by K. J. Ramsey
We live with the inheritance of thousands of years of handling our bodies like past, present, and future crime sites, misinterpreting Scripture’s understanding of the flesh to be all that is physical. Without realizing it, we approach ourselves and others with a religious sword, splitting ourselves in two, the physical and the spiritual, demeaning the physical as a separate part opposed to worship, faith, and joy. We look at our whole bodies, whole stories, and whole selves that God made and called very good, and we unwittingly call part of them very bad.
While sin has tainted every atom of creation and every plot line of our stories, God’s original declaration of us as good remains. Further, Goodness himself took on flesh to dwell among us, forever affirming human bodies in human stories as the place where God reveals his love. But we approach our bodies and physical experiences like prisons trapping our souls, denying them their higher, spiritual destinies. It turns out it’s not just our culture that treats bodies like commodities or inconveniences in service of success. Christians do too. We just call it holiness. We treat our physical experiences like the snare keeping us from joy, separating us from God. When so much around us has taught us to regard our bodies with either doubt and scorn or perfectionistic preoccupation, how can we look at suffering as anything other than a short-term problem to solve as quickly as possible?
Similarly, when bodies are prisons and the physical is suspect, how can we ever encounter pain as a meaningful experience or, shockingly, the place where God comes to find us, a physical experience he chose to go through himself to bind us to his life?
When I first got sick, I was asked about unrepentant sin. Surely, some secret attitude, behavior, or pattern was causing my suffering. I racked my brain for answers. If I could find the hidden sin and repent, then maybe the suffering would cease. What lesson was God trying to teach me? If I could learn it, maybe I would stop hurting.
Contrary to how many Christians approach hard things, suffering is often not an indication of hidden sin or evidence of a lack of faith. What if the real sin is to witness suffering and immediately judge the sufferer as bad? Sin is letting our pernicious anxiety make us blame someone for the suffering we see. Sin is seeing weakness and assuming its bearer lacks faith. Sin is expecting ourselves and others to be miniature self-saviors who can rise above our broken bodies and broken stories and eliminate suffering by the power of our own determined truth-telling.
Sin is calling a failure what is actually the fall. It’s forgetting our origin story, the sin of self-sufficiency, and the outcome of living beyond the boundaries of what God has given. It’s forgetting that every part of creation cries out because of the curse. It’s forgetting that broken bodies, broken stories, and broken relationships are the result of ancient sin. It’s personalizing what are often bigger consequences of a massive story. Disease, disorders, weakness, poverty, and grief are the losing legacy of humanity, the shards of sin shattering us, from the smallest cell to the largest cultural system. The Savior came and is coming again, but our healing is in his hands, not our own. If our Savior chose to enter the human story in a human body, then we should enter one another’s places of suffering remembering we carry and extend the presence of Christ. Sin is any Christian’s response to pain, poverty, and weakness that assumes they are individual problems to solve rather than places to patiently embody the solidarity of Jesus.
When we reduce pain to an individual problem, we don’t know what to do with ourselves and our stories. In an increasingly individualistic society, where the space between self, tradition, and our embodied connection to each other feels wide, suffering can be a massive assault to our sense of self and our ability to hope. We become lost in a chasm of overspiritualized pain and undervalued physicality, not knowing where our lives fit alongside a Christianity glittering with the veneer of abundance. Already exhausted, we sink under the weight of existing as an aberration of the abundant life our Christian friends and families want us to project. Defeated and lonely, many of us subconsciously attempt to detach from the grief in our bodies, excising it from our minds to feel accepted in the community of the able and successful. We push pain away with effort, pretending to be okay among the shiny, smiling faces at church or work. For if we were honest about how sad or sick or hopeless we really feel, would we be accepted at all?
There is a widening gap between expressing our faith individually and rooting that faith in community, a gap that leaves us with inadequate shared language to draw from to describe the turmoil of prolonged suffering.20 A poverty of shared language leads to poverty of hope. We don’t have language for lament because we don’t view weakness as an expected reality. We don’t have space to grieve, because we’re too busy judging grief or seeking its relief to speak its truth aloud. As a therapist, I’ve known many Christian clients whose faith buckles under the weight of displacement from a story, language, and community large enough to hold suffering’s tension. With less and less biblical literacy and connection to church, sufferers are untethered from the language, narrative, and practices that could anchor us in understanding, encouragement, and hope.
We feel ashamed of our suffering and confused about its role in our lives because the story we’ve been handed disowns grief and minimizes weakness. We struggle to accept and cope with suffering because our culture tells us to deny or hide it. Our silence and pretending is the inheritance of Christians who have so swallowed the American Dream we have lost sight of our suffering Lord.
Growing up in an evangelical church and attending a small Christian school, I digested a steady diet of disembodied hope. Though I suspected and secretly hoped the object of Christian faith was not floating on a cloud, singing terrible worship music for the remainder of my existence, no one offered me a more sensible alternative. The language of sin and heaven seemed inadequate, even before physical suffering entered my life, especially because many of the Christians I knew seemed at best sad and at worst hypocritical. I didn’t realize it, but I was longing for joy in a subculture striving for perfection. Joy’s absence had subconsciously fueled my search for meaning, but striving had carved well-worn routes into the pathways of my brain.
