When your prayers for healing haven’t been answered, the fog of depression isn’t lifting, your marriage is ending in divorce, or grief won’t go away, it’s easy to feel you’ve failed God and, worse, he’s failed you. If God loves us, why does he allow us to hurt?
Bible Gateway interviewed K.J. Ramsey (@kjramseywrites), author of This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers (Zondervan, 2020).
Explain the chronic illness in your life that prompted you to write this book and the heartbreak of being plundered by the church.
K.J. Ramsey: I live with an autoimmune disease called Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS), which causes pain, stiffness, and degeneration in my spine and other joints. I haven’t had a day without pain or fatigue in 11 years. Along the way, the Body of Christ has rooted my husband and I in a hope larger than our hearts can hold on our own.
But sometimes arrogance, pride, and unhealed wounds in others’ lives can also make the church a place where hurt threatens our hope instead of forming it. While the pain that happens in relationships in the Body of Christ was not why I wrote This Too Shall Last, I believe it’s important to be honest that the Body of Christ holds the potential for great harm and great healing. Often relationships with other Christians are where we experience our deepest wounds, but it’s also in relationships in the Body that we’ll receive our greatest healing.
What do you mean Christians have “reduced the gospel to rescue, power to privilege, and hope to swift healing, reducing ourselves in the process”?
K.J. Ramsey: We forget that Jesus told us to expect both his peace and suffering. In John 16:33 Jesus said, “I have told you these things so that in me you may have peace. You will have suffering in this world. Be courageous! I have conquered the world.” We’d prefer a gospel that simply says, “You won’t have suffering in this world anymore because I’ve overcome it!” But that’s not what Jesus said.
The abiding peace of Jesus is not found simply in being rescued from hard things or guarding ourselves in privilege from experiencing weakness. The abiding peace of God is found in the presence of Christ sustaining us in sorrow and strengthening us in our weakness. We reduce our capacity to abide in Christ’s peace when we place expectations on ourselves and God to be rescued from stories that Jesus said to expect. What if the gospel is the good news of gaining the life of Jesus in every place we experience death, decay, and discouragement? What if we can only grow in his life by experiencing sorrow instead of trying to escape it?
What do you mean when you write “pain threatens personhood”?
K.J. Ramsey: Pain of all kinds shares the same neurobiological pathways, creating the internal experience of disconnection and disintegration. When you experience pain of any kind—physical, emotional, spiritual, mental, or relational—you experience it physiologically as a threat to your existence.
Suffering, at its core, is the experience of feeling diminished, of feeling like ourselves and less capable of engaging in relationships. Suffering is the diminishment that happens when pain threatens our sense of self.
The beautiful thing is, in Christ, the experience of suffering can be the very thing that prompts and pulls us into fuller personhood—the truth that we were made for more than self-sufficiency. We were made for interdependence.
How is suffering transformational space?
K.J. Ramsey: We tend to think of suffering as something to get past, but it’s more of a place we find ourselves. Suffering feels like walking into thick fog, where we can’t see what’s coming. We have to trust that God is not leading us off the edge of a cliff, but rather is guiding us to safety. Suffering edges us to the borders of our relationship with God and ourselves, inviting us to deeper trust.
In the cloud of suffering, we’re stripped of old certainties, of attachments to shame, striving, and self-sufficiency, so that we can attach to the invisible God instead.
Suffering is transformational space in that it invites us, again and again, to be present to the invisible God, to trust God is leading us forward with kindness, and to allow our lack of control to become quiet, courageous faith.
When we’re willing to be where we are instead of treating suffering like something to get past as quickly as possible, we open ourselves to be changed. Suffering becomes the place we find our truest selves, hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3:3).
How does suffering fit with Jesus’ purpose of bringing the kingdom of God near to us?
K.J. Ramsey: When we suffer or see suffering, we wonder how a good God could allow such pain. But the mysterious means of the kingdom is that God himself chose to enter the world set on suffering as one of us for all of us. Jesus chose to live in a body that would groan, cry, and die. “We always carry the death of Jesus in our body, so that the life of Jesus may also be displayed in our body” (2 Cor. 4:10). As we share in suffering, we share in Christ’s life. Every place of human pain can be a place of experiencing the life of Christ as authentically ours, creating trust where we feel doubt, security where there’s fear, and joy where there’s sorrow. The kingdom of God is brought near to us in the person of Jesus by the Spirit’s abiding presence in us.
