In the fall of her junior year in college, K.J. Ramsey was an athlete, a campus leader, and a straight-A student. In the space of a few weeks, debilitating pain shattered her former identity and reduced her days to hours of agony. When doctors struggled to diagnose and treat her, it became evident that this was not a temporary circumstance but a chronic illness. Grief over lost dreams, guilt over her inability to produce, and pain that would not relent left Ramsey wondering, “Does God still love me?”
In the 12 years that have elapsed since she felt the first twinges of inflammation in her joints, Ramsey has pursued this question through theology, psychology, Scripture, and community. Her newly released book, “This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace when Suffering Lingers,” is an invitation for the suffering to know Christ’s presence in their pain and a call for the church to see God’s grace through the testimony of those who suffer. In the introduction she asks, “What if the church treated suffering like a story to tell rather than a secret to keep?”
“This Too Shall Last” is a counternarrative to the truisms liberally offered to those who are suffering. It is an invitation for readers to see how their stories are a part of God’s story of redemption, even the parts that seem uncomfortable, shameful, or unrelenting. In contrast to the grief, shame, and isolation of suffering, Ramsey’s book offers warmth and compassion. It opens with an invitation to bear witness to the middle of our stories, “where so many of us live yet so few describe.”
Storytelling as Hospitality
Ramsey initially began writing as a way to connect with other sufferers. “I longed to meet someone else who was sick like me.” Writing about her experience with a chronic illness helped Ramsey silence the shame that held her captive and dispel the lie that she was the only one suffering. But as she began to share — writing articles for the chronic illness website community called The Mighty and publishing her first article in — she realized she was not the only one who needed community. “When I hear from readers they say, ‘You gave me words for what I’ve been living.’”
Listening to the testimonies of those who suffer prepares Christians for the suffering that will come, but also prepares them for the glory that will be revealed in them (Romans 8:18).
That was certainly my experience as a reader. “This Too Shall Last” gave me language to express the pain of my story of suffering. Years of infertility culminating in a life-threatening miscarriage burdened my heart with secret sorrow and a deep fear that I was unloved by God. In her book, Ramsey explains how emotional and physical pain hijack the brain’s ability for higher-order thinking and emotion processing, producing unnecessary shame. “[Shame] is always countering the narrative of God’s nearness with the story that we are unloved, abandoned, and forever stuck in a place of pain.” But Ramsey encourages readers to see their story in light of the bigger narrative of God’s love. “This is a story that transcends our suffering by entering into it.”
Sharing personal stories about weakness and suffering is how Christians give testimony to God’s sufficient grace. And sharing our stories is also an act of hospitality, Ramsey told me, welcoming others into the truth of God’s incarnate love. “Trauma steals our tongues and makes it so we can’t make sense of our stories, and words have this great power of bringing us back to wholeness. When we can name these very confusing parts of our stories, we can see that we are still part of the story of God. That is the Gospel: The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
The Story of Our Suffering Savior
When Ramsey says she was born and raised in the PCA, she means it literally. “I was almost born in the parking lot of the church where my dad was an elder,” she told me with an incredulous laugh. Her dad played Joseph in a Christmas program while her mom labored in the car, waiting for him to finish before they rushed to the hospital. By choosing someone else to play Mary, her church missed the opportunity for an especially authentic Nativity experience.
Despite almost being laid in a manger, it took Ramsey a long time to understand the full implications of Christ’s incarnation. As part of the trappings of being a “good” Christian girl in a conservative family, Ramsey found it easy to internalize a works-righteousness built upon a distrust of emotion and a heavy reliance on knowledge.
But when an autoimmune disease stole her ability to function without pain, her self-image as a capable, productive person began to crumble, and her self-sufficient “righteousness” went with it. “I wasn’t set up to know what to do with suffering when it came into my life and never left, when I was handed a story that included having needs that I could not meet on my own and feelings of fragility that no amount of faith could annihilate.”