My first years at Covenant College anchored my faith in the more compelling and whole story of the God who came in the flesh to redeem and restore instead of burn and judge. When I first visited the church that would become my home during my college years, I felt something in the sea of swaying, clapping bodies I had only sampled in other Christian communities.21 In movement, song, and diversity, I encountered enthralling, refreshing joy. Pieces of my faith that had been disembodied and fragmented began to fit within the arc of a bigger story and an incarnate body, Jesus Christ and his church.
But learning a story and believing that story when everything in us quakes and hurts are two different things. So when sickness invaded my strong body as a college junior and then didn’t leave, I had to believe something. And I found my way to belief, and even joy, but only through the pain of shedding dense layers of individualistic striving.
The church where I had tasted joy became difficult to get to with my new, weaker body. My hands couldn’t quite grasp the steering wheel of my beloved green truck, so I had to find rides down the ambling roads of Lookout Mountain to make it to church in the city below. The chemotherapy pills I had started soon after that initial doctor’s appointment made me nauseated, so the winding road was difficult to tolerate. Once at church, I was embarrassed by the trail of hair I left behind in every seat, my body struggling to receive the poison sold to it as medicine. I was confused by the way tears would unexpectedly come when we’d sing, the lyrics touching a wound deep inside that needed healing and a hope that needed air.
When we sang of lifting our hands, hearts, and eyes to the hills, where our help comes from, my tears were prayer and praise. Lifting hands that couldn’t work well enough to get me to church without help, a heart trembling in uncertainty and weighed down by dismissal, and eyes unaccustomed to seeing the weak body star
ing back in the mirror, I began to sense the mixture of longing and nearness that would mark the next decade of my life. Even now I struggle to name it, an odd amalgam of pain and yearning touched by a sense of love.
Weeks after my trip to the University of Michigan rheumatology office, I sat in the dark on top of my dorm bed on a floral quilt of yellow, green, and blue, alone with a body too sick to leave bed. Leaning against the cold cinderblock wall to hold myself up, I tried and failed to open my Bible. The hands that had, with my mom’s, pieced together the tiny triangles of the quilt I sat on couldn’t handle the basic pinch and lift of turning a single page of Scripture. I couldn’t even open the books that held the currency of my connection to God and others. I couldn’t care for anyone else, write a paper, or study for a test. All the ways we learn to show we are worthwhile can evaporate.
All my life, I’d subconsciously believed a story of strength—that independent striving was the narrator of success. Sickness killed the narrator, or at least left him fatally wounded. My whole life had been an unfurling series of achievements shielding me from hurt, trauma, and loneliness. Suffering cut through my exterior of exceptionalism, exposing the self beneath my striving.
I had nothing to offer God but my broken heart and broken body.
We wonder who we will encounter when our armor falls off. Will we even recognize ourselves? We fear the silent alone, where no work, capability, or activity can define our value. Many of us live with eyes closed tight against our suffering and the suffering of others because we’re terrified of our sin and selves being dissolved. We fear looking long at our pain, because we think if we start looking, we may never see anything else. A reluctance to see only adds the burden of daily pretending to already-present daily pain. An unwillingness to see our real, broken bodies and strained stories keeps us from becoming the people we truly are—people more loved by God than we can realize or feel when we’re busy protecting ourselves from pain.
All pain matters. All pain impacts our whole selves. All pain needs a story and response greater than the dualistic sludge covering our eyes, preventing us from seeing our true suffering and true Lord.
What if we’ve been desperately, unconsciously seeking a story that isn’t even good?
What if self-sufficiency was always a bankrupt lie, and suffering simply demonstrates its poverty?
What if suffering isn’t ruining our selves but re-creating them?
Suffering is an invitation to live and tell the story truer and more satisfying than pain-free ease. It is an invitation to know and be known by the God who entered the human story intent on transforming death into life. The presence of prolonged suffering begs us to remember our true story and its suffering Lord.
We whose suffering is inconvenient, mysterious, and threatening to both ourselves and those around us are held and loved by a God who not only sees our inadequacy but injected himself into it by taking on human flesh.
Pain and suffering disrupt our relationships and disintegrate our bodies, down to the very functioning of our neurons, but God calls us good and loved. When we choose to live open-eyed, when we allow our suffering, weakness, and unarmored selves to be seen by God, ourselves, and others, we may find there was goodness in these stories of suffering all along.
We need a story bigger than success. We need incarnation. We need embodiment. We need exposure and sight and light that touches darkness in actual bodies, with real histories, in the places where we most want rescue, relief, and retribution.
This is a story where pain propels communion. It’s the most surprising, curious, and true story of all, where the Author—God himself—not only tells the story but enters it and changes everything, not by winning but by suffering.
