Episode 12: Part 2: How to Suffer Well
Season 1 · Episode 12
Part 2: How to Suffer Well: Honesty and Friendship with Jesus
Show Notes
Amy and Justin Howard continue their conversation on suffering, turning to the pain caused by other people's sin and the deeper mystery of unitive suffering. They untangle forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation as three distinct things, name the trap of codependent "I'm fine" self-absorption, and reclaim anger as a God-given signal that moves us to loving action rather than resentment or rage. Along the way they explore what it means to "upcycle" our pain through the broken body of Jesus, how love covers a multitude of sins by building a bridge toward the very people who cost us something, and why real friendship with Jesus includes sharing in his sufferings. It's a warm, honest, and practical episode about becoming like Jesus in the hard places.
In This Episode
- Forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation are three distinct things done by different people: forgiveness is a choice we make, healing is a miracle God works in us, and reconciliation requires two willing parties.
- The codependent response to being sinned against is to absorb the pain into ourselves and say "I'm fine" — but we are not Jesus, and we were never meant to be a safe receptacle for other people's sin.
- Anger is not the enemy; it is the body's signal that something isn't right and needs action. Resentment (unresolved anger) and rage are the real dangers.
- We can "upcycle" our suffering through Christ — naming the honest hurt before the Lord, releasing our attachment to the outcome, and receiving his leadership on how to respond.
- Healthy boundaries flow from finding our "okay" in God rather than in a spouse, children, or bank account; from that place we can offer a cheerful gift instead of a doormat's silence.
- Love covering a multitude of sins means choosing, with Christ, to build relationship even when it costs us — just as Christ moved toward us across all our sin.
- Unitive suffering is the invitation to know Jesus by sharing in his sufferings; healing often takes real time, and humility means never assuming we know someone's whole story.
Going Deeper — Discussion Questions
- The Howards describe forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation as three separate things. Where in your own life have you confused them, or felt pressured to skip straight to reconciliation before healing had happened?
- Amy names the "Christian f-word" — saying "I'm fine" — as a codependent way of absorbing others' sin. Where are you tempted to swallow pain instead of handing it to Jesus?
- "Wherever you find your okay is the thing you really love." Where do you locate your okay right now — in a person, an outcome, a bank account? What would it look like to find it in God?
- The episode reframes anger as a God-given signal that moves us to action. How were you taught to think about anger, and how might listening to it (without resentment or rage) change a hard relationship you're in?
- Amy shares a story of drawing a boundary with a difficult person by first asking, "What would be a cheerful gift I wouldn't resent giving?" Is there a relationship where you could name what you have to bring to the table?
- What does it mean to you that love "covers over a multitude of sins" by building a bridge toward people even when it costs us? Who is Jesus inviting you to move toward at a cost?
- Jesus tells his disciples, "I no longer call you servants, but friends." What would it look like to grow from being cared for by God as an infant into sharing in his sufferings as a friend?
Full Transcript
▸Hide transcript · proofread, 57 min read
0:03Introduction
Welcome to Between Heaven and Earth. We're your hosts, Justin and Amy Howard. And together, we lead a mission agency right here in beautiful New England. We are thrilled that you've joined us. In each episode, we'll explore what it means to follow Jesus by bringing Heaven and Earth together in your family and community. Our goal is to empower you to thrive in the collision of kingdoms and courageously join with Jesus in his great project of healing and restoration. This podcast is brought to you by Encounter Culture Mission Collaborative, dedicated to working with ordinary followers of Jesus to mend, make, and multiply disciples right where they are. Let's dive in. Welcome back, friends.
0:54Responding to Suffering Caused by Sin
We are continuing on the topic of suffering and learning how to discern between the types of suffering that we experience. And how do we engage that suffering? So we've looked at suffering that is, well, suffering that is the result of living in a broken world, that this is just the way things are. The kingdom of God isn't fully here, so we looked at that. We looked at suffering caused by our own sin and how we discern and engage that with Jesus. And so let's look at the third type of suffering that you were talking about, Amy, and that is the suffering caused by other people's sin. So let's take a dive into that.