So Ramsey began to read in-depth about the Incarnation. “It’s so simple and scandalous,” she writes. “In choosing to become human, God knew dependency. It’s a body that brings God’s love to us.” This understanding helped to combat the shame she felt about her own weak, fragile body. “My story of finding grace in suffering has been a story of seeing the full humanity of Christ touching and transforming my full humanity — including my physicality and my emotions.” Without a robust theology of the Incarnation, our theology of redemption becomes paltry and pale. “If I cannot allow Jesus to be as human as I am, then I cannot allow Him to be Lord. My faith is only as real as I believe His body to be.”
Ramsey told me, “I so long for people with stories like mine to look to our Savior and see that He is as human as we are. We don’t have to divide ourselves from the sticky substance of emotion and sensation in order to be faithful. The whole journey of faith is trusting that Christ has come all the way near to us.”
The Church as a Storytelling Community
While she was pursuing a counseling degree at Denver Seminary, Ramsey began to weave together her understanding of Christ’s humanity with a deeper understanding of the human brain. In her book, Ramsey examines how humans made in the image of God display His relational nature. “The image of God is not simply in you and me. It is in us.”
She wondered, “Would a story of someone being sustained in ongoing suffering ever be valued enough to be shared from the front of this church?”
We need others to help us see how our stories of weakness connect with the biblical story of Creation, Fall, Resurrection, and Consummation. Ramsey quotes Bonhoeffer’s classic book on community, “Life Together”: “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.”
Unlike pithy platitudes that promise quick resolution, the faithful presence of other Christians proclaims the Gospel truth that in Christ, God has drawn near to a world marred by sin and suffering. “This Too Shall Last” recounts story after story of Christians who served Ramsey in this way: her college roommate who massaged her hands while she wept in pain, the friend who regularly showed up to sit on the couch beside her when Ramsey was too sick to move, a professor’s validation and understanding when Ramsey’s husband experienced depression. Each episode was a tangible witness of God’s presence in her weakness. And that witness was amplified when those friends began to share their own stories of lingering pain — singleness, infertility, mental illness, loss and grief, and family brokenness.
In a chapter titled “The Communion of Saints,” Ramsey shares that the church needs the embodied witness of weakness to display the true story of God’s kingdom. “We who are weak remind the entire church that salvation comes only through God and not through our self-sufficient striving. … Bearing witness to weakness helps us all place empty hands on the empty cross, forming expectant hearts for the risen Christ who is coming to heal, restore, and redeem.”
Lament as Bearing Witness
Several years ago, I read an article suggesting that by eliminating lament from our liturgies, churches have exiled the grieving to shed their tears in church bathrooms (or worse, outside the community of saints). In this heightened season of grief, loss, and isolation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for a community to share our sorrow has become even more evident.
In “This Too Shall Last,” Ramsey recalls a time of sharing in her church, each testimony providing a “before and after” story, including one woman who had been healed from a chronic health issue. While rejoicing that God worked in such a powerful way, Ramsey also felt the tension between her story and the woman’s story. She wondered, “Would a story of someone being sustained in ongoing suffering ever be valued enough to be shared from the front of this church?”
While Christ’s resurrection promises that suffering and death are not the end of our stories, His faithful life reminds us that we still live in the tension between the “now” of Christ’s kingdom and the “not yet” of the new Heavens and Earth. This middle of our stories can be cheapened by premature triumphalism.
“The church in North America has so collapsed the message of Christ onto the American dream that we need to course-correct, and creatively and intentionally make space to bear witness to stories of weakness, stories of suffering,” Ramsey said. “We’ve just scurried to the far end of the continuum of faith, and we are missing so much of the story of Jesus. And we are sidestepping so much of the space where we can see Him come near to us.”
The American dream isn’t the only source of this disconnect. In many cases, gnosticism has sneaked into our Gospel. “The substance of even our spiritual lives is fraught with dualism. We turn to the church for wisdom about how to live in the expansive fields of grace, and we are trained to demonize our bodies and slap truth on our souls. It doesn’t work.” The end result of this separation of body and soul is that we struggle to apply the truth of the Gospel in our lives.
