Why read a book about a young woman’s personal account of unhealed, agonizing pain? How could a book about lingering suffering be uplifting, especially during such a challenging year? First, author, K. J. Ramsey’s experience with suffering has taught her a perspective about Christ that is Biblical, yet under-proclaimed. Your takeaway will include a fresh, impactful way of connecting to Christ living in you. Second, as a member of the Body of Christ, you’ll be reminded that whatever you’re enduring in this life and whatever the Body of Christ is enduring come together in a powerful way for you to bond with the church. Third, after reading This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers, you’ll find glorious motivation for pressing further into the challenges of your life.

A Taste of This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers

Ramsey is a gifted writer, so reading her story will bless you as much as it will leave you thinking and motivated to make changes to your habits. The following quotes, from the three main categories of this book, should give you a sense of how this resource could help you grow.

1. Fully Living Your Hard Life

“The parts of your story that seem to be keeping you from strength and significance are what God calls chosen and valuable.”

“When we distance ourselves from our pain, we end up distancing ourselves from everyone.”

“We can’t gently turn toward the place where God will meet and heal us if we don’t let ourselves acknowledge we are there in the first place.”

“Instead of living fully within the borders of the lives we’ve been given, we plot an escape and call it faith. When we stop rejecting our lives by spending all our energy on seeking rescue, we have energy left to taste and see the goodness that is here.”

“If Jesus said His power is perfected in weakness, we should spend less energy treating weakness as a problem to fix and more time bearing witness to it with the expectation of seeing Christ.”

“Walk into the barren, empty places of your pain, because this is where God will fill you with Himself. May you have courage to join Christ in your place of weakness – as a place He is working and redeeming and filling with meaning – rather than trying to escape it, numb it, or name it as worthless.”

My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness. (2 Cor. 12:9)

2. The Power Of Connecting With The Body Of Christ

“We who are weak remind the entire church that salvation comes only through God and not through our self-sufficient striving.”

“We won’t encounter the whole gospel in our suffering unless we encounter one another in pain. Whom will you trust to see you so fully and consistently that they can see the faith at the core of who you are and remind you of it when your eyes only see darkness?”

“The more we share our stories and are received with compassion, the more our brains are shaped to anticipate love instead of rejection.”

“The kingdom will come, as the church energized by the Spirit, goes out into the world vulnerable, suffering, praising, praying, misunderstood, misjudged, vindicated, celebrating: always – as Paul puts it – bearing in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be displayed.”

If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it. (1 Cor. 12:26)

3. What Does It Really Mean To Connect With Christ When Life Is Hard?

“The continuing presence of disease, disorders, weakness, trauma, and poverty become stories of Christ’s solidarity and places to see His lordship touch everything.”

“There is no place too low for Him to stoop and no weakness too recurring for Christ to care for. He is wrapping His scarred hands securely around the most shattered pieces of our stories, carrying them with care because He chose to be shattered first, and placing them perfectly alongside His own – into a mosaic of glory.”

“Becoming whole in and through suffering requires experiencing the presence, power, and story of the Person we most fear has abandoned and neglected us – God Himself.”

“Sin is having expectations of ourselves and others to be miniature self-saviors who can rise above our broken stories and eliminate suffering by the power of our own determined truth-telling. Repentance is the continuous repositioning that transfuses you with the powerful, redeeming blood of Christ that will sustain you in your suffering and transform you into a person who believes you are loved.”

“God’s kindness toward His people throughout all history becomes structured in our emotional memory when we relate to Him from our places of pain. Suffering walks us to the anxious edge of knowing God and asks us to instead be known by Him.”

“We need a story bigger than success. We need incarnation. The solitude of suffering forces us to make peace with our loneliness, to sense our deepest longing is not simply relief but wholeness of life in God.”

For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also abounds through Christ. (2 Cor. 1:5)