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I am by vocation a counselor and professor. I specialize in caring for individuals and families caught in cycles of abuse and trauma. As such, my life is often a front-row seat to the terrible evils that people suffer from and inflict on one another. I’ve often thought that counselors and firefighters have a lot in common—we run into burning buildings to help, then retire to the station once the task is done.
But this book doesn’t come from that professional place. This book isn’t the equivalent of a book by a firefighter on the methods of extinguishing residential blazes. It’s a meditation from a firefighter who has watched his own house burn down and been unable to stop it.
My wife Kate and I met at a tiny high school on the central coast of California. It took me ten years to ask her out, but once I did I quickly realized that I should have used that past decade quite differently. She was the best of everything I never knew I needed—daring, spunky, always on the edge of doing something just a bit crazy. She sang. She danced. She spoke her mind. Her love for Jesus radiated out from every fiber of her being.
We tied the knot on one excessively warm afternoon in June 2013. Little did we know that the defining two words for the next eleven years and counting would be chronic pain. Our descent into that world began just six months after that happy day, and we’ve never made it back out of the hole.
I don’t always know how best to describe what’s gone wrong. There are so many levels—levels that undoubtedly you experience as well.
I could talk about medical details, a path littered with all manner of doctors and medications and hopes raised and dashed over and over again. Gone are the days of running together, the lengthy hikes in the woods, the ordinary easy movement and touch that framed our lives before.
I could talk about rewriting every category of life as chronic issues entrenched and we had to surrender to a new reality over and over and over again. Gone are the piles of homeschool curricula and tidy budgets and any semblance of a “normal”-looking two-parent household.
I could talk about the dark nights of the soul when the things we thought we knew and understood about God and ourselves and good theology were pressed far beyond what we could have ever imagined. Gone is the uncluttered relationship with God where his rule means that things generally turn out okay and the standard of human life is happiness.
I could talk about the pummeling effect chronic pain and illness have on relationships, of well-meaning people (who seemingly ought to know better) insisting that greater faith or essential oils can set your life back to normal if you just would truly believe. Gone is the feeling of being understood, of having a normal life that most people can relate to.
I could tell you that the first prayer my two-year-old daughter uttered on her own was “God, Mommy feel better?” Or about the times I have had to explain to my sons’ teachers that, no, their mother wasn’t dying; our boys were just processing their fear that she might. Gone is my kids’ innocence as they inhabit a world where they learn of debilitating pain before My Little Pony or Pokémon or the other stations along the way of growing up.
Chronic pain and illness are the backdrop for the movie of our life. They were there when we were newlyweds trying to figure out how to take two lives and blend them into one. They were there as we welcomed three kids into the world and lived in four states. They were there as we watched God take Kate’s father home to be with him. They have wound their way through every event, every milestone, every day of our existence. And barring something unexpected, we have about forty-five more years to go.
The Fastest Or The Lastest
Writing a book on suffering is a daunting task. You may have drunk far deeper from the cup of suffering than I have. I marvel at your strength and how God upholds you. Or you may wonder if you’ve earned your place at the table. Sure, we have our struggles, but this idea of entire-life-rewriting pain and illness is farther into the cave than we’ve stepped. It’s true that some of us have heavier burdens to carry than others. But at the end of the day, each of us whose spouse, child, parent, sibling, or friend is afflicted with chronic pain and illness carries burdens. We’re a community of people trying to figure out how to live a life that’s no longer Plan A and endure in love like Christ does for us.
My favorite sport is long-distance trail running. (Strange, I know.) Right now, the top athlete in the sport is Courtney Dauwalter. She’s rewritten every record in the book, including setting the course record at the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, a 106-mile race, by over an hour. (That’s the equivalent of a team winning the Super Bowl 43–8.) For all her athletic achievements, I find her view of other runners even more impressive. She often talks in interviews about how she’s not convinced she’s the most impressive athlete in the field. After breaking the Tahoe Rim course record, she noted that, for her, “the best part of it all, I think, [is] cheering people in. We all cover the same trails. It doesn’t matter what pace you did; everyone did 205 miles out there.”1
I’ve found Dauwalter’s advice helpful in so many ways as I meet new friends whose lives have been disrupted by a loved one’s diagnosis of chronic pain and illness. There’s no “fastest or lastest” in the world of suffering. We all have our unique struggles and challenges. Wherever you are on the road of learning to rewrite your life, my hope is that this book meets you.
Nate Brooks serves as an associate professor of counseling at Southeastern Baptist Theology Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. He counsels at Courage Christian Counseling, focusing on abuse, trauma, grief, and chronic pain and illness. This article was excerpted from his newly published book, Disrupted Journey: Walking with Your Loved One Through Chronic Pain and Illness (P&R, 2025).