved, a solution, and a transformed hero. By the end of the story, the hero is not who he was when the words “once upon a time” were first uttered.
When Christians talk about how our stories are wrapped up in God’s larger story, what usually comes to mind, and what most people are pointing out, is how our stories are caught up in God’s ultimate story of Creation, Fall, Rescue, Redemption, and Restoration. And we usually focus on the bookends of our stories with the transforming solution thrown in for interest and context. We focus on who we used to be without the gospel, how God saved us through Jesus’s life, work, death, and resurrection, and who we will be in heaven. There isn’t much talk about the middle of our stories unless they contain additional elements of transformation and resurrection—recovering from addiction or surviving stage four cancer or healing a marriage that was on the brink of disaster. Few people talk about the middle of our stories when transformation and resurrection are absent and leave empty spaces we hate to acknowledge.
In her book, This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace when Suffering Lingers, therapist and author K.J. Ramsey writes about the middle places most of us want to ignore or deny or gloss over. She invites us into the uncomfortable cracks between the elements of our stories and shows us how God meets us, holds us, and offers us grace when our stories are full of subplots of suffering, chronic illness, and brokenness that last and linger. Ramsey is a witness who proclaims what she has seen and experienced chronic illness and other devastating experiences so those of us who are listening can know we aren’t alone.
When describing God’s presence in our pain and how avoiding our emotions and clinging to selective truths from Scripture won’t heal us, Ramsey quotes Cistercian monk Thomas Merton:
Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most.
Ramsey adds, “God continuously invites us to know his presence in our pain, but we often miss his invitation because we are too busy dismissing his messengers. When we paint over pain with insistence on truth, we are discarding the substance of our greatest comfort.” When we respond to suffering with exhortations to ourselves and others to dismiss our feelings and cling to certain truths of Scripture (while ignoring verses that support the importance of our emotions), we miss out on the soul healing that occurs while we continue to suffer from our addictions, cancers, or broken marriages. This soul healing is often full of mystery and tends to occur in the darkness when we can’t clearly see what God is up to.
Ramsey points out that Jesus said we would suffer, but he also said we can expect peace while we suffer. Ramsey writes this about Jesus’s forewarning:
When we step courageously into the reality he named, we show the rest of the church and the watching world that God has not forgotten the weak, the poor, the odd, or the needy. When we let suffering be seen as part of our stories, we remind others that suffering is a valuable, sacred part of following Jesus Christ.
Ramsey also writes about noticing God’s presence and receiving God’s grace and love. When we wish our suffering would turn into something more comfortable for everyone around us, we encounter God’s grace. We come face to face with our God who draws us close in the middle of our stories that have no guarantees. When we inhabit these places, Ramsey says this is what will happen:
You’ll see the surprising truth that the parts of our stories we most fear—and even most hate—are the places we can most be enfolded into God’s lasting story of love. We’ll find that the body of Christ holds the grace we need when suffering lingers—grace embodied in the life of Jesus, who chose to absorb all the pain we cannot handle, and his abiding presence in us by his Spirit and with us through his people, imperfect though they may be.
Grace exists in the spaces between the more acceptable elements of our narratives that don’t conform to the pull-ourselves-up-by-our-bootstraps themes most Americans (we) prefer.
While we are renaming and disguising our suffering so it will be more palatable, we can become numb to reality. Ramsey says, “We remain allergic to our actual lives, addicted to maintaining an illusion of control, desperate to whip our bodies and stories into submission to the story of self-sufficiency and the glory we think it affords.”
It’s hard for us to be honest about our tendencies to dismiss and ignore long-term suffering. It’s hard for us to admit we’re turning our heads away from the truth. But if God shows us our tendencies to dismiss and ignore and helps us embrace our true storylines, we can be transformed into people who experience greater intimacy with the Triune Lord and trust in God’s goodness in the middle of what seems like an absence of goodness. Ramsey writes:
“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.”