What do we do when we experience suffering because someone has sinned against us? Or someone is continuing to sin against us? Ooh, yeah. The ones that just kind of are the one-off events, those are not necessarily less painful, but maybe a little less complicated. Rather than the ones that are part of maybe really ongoing, difficult relationships. Or people aren't maybe even intentionally sinning, but they're broken in ways that makes it a form of suffering to endure in the relationship. Or they've been sick for a really long time. Or it's costing you a lot to be in close proximity with somebody else. Or maybe you're still dealing with the consequence of someone's sin. Yeah, yeah.
So either someone themselves has sinned against you and you're suffering as a result of that. Or just being in close proximity to someone else is causing suffering, whether they're sinning or not; it just is very hard. So I'm guessing that the response to that kind of suffering is forgiveness. Yeah, I think we did touch last time a little bit on the difference between forgiveness and healing and reconciliation. Those are three distinct things. They are not the same. They are done by different people. So forgiveness is a choice that I make myself. I forgive. I choose to release my right to retribution to Jesus for him to bring about healing and justice. So that's my choice.
Healing, so feeling better after that happened, that's miraculous, and that's what God does in us. As we hand our need for wholeness and justice to him. So healing comes from him. Reconciliation is when two parties are both looking to reestablish a relationship because of a mutual desire. So trust, repentance is going, you know, both ways if it's necessary. There's, you know, a visible desire for a healed relationship. That's it. That is a non-static, two-way street. It's very dynamic and not the same thing as forgiveness or healing. You can have forgiven and not healed yet.
You can have forgiven and not be reconciled. Yeah, which I think tends to be a sticking point for a lot of people in the church. It's like, well, you know, you're not reconciled to this person in relationship, so you must not have forgiven them. Yeah, and we talked a little bit about how preemptively Jesus—we are forgiven in Christ. It is up to us to receive that forgiveness, and if we choose not to receive that forgiveness and begin to move toward our relationship with God, he will allow us to remain unreconciled, even unto hell. Yeah. Yeah, it's not because he is unforgiving.
It's not because he's not holding out forgiveness toward us. It's because we are not engaging that and choosing ourselves to repent and receive his forgiveness, right? So those three things are very distinct and very important when we're looking at responding to the kind of suffering that comes from other people's sin towards us. So forgiveness is the first kind of thing. The second one that I want to look at is the kind of suffering that we experience at the hands of someone else. We kind of have two options that we can sort of choose to do with that suffering. The first one is, I think, really common culturally, and it is the codependent option. The codependent option looks like: someone sins against me, and I am just going to receive that into myself. So they've judged me, or they've said something unkind or cruel, and I use the Christian f-word to describe the situation. I just say the f-word.
6:01The Christian F-Word: "I'm Fine"
We don't use that word. This is the Christian f-word. I say, "I'm fine." Yeah, that is an f-word. Yeah, it's "fine." I'm fine. But what's actually happened is that sin that someone else has sinned against you has caused some level of damage, and instead of you also doing the hard work of actually maybe naming the pain and working toward forgiveness and reconciliation, you just absorbed it into yourself. So you haven't handed it to Jesus for forgiveness. You've maybe allowed it to create a—like, your only response is, "Well, I must have done something wrong. So I'm gonna repent."
There's this wonderful—there's a wonderful little, like, a YouTube video or something of this British guy. I think New Englanders and people from sort of Great Britain descent all kind of thematically behave this way a lot of times. He's crossing the road at a crosswalk appropriately, and a car runs him over, and the pedestrian stands up and apologizes. "I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." And then, if I remember the little sketch correctly, then that car proceeds to back over him again. And once the pedestrian gets up, he apologizes again. "Oh, I'm so sorry.
Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry that you've now intentionally run over me twice." So that's codependent behavior, and that's a great topic for another discussion together, but I just want to put a pin in that. So you are not Jesus. So you actually are not the receptacle that can absorb other people's pain and sin safely—other people's pain and sin against you. Yeah, or anyone's, in general. So you actually—I know a lot of times it feels like holiness. It feels like, well, I'm just—I'm just a sheep. I'm just the victim. I'm just the—and it's gonna be holiness for me to just kind of eat this pain and sin.
And actually what it ends up creating is a really dysfunctional system. Well, and watch out when that all erupts. Yeah, yeah. When all that stuff you've been eating for all that time, then—a rush. Then you just finally explode. Yep, yep, yep, that's a classic. It can really cause damage, and—Yep, classic codependent behavior is you just stuff it until you boil over. And then finally, you're just gonna let everybody have it. As opposed to noticing those signals in your body like, "Oh, what's coming at me right now is not for me to carry or keep.
It's for me to act upon, whether that's get out of the way or say, 'That hurts,' or take action in some other way." That feeling of that knot in the pit of your stomach, or the headache that emerges within an hour or whatever else, is your body's way of saying, "There's something that my body's trying to digest right now that isn't good for it." Right, right. So that's kind of like the codependent option of handling other people's sin. The other option leads into that fourth type of suffering that we're gonna talk about. And this is when people sin against us and we forgive. So the sin itself is—I don't wanna say—upcycled through the broken body of Jesus.
9:19Upcycling Our Pain Through Jesus
So we're not the ones that need to be Jesus for somebody else. We're actually saying, "Jesus, this hurts me too. I'm handing it to you, and I'm gonna listen to you for a right and holy response," whatever that looks like. But oftentimes in that place, as we upcycle that, Jesus gives us then the opportunity to partner with him in bringing about healing even when it costs us something. I know oftentimes it looks from the outside like the same thing, but it's actually not. There's a place where we're saying, "Jesus, you are the only one that can actually heal this. But in some way you're actually inviting me to participate in this mysterious passage—love covers over a multitude of sins."
And we were having a great conversation in the car about this the other day. I'd love it if we could continue that. Sure. Well, first of all, I think that in order for that to be effective, the upcycling of our pain through Jesus—the purpose of that is to find a place of safety and non-judgment. Oh, say more. In God. Yeah, yeah. That we're not carrying this by ourselves. We're not abandoned. This is not for naught. We're able to be honest. We're angry. "God, I'm angry. This really hurts. I don't know what to do." Yeah, and we live in the joy of his presence when we do that.
And then that enables us to then—receive from him more than just what we—receive from him so that we can be something to the other, to ourselves, to God. But we can't just do the right thing unless—we've upcycled—that's right. And we know who we are and how we're felt about in heaven. Yeah, yeah. And I just wanna put a little plug in here. If that idea of upcycling something through Jesus is really novel to you, and it kinda stirs your imagination a little bit, can I recommend signing up for an EncounterLife cohort? Having some tools and techniques for bringing stuff to Jesus is really, really helpful.
And if that stirs your imagination—curious about how to do that, or that sounds just really foreign—those are online cohorts that are available to anybody. They start up on a rolling basis. And we would love to set you up with one of our coaches and one of those cohorts where you can learn how to do that in a really practical way. It's a 12-week intensive coaching cohort where you dive deep into the first commandment and then into the great commission. Yeah, learning how to be loved well by God, how to bring the pain to Jesus specifically.
And then how to turn that into mission instead of just kind of trying to make everything mission, or just giving up and hiding in a little ball in the corner. Yeah. And in there, you do talk about codependency, and you refer to it as finding your okay. Yeah, locating your okay. Okay. Where is your okay? Is it in your spouse? Is it in your children being okay that you feel okay? Is it in your bank account? Where is your okay? Because wherever you find your okay is the thing you really love. It's the idol, right? Yeah. It can be idolatrous. But you know, codependency is a thing.
