Home > Author > K.J. Ramsey
1 " All pain triggers a reminder, deeper than thought, buzzing through blood and bone, that we are fragile and finite. "
― K.J. Ramsey , This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers
2 " Living with long-term suffering in American culture feels like being off-key. Suffering quiets and slows, but our culture prefers a crescendo. "
3 " Often the pain that makes us feel most stuck is not our suffering; it is experiencing distress in the presence of people who expect us to get better faster than we can. "
4 " Suffering whispers, shouts, and screams the story no one wants to remember: we are not in control, and we are all going to die. "
5 " When pain of any kind makes us feel less ourselves and less capable of engaging in relationships, we experience it as suffering. "
6 " Jesus’ words to his disciples are just as true for us today. We will weep and mourn. We will have sorrow. And our sorrow will turn to joy. Today, in the tension of pain that persists, we are living the reality Jesus named. Here we find the descending, rising rhythm that creates our new life. As Henri Nouwen says, “It is the way in which pain can be embraced, not out of a desire to suffer, but in the knowledge that something new will be born in the pain.”4 In our longing for tension to be relieved, we cannot miss that Jesus said sorrow comes before joy. This is the church’s story: sorrow comes before the song. "
7 " And if what we hear from God’s people is largely the language of try hard and triumph, the sugar-lipped expectation that we’ll get better and move on, when our efforts are futile and triumph seems distant, we might just believe that the story of Jesus isn’t for us or isn’t even true. Prolonged pain becomes shame, a hidden hurt that we might not be loved by God after all. "
8 " Grasping to find the purpose in your pain may be the very thing preventing you from experiencing comfort and even transformation in your suffering. "
9 " So listen to this more closely than to those who taunt or judge, including yourself: “God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God has chosen what is insignificant and despised in the world.”3 The parts of your story that seem to be keeping you from strength and significance are what God calls chosen and valuable. "
10 " Shame wants us to live divided, dishonest, disembodied lives, to treat our bodies and stories like failures to conceal, to let our lips say we believe God is good while our hearts stay discouraged in the dark. The most harrowing power of shame might be its stealth in convincing us that silencing our pain behind statements of God’s goodness is spiritual, when really it’s just a churchy form of self-sufficiency. "
11 " When the church amplifies stories of healing and overcoming without also elevating stories of sustaining grace, she is not adequately forming souls to hold on to hope. If the majority of stories we hear are tales of triumph, we will question the worth of our stories when healing doesn’t come. God, in his wisdom, in his hidden purposes, allows some of our suffering to linger, and the church unintentionally turns hearts away from the heart of God when she does not hold space for the sacred mystery that weakness reveals God’s strength. "
12 " The deepest anguish of suffering involves coming up against the divide in ourselves between believing God is loving and feeling it is true. "
13 " the greatest story ever told is of a God who so loved the world that he chose to suffer for it. We’ll see what we can’t see when we’re busy searching for the purpose in our pain or hustling hard to prove how valuable we are for God’s kingdom. Suffering has always been God’s means of rousing a sleeping world with his love.2 "
14 " 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. "
15 " Others might not be comfortable with our most honest, desperate cries, but the psalms make it exceedingly clear God is. This is the prayer book of God’s people, written in the language of desire that situates our pain next to praise. Not hiding pain underneath praise. Not whispering about it. The psalms display God’s people attuned to their pain and willing to express it in striking vulnerability, "
16 " 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. "
17 " The seemingly impossible task of enduring suffering and rejoicing in it is born in the impossible reality that God became human. The implausibility of having joy in a body with an incurable disease is made possible by God in a body. The possibility of hope in your despair is alive, here, as close as your breath. "
18 " We who mourn carry vision the world needs. Through the lenses of tears, we can truly see.24 Something is broken that God will make whole. "
19 " all the faith you can muster won’t push your suffering over the edge of the cliff into your past, "
20 " The loneliness of realizing there’s a weakness inside us that no amount of effort or faith can eradicate makes us feel like exiles. Living with suffering that lingers can feel like being an unwanted refugee in a country blind to pain. You feel outside grace, outside light, out of reach of what you think makes life good. Your body holds a story quite different than the story your culture says is worth living. And you’re not sure you want to, or even can, move forward with this body in this story. "