I’ve flipped through This Too Shall Last several times to try to find holes that prove Ramsey missed something. I searched and re-read so I could point out what else I think she should’ve covered. Did she write about how lonely suffering can be? Yes. Did she write about hope? Yes. Did she write about what it looks like to suffer in community? Yes. Did she include science and research? Yes. Did she write about others’ stories of suffering and not just her own? Yes. Did she talk about how sin fits into all of this? Yes. Did she talk about repentance? Yes. Does she have a robust theology of grace instead of a lukewarm semblance of something that might be grace if you tilt your head a tad to the right? Yes.
You get the picture. She didn’t leave anything out. Or, if she left something out, I’m unable to put my finger on it. This Too Shall Last is a comprehensive exploration of what we experience in the middle of stories of suffering that we wish we didn’t have to endure. She offers us this reminder: “You don’t need another before and after story; you need grace for the middle of your story.” Ramsey shows us who we are, who God is, and how God catches us—and continues to hold us—when we fall in between the cracks.
COMMENTS
9 responses to “Our Stories of Suffering and the Presence of God”
Leave a Reply
Thanks for sharing. I’m excited to read this book.
Great! I hope it’s helpful!
I enjoyed reading this.
But I’m left with an unresolved conflict that I continually deal with in my own life.
How does this include our response to suffering caused by discipline for disobedience to God’s will, as Hebrews, for example, talks about? Surely the point of that suffering given by God is lesson-based in the sense that we should avoid it again in the future by making obedient choices, similar to how we may discipline our children.
And I’m not talking about natural consequences from bad choices. I’m talking about the supernatural discipline that God delivers for behavior, words, thoughts that are displeasing to his will. For instance (because it just pops into my head), maybe you tell a lie at work for something and then on the way home you get flat tire. That flat tire might be God’s discipline for your lying, and he’s trying to tell you something. Shouldn’t we be alert to that?
Maybe I’m asking: how does one discern the difference between suffering intended to change our behavior (which is a form of suffering to avoid) and suffering meant to draw us closer?
And in that sense, can’t we reduce our suffering if we stay obedient? Doesn’t Herbrews (and other passages) imply that there is (to put it in mathematical terms) an inverse relationship between the degree of our obedience to God and the degree of our suffering?
Hi, Linc.
Thanks for reading. I don’t think much (at all?) about punishment or suffering from God because of my sin. I don’t think about how God might be affirming my behavior or making me change my behavior. If that’s how God interacts with us and communicates with us, then every single thing that happens in our lives would have to be viewed through that lens. If I get a book deal with a great publisher for me to write a second book, is that God telling me I’m sufficiently pleasing him? When a black man is killed by two white men while running near his home, is that God punishing him for lying to his co-worker earlier in the day? Or is that God punishing his mother for being impatient with her son hours before his death?
Okay, here are some real examples from my life: Do I have bipolar disorder because I lose my temper and yell at my kids sometimes? Does my daughter have mild autism because she was mean to her little brother? Did we have to pay $500 to have our car fixed this week because we haven’t been good stewards of our finances?
If this is how God operates, I don’t want to have much to do with God. This line of thinking isn’t in line with Scripture (see John 9:1-12), the gospel, or a robust theology of grace. If that’s how God engaged with me and grabbed my attention about my sin, I’d be getting flat tires every day, all day. We all would. We’d all be broken down on the side of the road, staring at each other and wondering who would show up and rescue us and redeem us.
But, thank God, we already have a Rescuer and Redeemer.
CD
Thanks for your response!
If I could make a fine point. You mentioned you don’t think about God’s punishment for sin at all, but I think there’s an important distinction to draw between punishment and discipline that makes a world of difference to the point I’m making.
Punishment is retributive for wrongs that need to be righted. I think there’s accordance between us that Christ paid the punishment that we deserve, and we are indeed Rescued and Redeemed as a result of that penal substitution (if that’s your view of the atonement). As such, God does not punish us, and this applies both to our eternal and our daily lives. We agree on that.