So if you're listening to this today, and you know, if someone's not okay and you feel it in your body—you don't even know why you have tension headaches. Yeah. You don't even know why you feel sick to your stomach, or you feel uncertain or anxious. Or you have that constant pattern of stuff it, stuff it, stuff it, explode. Right. You know, a lot of the codependency manifests itself in a lot of physical sickness, ailments, and the inability to process food. Yeah. Oh, we see that all the time. All the time. Yeah. A malformed ability to be angry and not sin, not knowing what anger is for. Anyway, if that's intriguing to you, we would love to have you join a cohort.
You can sign up today right on our website. We'll put a link down below in the notes, or you can just go to encounterculturene.com. And you're going to follow the links for EncounterLife and join a new cohort. Yeah. Okay. So that's how we deal with sort of upcycling other people's sin against us that causes suffering. Can I ask you a question though? Yes. We have split this up into two sessions. Okay. And so we do have some time. All right. Yeah. I know we need to get out of here. I really want to talk about love covering over a multitude. I know you do. So I'm so excited about that. But this is something that I think is important to touch on.
13:41The Healthy Role of Anger
And that is—you're making me nervous. Well, suffering caused by other people's sin. Yeah. What is the healthy role of anger there? Oh, yeah. That's such a great—yes. You know, we can forgive people. And forgiveness is a choice. Like you said, healing is a miracle. Yeah. Reconciliation requires two parties. Is there a place for anger? I love anger. Is there such a thing as Christian anger? I love anger. And I know that that is, like, anathema in Christian circles, because just like things like sex, things that have the potential of being very, very powerful oftentimes make us extremely nervous.
And it's easier for us to just focus on sin maintenance and avoidance rather than learning what this is actually for. And if we really believe the gospel message, then the stuff of creation, what God actually made, is extremely good. That means sex, in its form, the way that God made it to be, is extremely good. Unless you're Augustine. I am not. We're going to just shelve Augustine's take on human sexuality for just a minute—or forever. Forever. Let's do that. Poor guy. Yeah. He has so many good things to say. He needed an encounter. He did. He had some really amazing things to say. And I'm so thankful for his reflections. So I kind of wish he hadn't talked about women or sex.
I read this remarkable passage by him just the other day. He said something to the effect of, "I cannot conceive of a function in creation that God intended for a woman beyond bearing children." He's like, if God had wanted—for a helpmeet, if God's intention in her as a helpmeet was, like, to bear the load of physical labor, that was useless, because she's very weak. And he was basically listing down: she's not good for conversation. She's not a good companion. She can't lift. She can't lift heavy things. What's her purpose? So she just had babies—which, we love babies. We have six of them. So I'm not disqualifying that as very wonderful.
Well, then you definitely served your purpose. I guess we're done here. We're done. You have served your purpose. Now you can go tend your garden and be a wallflower and be—right. Right. Make dinner. You know, he did not list dinner making, but it would be bad if I stopped making dinner. Well, that's because they had servants. You know, a lot of the households back then that would have been reading his material would have had servants. Yeah. I'll just keep making dinner for the time being here. You're welcome. So yeah, anger. Anger. I love anger. So if you think about it, I mean, God himself, all through the scriptures, God gets angry.
His anger is not like our anger, just like anything in the weakened, broken world of our experience—it hasn't, everything's been corrupted and touched by death and sin. So if we start from the idea that God made everything good, and humans in the image of God have the capacity to be angry, and it's written into the image of God in us, we look in the scriptures and we see that God gets angry. And what his anger causes him to do is act. In our broken, corrupted, death-bound state, oftentimes when we are experiencing situations that cause anger in us, we're bound by that same sense of "there's not going to be enough for me. I'm not going to be safe."
"This isn't going to be—" and we lose this deep sense of the provision of God, and anger in its own way. We've talked before about how trauma is kind of atheistic. I think when we feel anger, sometimes it almost feels like God's not there. So God doesn't have a role to play in this moment. I'm just angry. So it's up to me, because something bad is happening. So I think when we feel angry, we can sometimes have that sort of atheistic experience—atheistic meaning like God's not going to help. I'm on my own.
