This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers Paperback – May 12, 2020

This Too Shall Last is equal parts memoir, therapy session, and theological treatise. It’s the memoir of a woman who experienced the sudden rug of health and vibrant youth pulled out from underneath her over ten years ago. It’s a therapy session with a licensed professional counselor. And it’s a theological treatise from a seminary graduate on the role of the suffering and weak in the church. At just over 200 pages, it’s a relatively short book and yet packed with engagement on a topic most would rather keep to a cozy paragraph — something neat and easily wrapped up with a tidy bow.Ramsey starts the book with a pointed statement: “This is not a before and after story.”It is unique to read such an honest book about this kind of chronic suffering written by someone smack in the middle of her own. Not looking back on her successful escape or triumphant victory – you too can beat suffering in these three easy steps – but, as one who admits that even during the writing of this book she was faced with really hard things and the inevitable question, “Do I really believe what I’m writing?”The fact that she has to live out what she is selling here lends so much credibility and weight to what at times might feel impossible – like inviting others into what we would much rather hide and power through. This really challenged something I have swallowed over the entirety of my own 20 years of living with broken health – the glorification of bootstrapping and being “in constant pain, but no one would ever know it.”Ramsey firmly posits, “Our stories can block us from grace when unacknowledged and forgotten, but when remembered with respect and care, they reveal the fingerprints of Christ’s incarnation in our lives.”She states that the chronically ill begin to see pain as their enemy. I resonate. But I see an enemy just as significant in the day-to-day practical theologies of those who have entered into your Day 7,000 of chronic pain and on their Day 1 can’t comprehend all the days – and all the platitudes and frustrations and and appointments and disappointments – that have come before. The knee-jerk reactions, shallow belief systems, pity instead of empathy, impatience and implication, and bad theology that bulldoze the sufferer just as we begin to see in Scripture, prayer, and the lives of long-dead saints the bittersweetness of the weight, worth, and gift that suffering has to offer.This is why Ramsey’s book is so important not just as tangible therapeutic help for those with chronic suffering, but for the church as a whole – for pastors and small group leaders and prayer teams and anyone who wants to be a real spiritual friend to those in pain. Some in your pews and around the potluck table live with suffering that looks closely like Ramsey’s, with a hard-to-pronounce and serious diagnosis or the visible crippling of her body. But there are others whose suffering you won’t see as clearly, who may not share Ramsey’s gift for articulation and expression of the internal struggles and spiritual needs that accompany their own stories. I implore you to let Ramsey guide you into her story, her theological framework of suffering, and the liminal space that might make you squirm a little. Welcome her many metaphors and anecdotes as an invitation into a story that is very likely shared by many around you who are desperate for you to show up for them with a more robust and realistic doctrine of suffering. Not just for their sake, but for the church as a body. Ramsey offers a thorough explanation for why “the church needs the embodied witness of weakness to fully inhabit the story of God’s Kingdom.”One such story Ramsey shares that made me weepy was the day she went on a beautiful hike with strong and healthy friends. With a body that could not easily keep up, she found herself left behind while they all made it to the glorious waterfall destination. She says, “This is how suffering can feel. Like a forest whose light is threatening, a place we lose our companions. We panic as we wonder if we will ever find a way out. When suffering invades our lives, we feel lost, left behind by the church while they keep blissfully hiking toward a waterfall of grace we fear we’ll never reach.”Ramsey invites us to name stories of weakness in the context of the whole story of Scripture, to turn towards our bodies with compassion as we look to the embodied life of Jesus who “didn’t merely identify himself with those who suffer, but became one who suffers,” to find the means of grace and power (in the Eucharist, spiritual disciplines, and elsewhere), and to reimagine a future not defined by the value-system of Western Christendom but by a suffering Christ.Many of her arguments echo the conversations that led my husband and me into the Anglican tradition seven years ago. We needed the embodied focus on the entire Biblical narrative, to be nourished by the weekly Eucharist and confession, the incarnational focus on the physical, tangible, and active presence of God in our midst, and the stewardship of the mysteries of our faith.May the stories of suffering around us be more than a ministry speedbump or potential success story for our prayer ministry. When we’re tempted to say (or at least imply), “I’m praying God fixes you soon so you can stop bumming us out and you can start pulling your weight,” may we pause and really think about what we’re suggesting.In this much-needed book, Ramsey invites us into a better way to make sense of chronic suffering: “In Christ the suffering we want to escape becomes the place of more fully participating in the reality of the kingdom of God. Our union with Christ does not rescue us from our earthy existence. Rather it plants our feet on the arid soil of suffering and makes it fertile ground.”