However, Scripture makes the point again and again that God does indeed discipline, correct, rebuke, censure (whatever you want to call it) those that He loves, and we are not to ignore or rationalize away or resent that discipline as a God we don’t want to follow. Rather, we should be alert to the unexpected and sometimes seemingly unrelated ways that it’s delivered. We’re ever called to rejoice in it when it comes, because it’s evidence that we’re loved by Him in the same way we discipline our children because we love them.
The Bible is full of stories that illustrate this: Ananias and his wife who dropped to the ground and “breathed their last” because they held back on their tithing and lied about it; Paul informing the Corinthians that they are weak and sick and even die early because they don’t discern the body of Christ in communion; David being sick for a year and losing his son for his affair with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband.
Whether you take these stories literally or not, their inspired narrative truth remains. They’re about God’s loving discipline that is “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.”
The difficulty for all of us is discerning the difference between the kind of suffering that God lovingly delivers to correct and the kind of suffering that occurs simply because we live in a fallen world. It’s not easy, and as I said, I struggle with it, but I don’t think that means we should ignore it. Prayer and Scripture and worship are meant to help us with that.
You raise some challenging examples, and many of those I would say are not for discipline (although I would caution that we don’t know the full extent of all those situations and God’s intent), but are probably just suffering that results from living in a fallen world.
Our child has mild autism also. Do I think it’s for some sin our family committed? No. I think it’s the kind of situation that I just described, although I’m loathe to call it “suffering” because there are blessings and “superpowers” that come with it. But I do think within the day-to-day of living with that in our family – as with many other circumstances – there are messages of discipline that we should be attuned to so that we can change our behavior when we’re off course and increasingly be conformed to the image of Christ in obedience and love.
Another way I would say this in somewhat higher theological terms: soteriological grace doesn’t leave us off the hook from God’s loving disciple. Saving faith should cause us to continuously pursue living in accordance with God’s will.
Yes. I agree that this is a thing, and it probably happens. I can think of a few examples where that *might* have been what God was doing. But since I can’t ever really know for sure, I don’t feel comfortable making those judgments (for myself or anyone else). I believe all of this is wrapped up in mystery more so than something we can know for sure.
I agree that we are being transformed into the image of Christ, etc. I’m definitely not who I was when I was converted to Christianity during my junior year of college, praise God. The changes are subtle and are hard for me to notice at the moment. But if I think about certain traits, etc. and who I was even a year ago or five years ago, I see some evidence of transformation.
It makes more sense to me that this happens through responding to the love and mercy and grace God pours out on us. At least that’s what I experience. When I notice God’s presence, God’s love, and God’s grace in my life, it really does affect my actions (sometimes), helps me notice sin I need to confess and repent of (or I like the idea of being repented of because I believe God repents us), and turns my gaze toward Jesus and his righteousness which covers me. (Sometimes)
So, because of all of this, I don’t really think about what God might be doing to correct or rebuke me or whatnot. Does that make sense? I do read those examples in Scripture and wonder about them and the possible examples that I have seen, but then I kind of move on.
And even though I’m being transformed, I still mess up, sin, and make dumb decisions and choices every day. And all of that transforms me, too, because it makes me cling to the gospel even more. So maybe our transformation isn’t all about our actions, responses to others, responses to difficult circumstances, how we inhabit suffering that we aren’t really sure why we are called to inhabit. Maybe our transformation also includes growing in our dependence on the Lord while we are far from who we will ultimately become in heaven and believing that God sees us the way Jesus is seen in the midst of our sin and whatnot.
Had the pleasure of listening to the author read this book via Scribd.
It is one of the best books I have read, the wisdom and insight so beautifully written about the theology and reality of suffering is amazing. I consider this a must read and will encourage all I know to do so. Grace and honesty permeate each page.
I’m so glad you enjoyed the book!