And given our own backgrounds, you know, we may have a history of lashing out in anger and of causing great destruction, or of extreme avoidance because we don't know how to be angry and act. But the reality is anger is your body's way of saying, "This isn't good. Something needs to change." Right. And it propels you to action. That's really great. That's a really important function for you to have. Yeah. And the action might just be, "I'm going to remove myself from the situation." Yeah. And if I haven't allowed myself to stew in something for years, and I'm just a perpetual victim, it's probably not going to come out as an explosion. I can say, "Hey, I can listen to that signal of anger."
Let's just say, for example, someone's, you know, behaving in a way that's inappropriate. You know, they're being nasty to you. Low-grade anger situation. Someone is coming up to you. They're just being nasty to you. Yeah. I feel the signal of anger, and it tells me, "Oh, what's happening right now isn't okay." Right. So I can say, trusting in the Lord for my own boundaries, I can say, "Hey, I love you, and I'm willing to have a conversation with you, but also the context right now isn't great. So how this is coming across is not going well."
"Why don't we regroup in a little while, or when you're ready, I'll be right here, but I'm also not going to continue the conversation in this way." And if there's a backlog of unforgiveness and codependent behavior, that's going to be impossible. Like, that right there is going to have barbs in it. You're going to try to stick it to him even while you're drawing a boundary. Right. But if you're okay with the Lord, then you can name what your cheerful gift is in that relational situation. So like, "I am happy to—" and you may not be happy to do anything.
You may need a break, but you can also, you know, if you have managed that relational boundary in a healthy way, you'll be able to say, you know, "Hey, I want a relationship with you, but I don't want it on these terms. When you're ready, you know, this is the kind of relationship I'm ready to have." Right. I don't think anger is the problem. I think that oftentimes in relationships, what is actually the problem is resentment. Yeah. I think that resentment is unresolved anger. Yeah. I think rage is also a problem. So rage is sort of the other side of that. Rage is a serious problem that can cause a ton of damage. Yeah.
But I think that resentment is a feeling of bitterness leading to malfeasance. Yeah. Like, "I'm going to hurt you. I want revenge. Yeah. I want you to suffer." That's when unresolved anger turns into something that's deeply unchristian. Yeah. And on the flip side, rage is the thing that says, "I don't see you as a person right now. I see you as a threat." Right. "I'm going to behave as though you are a threat in this situation," and that can get pretty horrific and pretty ugly and work its way all the way up the scale to, you know, war and all sorts of terrible things. Yeah. So there is a place for anger, and anger just drives you to action. Yeah.
That's right. Anger gives you some energy to—I had a situation in my own life about a year ago where we had an ongoing relationship with another person that just had really, really terrible boundaries, and we'd get just really manipulative when, you know, when there was any hint of a "no." And I remember just being really fearful of drawing a boundary with a relationship. Oh, man. "If I say no, they're going to go away forever, or I'm going to get in trouble, or they're going to be mad, and then I'm going to have to clean that up." And I was just scared. I was just afraid of acting.
And what I realized is whenever they were around, I found that I was just repenting all of the time. Like, in my own head, "God, I'm so sorry. I'm such a judge," or, "God, why am I so mean? God, why is this person so irritating to me? I'm losing my mind." But what I realized I was trying to do—it's actually not, like—there was a genuine anger. This person is consistently violating my boundaries and doing it in a really kind of strategic and sometimes highly manipulative way. Yeah. And it ruins the atmosphere. Oh my gosh. It ruins the whole environment.
But instead of feeling that anger in my body and letting that tell me, "Hey, you actually may need to make changes in this relationship. You have to take some action and take some ownership for your own sense of violation in this," I was just stuffing it and allowing the anger to build. Because you don't want to hurt their feelings. You don't want to—you want to avoid some sort of relational catastrophe. You want to, right? Right. So what I did finally was, I first went with the Lord, and I was like, "What would cheerful give?" I love that passage. "The Lord loves a cheerful giver." It's like, what would be a cheerful gift for me for this person? I mean, right now I'm just mad.