In Jesus, this is what we have. Not the stories we thought we wanted but the one we most need.
This story is mine, and it is yours. Come, let us find the grace that is here.
NOTES
1 See Ashley Fetters, “The Doctor Doesn’t Listen to Her. But the Media Is Starting To,” The Atlantic (August 10, 2018), www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/08/womens-health-care-gaslighting/567149/; Joe Fassler, “How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less Seriously,” The Atlantic (October 15, 2015), www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/emergency-room-wait-times-sexism/410515/.
2 At the time of this appointment in 2009, fibromyalgia was, even more than today, experienced by many female patients as a catch-all diagnosis when a doctor was suspicious of one’s pain having a physical origin. I am in no way calling fibromyalgia a primarily psychosomatic disorder. Rather, it is a complex disorder in which one’s central nervous system causes widespread pain. As you will learn throughout this book, I believe all pain is embodied and real, a conclusion I have found through both science and the crucible of my own pain being disbelieved and minimized by medical professionals.
3 Anatole Broyard writes, “It may not be dying we fear so much, but the diminished self.” Quoted in Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2013), 39.
4 Peter A. Moskovitz, “Understanding Suffering: The Phenomenology and Neurobiology of the Experience of Illness and Pain,” in Maldynia: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Illness of Chronic Pain, ed. James Giordano (Boca Raton, FL: CRC, 2016), 34.
5 Clara Costa Oliveira, “Understanding Pain and Human Suffering,” Revista Bioética 24, no. 2 (2016): 225–34.
6 Kirsten Weir, “The Pain of Social Rejection,” American Psychological Association 43, no. 4 (2012): 50.
7 Moskovitz, “Understanding Suffering,” 34–61.
8 Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life (New York: Penguin, 2008), 132.
9 Gen. 2:25.
10 Gen. 1:29–30, my paraphrase.
11 Gen. 2:17.
12 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), 207–8.
13 Gen. 3:7–8.
14 Gen. 3:11.
15 Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul, 218.
16 Gen. 2:17. The curse of the fall touches everything. Theologian Michael Williams writes, “God imposes a series of curses on the participants of the first sin: the serpent whose temptation occasioned the sin, Eve, and then Adam. He expels the man and woman from the Garden. Henceforth they and their posterity will experience the world as an inhospitable place, a place of toilsome labor and great danger.” Michael D. Williams, Far as the Curse Is Found: The Covenant Story of Redemption (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2005), 67.
17 Bryant L. Myers, Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practices of Transformational Development (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2009), 27.
18 James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009).
19 Brad D. Strawn and Warren S. Brown, “Liturgical Animals: What Psychology and Neuroscience Tell Us about Formation and Worship,” Liturgy 28, no. 4 (2013): 3.
20 As New York Times columnist David Brooks writes, “The grand narrative of individual emancipation left us with what some have called ‘the great disembedding.’ ” Individualism has steadily severed us from the committed fabric of relationship and institutional rhythms and norms that could tether us to meaning and hope when life is shifting and scary. David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life (New York: Random House, 2019), 31.
21 During college I attended New City Fellowship in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a multicultural church focused on “producing discipled believers who become God’s instruments of grace, justice, and mercy.” www.newcityfellowship.com.
CHAPTER 2
WARRING STORYLINES
Hijacked by Shame, Healed by Solidarity
Realize who God is, what he has done, who you are in Christ, where history is going. Put your troubles in perspective by remembering Christ’s troubles on you
r behalf, and all his promises to you, and what he is accomplishing.
—TIM KELLER, WALKING WITH GOD THROUGH PAIN AND SUFFERING
The roaring rainstorm sweeping northern Wyoming seized my attention as we drove to our temporary landing place of Bozeman, Montana. Gripping the wheel and staring hard through the curtain of rain coming across the windshield, I slowly adjusted to the storm we were in. By the time I saw an incoming call from a dear friend, I was calm enough to answer. Lore had faced sorrows like our own, sorrows like the one that had us jobless, homeless, and driving up I-25 with all our earthly possessions in a five-by-eight U-Haul trailer in search of solace and a future. As the torrent receded into a drizzle, I trickled out the story of our most recent suffering, primly summarizing in the plainest terms how more hard things had happened.
“You need to let your pain matter,” she responded. “Don’t rush to make everything sound more okay than it is.”
I’d spoken these same words to dozens of my therapy clients, but hearing them was like rain in a drought. Hydration hurts a little when you’re cracked and trying to keep yourself from crumbling. Her voice and presence were a tender dressing on a wound that had just started healing, the kind of dressing you can’t change on your own.
My mouth had said there were blessings in disguise, but my body was tense with the truth of its discouragement. I was tired of sharing stories of suffering. I was ashamed of having one more hard thing happen, afraid my friends would eventually blame me for all the suffering in my life. So I simplified, minimizing our present pain into a pittance of what it actually was. Lore heard past my words, reminding me that patient honesty is better than shamed silence or withheld woes.