THIS is the kind of Christian non-fiction book I crave - beautiful, deeply moving and unpretentiously cerebral. In the midst of unrelenting suffering, a "rah-rah, you can do it!" pep talk with numbered steps and imperialistic "how-to"s grates the soul. Gimme a story, every time.This gorgeous book about how Jesus meets us in suffering manages to be soaringly poetic while educating us about neuroscience, theology and the pervasive effects of trauna while offering concrete hope in Christ. Ramsey makes heady theological concepts earthbound and embodied through story, reflection and physiological and therapeutic truths. And it's all interspersed with memoir (which I could have used even more of, frankly!). As she quotes Andrew Peterson (and gee whiz, her numerous quotes from other authors and theologians are invariably CHOICE!): "sometimes a story is the only way back from the dark."While she grounds hope in the here and now even in the midst of seemingly intractable pain, she never loses a gaze toward eternity. But hers is not a blithe gaze which trivializes or diminishes the suffering of now and the story gravid with meaning and redemption that God is writing through it.It's simply a beautiful book that checks all my boxes: it made me feel smarter, satisfied my yearning for deep theological discourse, and assailed my heart with the beauty and thrilling mystery of the incarnation. I normally don't underline books 'cause my husband's greatest pet peeve is buying a used book only to discover it's been liberally highlighted and / or underlined, but I lit this puppy up like the Fourth. Some favorites:"We remain a people of hope when we are honest about hopelessness." Pg. 58. Oof. Thank you."Our ability to give and receive God's love - to relate in ways that reflect the self-giving, empowering, gracing nature of God - is formed in the matrix and mud of relationships. Our story shapes our faith. And to live in the story of God's love, we must be shaped by communion with each other." Pg. 75"Our inability to think our way into hope is a grace, because hope comes through being known." Pg. 84"The psalms show us being fiercely honest about not being enough is what creates and sustains intimacy with God." Pg. 87"Dissonance is the birthplace of all abiding Christian hope." Pg. 115 WUT?! Think about it though!"Suffering can erode our trust in God. I think it also rebuilds it. But first suffering kills the god I thought I was worshiping so I can know the God who is actually here." Pg. 127Pg 129 - Her discussion of how Jesus had to have faith, had to make a choice to believe like the rest of us. This really challenged my thinking around verses such as Hebrews 4:15 and what it means for Jesus to have been FULLY human! Wow! As she says on pg. 130 - "His trust creates the possibility of ours.""When we are united to Christ, our suffering can be music that reverberates with the sound of his love. His loves crosses the universe, echoing into the darkest, deepest silence of our suffering, enfolding our pain into his song of infinity-crossing love." Pg. 136. Um, whoa."We'll only live and tell our stories as good when we live and tell them in community" Pg. 182."Relationships are often the places where we've incurred the most pain in life, and they are also the mysterious means God will use to reshape us to live in the story more lasting than pain." Pg. 202. So simple but so profound and so true.I could not recommend this beautiful book more highly, and also recommend that Christian publishers listen up and publish more like that. Us depth- and memoir-loving folks - we're out here! I look forward to following Ramsey's career and the depths of riches her continued obedience to and trust in the living God brings forth.

KJ doesn’t do toxic positivity. Yet her writing is full of hope. I’m writing this review waiting in the ER at 2 am with my son who has a chronic illness that has stumped the doctors. KJ’s book is full of the gospel and reminders of the God who suffered and so knows our suffering. Thank you for sharing your story in this book and continually on insta.

This is a beautiful book that anyone who has suffered can read without fear of shame. It meets you where you are, just like God does.

The combination of lived experience and deep theological reflection made this book profoundly moving for me. K J Ramsey has refused the glib and easy answers to her life of constant pain and illness to attend to what the gospel really has to say to her situation and the situations of pain and suffering that we all face at one time or another. Her honesty and courage is a challenge to all of us who call ourselves part of the body of Christ to speak and live the truth of our suffering together rather than hide behind vague spiritual platitudes. Thank you for writing this book, as a person with a limiting chronic medical condition of my own and the carer for a parent with mixed mode dementia it has been a blessing to me.

This Too Shall Last is the book I needed five years ago. When Warrior Mode was failing me, and the idol of self-reliance was destroying my life, I discovered some of the truths that KJ Ramsey exquisitely pours into the pages of this book. Our culture would prefer we eradicate suffering by wrapping our grief and pain in a fragility-fixing faith, rather than finding God standing in solidarity with us in the midst of our broken stories.Writing from a space of ongoing suffering and pain, KJ invites us to see our embodied Saviour - who took on our flesh, blood and our bodily experience of brokenness - with fresh eyes: not as distantly enthroned, but as already here and present in every moment.This Too Shall Last is a gentle response to our culture's obsessive demand for comfort - an invitation to be held in the presence of God. He is pleased to dwell within you, and he is already here. When suffering lingers, "grace is not only rescue. It is often Christ's presence meeting us in weakness and sustaining us in sorrow."

This is wonderful book that I’ll return to again and again for encouragement and hope. It's filled with beautiful and vulnerable writing, and rich, practical and encouraging theological and psychological content.As a fellow pilgrim with chronic illness, I know that it's not easy to be so vulnerable, nor to find the strength, concentration, and mental clarity to write in the midst of fatigue, pain and emotional ups and downs, and I’m so grateful K.J. persisted! This kind of vulnerability is such a gift to others and is exactly what God often does choose to use to encourage others.As a reader, writer, spiritual director, physician, and fellow-sufferer with chronic illness, this book has been a huge gift to me and I recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone else who faces suffering that lingers and wants to draw closer to God—or find him drawing closer to them—in it.

The world needs this book right now. It provides a fresh & insightful perspective on how to reconcile suffering and faith, and yet it also remains full of hope too.