By bearing witness to her own weakness, K.J. Ramsey magnifies the love of Christ and provides substantive hope for a church in the middle of God’s redemptive story.
A lack of community lament leaves our imaginations impoverished and unable to envision the consummation of God’s redemptive story. “We think of heaven as a distant reality that we will reach someday,” Ramsey said. “But the scriptural view of heaven is that heaven comes down to earth. We often have too weak of imaginations to see that.” Listening to the testimonies of those who suffer prepares Christians for the suffering that will come but also prepares them for the glory that will be revealed in them (Romans 8:18). Suffering saints remind Christians that our redemption is fully accomplished but not yet fully realized, teaching the church to cry “Come, Lord Jesus.”
Making Space for Suffering in Our Stories
Today I’m watching my one-year-old son play while I write. He’s learning what cognitive psychologists call “containment” — discerning physical properties by testing which things fit inside other things. Right now, he’s alternatively putting a red ball, a finger puppet, a plastic toy, and his hand through a hole in a wooden box designed for that kind of experimentation. If the item doesn’t fit, he takes it out and examines it, turning it around in his hands while he scrutinizes it from every angle.
Thirty years of brain development lie between us, and I’m not trying to learn the principles of containment anymore, but I still have the desire to fit together the pieces of my experience in a pattern that makes sense. I’ll turn hard things over and over in my mind, hoping to figure out where this particular pain fits in the box of the Christian life. If I attempt to keep shoving suffering through a resurrection-shaped hole, I will feel the same frustration that my tiny son feels, howling with rage when my best-laid plans instead devolve into grief.
“In John 16:33 Jesus says ‘you will have suffering in this world, but be courageous, I have overcome the world,’” Ramsey reminded me in our interview. “Suffering is an expected part of our story. And that means it is something for all of us to pay attention to and to include space for in how we see ourselves and how we see each other.” When Christians embrace a narrative of faith that never involves suffering, we fall out of step with the story God is writing in our lives, and this dissonance can produce anger and entitlement. Without the gospel narrative to give it meaning, our brains struggle to make sense of suffering, wrapped in a fog of pain.
But although suffering can be a source of fear and doubt, it is also a means of grace. “Paul attested that Christ’s power was made perfect in his weakness,” Ramsey told me. “Weakness really is where we will see Jesus.” As hard as it might be for progress-oriented, perfectionistic Christians to hear, “by placing so much emphasis and focus on things looking better, we miss seeing the face of God.” Weakness may challenge our sense of self-sufficiency, but it clearly demonstrates God’s unmerited favor for frail and fallen humans.
Ramsey has come to see her suffering as a gift, one that helps her to slow down and acknowledge the presence of God. “Simone Weil wrote, ‘The beauty of this world is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter.’ Sometimes suffering graciously slows me down to see the things that I normally rush right past. In that slowing we can start to appreciate the small things right here that bear Christ’s smile. The beauty of this world is waiting for us as we are slowed down by suffering. Both beauty and suffering are the things that pierce us with God’s presence.”
By bearing witness to her own weakness, Ramsey magnifies the love of Christ and provides substantive hope for a church in the middle of God’s redemptive story. “Your suffering might not [involve] physical pain,” she tells her reader. “But your suffering probably carries the same shrill cry of agony and the temptation to give up on God as mine. Your suffering probably repeats the pattern of fear-to-faith in more days and hours than you’d like. In the place of your weakness, Jesus stands secure in the Father’s love for you.” “This Too Shall Last” invites readers to see the loving smile of Christ, the tender Shepherd who walks with them “through the valley of the shadow” for as long as the shadow lasts.
Katie Kelley, a graduate of Covenant College, earned her MDiv at Reformed Theological Seminary and is a PhD candidate in Developmental Psychology at the University of Notre Dame. She lives in a house full of books in South Bend, Indiana with her husband Daniel and son Liam.