Suffering reminds us again and again of our lack of strength, prompting us to pay attention to the God who chose embodiment and death to unite us to life. Every moment of our pain can be a moment of remembering and experiencing the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as ours. The kingdom of God comes as we allow our weakness to be where God is strong.
How should the church spend less energy treating weakness as a problem to fix and more time bearing witness to it with expectation of seeing Christ?
K.J. Ramsey: First and foremost, we need to be willing to pay attention to our discomfort with suffering and sorrow. Our discomfort betrays belief in our own faith and effort to secure blessings. But that was never the gospel. We need to allow ourselves to acknowledge how deeply uncomfortable with are with living in a world where suffering persists, where we cannot protect ourselves from pain. We need to be honest with God about the hurt we feel and the harm we see, and out of that honesty, hope will rise.
The gospel is always, always, that Christ’s power is perfected in our weakness (2 Cor. 12:9-10). Our posture toward weakness is often to deny it, hide it, or minimize it. What if we looked for Christ’s strength to be poured into it?
When the church sees its members experiencing weakness and sorrow, we’re at the cusp of seeing Christ’s strength here and now. As such, those whom society would deem as less valuable or worthy of attention are the very people the church should pay attention to as bearing the beauty of Christ’s strength.
Practically, our posture toward those who are suffering needs to be patient and kind, with expectancy of beholding Jesus making sorrow a place of strength. We have to be willing to let our discomfort be a dawn, to sit where we normally would try to just make things feel better, simpler, or easier. To listen longer and give platitudes less. To acknowledge we don’t have answers. To allow sufferers to ask theirs.
The church needs to seriously and continuously consider how our services and presence make space for sorrow to be experienced as a valuable encounter with the living God. (For more details, of course, you can read my whole book—particularly chapters 8 and 9!)
What is a favorite Bible passage of yours and why?
K.J. Ramsey: My favorite verse is Psalm 126:5, which inspired the tear on the cover of my book. “Those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy.” Psalms like this remind me, again and again, that experiencing suffering and sorrow instead of wishing it away is what will create trust and lasting joy. Every tear is a seed, and what is growing will last.
What are your thoughts about Bible Gateway and the Bible Gateway App and Bible Audio App?
K.J. Ramsey: I use Bible Gateway nearly every single day. When I was writing This Too Shall Last, I had a tab with Bible Gateway open during almost all of my writing sessions, because I was always remembering phrases and passages of Scripture to include throughout my chapters. I find that the accessibility of the website and app really help me explore the Scriptures and weave the whole of Scripture into how I write, think, and live.
Is there anything else you’d like to say?
K.J. Ramsey: Look to Jesus. Look to the life of Christ—the real, embodied life of Jesus. And then pay attention to your life and your body as places Christ really is present. The Word made flesh lives in us, making every part of our lives a place we can participate in the Word of God touching and transforming both us and this world from death to life. Scripture is living and active (Heb. 4:12), and its story becomes authentically ours as we remember the presence of Christ is here, with us now, in every place of our sorrow and joy. Your body, your story, your suffering are part of God’s story of uniting all things to himself. Pay attention to Christ and yourself with expectancy to see just how true this is.
This Too Shall Last is published by HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc., the parent company of Bible Gateway.
Bio: K.J. Ramsey (BA, Covenant College, MA, Denver Seminary) is a licensed professional counselor, writer, and recovering idealist who believes sorrow and joy coexist. She is the author of This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers, and her writing has been published in Christianity Today, RELEVANT, The Huffington Post, Fathom Magazine, Health Central, and more on the integration of theology, psychology, and spiritual formation. She and her husband live in Denver, Colorado. Follow K.J.’s writing at kjramsey.com and across social media at @kjramseywrites.
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The post When Escape from Suffering Is Not the Answer: An Interview with K.J. Ramsey appeared first on Bible Gateway Blog.