So nothing really feels like a cheerful gift. But generously speaking, what would be a cheerful gift that I wouldn't resent giving? And I figured out how much time and energy and commitment I was willing and able to give to the relationship. And then I sat down with that person, and I just named it. I said, "This is what I have to bring to the table. I want to do it well, but this is what I'm bringing." And initially it was messy. Like, I was physically, literally shaking. Like, "Ah, that's gonna happen." And this person threw everything at you. Yeah, it wasn't pretty.
It was not like, "Oh, and then the sun came out and all the flowers, you know, bloomed." And they were not—you know, it was kind of an unhealthy situation. Turns out they were a bit resentful. Oh, very, very. And wanted far more than you were able to give. Yeah, yeah. But what was wild is, as I stayed in the Lord, in the conversation, and trusted him, that I was allowed to have boundaries and say no, and that he wanted me to be a cheerful giver, not just a doormat—what was wild is I watched the dynamics of the relationship, even over this about-an-hour-long conversation, shift. And I wanna say, over a year out now, the relationship is better than it has ever been. It didn't go away.
Sometimes it will go away. It didn't go away. I didn't express anything with resentment or barbs. It was just, "This is what I'm willing to bring to the table." And once that was out in the open and clear, it was like the Lord himself participated in my boundary. Like, he really was my safety. It was a remarkable experience. And since then, it's given me a lot more relational courage. And this person hasn't necessarily gotten any more healthy. No, but I'm not building resentment, and I was able to hear that anger and respond in a godly fashion. Right, so that you could actually love them. Yeah. And they would actually have your authentic yes.
Yes, with the time and energy that I had to contribute to that. Hey listeners, are you ready to become fully alive? Life can feel overwhelming, and many of us struggle to feel fully alive. Perhaps you feel stuck in your marriage or career. You might be struggling with anxiety or depression, or you really wanna take your relationship with God to the next level. The good news is that you don't have to go through it alone. OneLife Group is a distinctly Christian approach to professional individual and couples counseling, as well as certified coaching for life, leadership, business, health, and wellness. They also have licensed spiritual directors to guide you in your ability to hear God.
They can help you get free, stay free, and live your life on purpose. With virtual services available for individuals, couples, and groups, OneLife Group can help you discover which approach is right for you or someone you love. They will help you continue your journey of becoming fully alive. Visit www.youronelife.co to learn more. You don't have to go through it alone. Check out OneLife Group today.
27:00Love Covers a Multitude of Sins
Okay, so we were looking at suffering caused by other people's sin. We've talked about forgiveness, reconciliation; we've talked about anger and the place of anger that moves us to act. And love covering a multitude of sins. What does that mean? We were talking about this in the car. I mean, I feel like you kind of got the ball rolling. Do you remember what you were saying? Nope. Do you? I mean, maybe.
I just found out I have ADD, like, for real. Like, I had a legit eval done. How does that make you feel? Vindicated. It's kind of sick, but I do. I'm like, you know, I—not vindicated in the sense that I thought I was ADHD, but where, you know, sort of the, like, perennial issues relationally that I've experienced in my life. I am not violating HIPAA. Am I? No, it's my own medical records. It's your own medical records. No, no, you can talk freely on a podcast. Oh, that's true. I can. About your own medical situation. Sure. Can I name names of people I don't like too? No, but you can talk about your own medical situation. Sure. Go for it. Yeah. I mean, our ADHD kids were really thrilled.
They were thrilled. They had company. That's right. And we're like, "Okay, guys, we're going to do this together now." You know, so anyway, so I don't know why I brought that up. Why did I bring that up? I don't know, but I guess that's another simple—oh, we were talking about—case study. Oh, we were talking about love covering a multitude of sins. I can't remember what that was all about. Yeah. That was a total bunny trip, like, rabbit trail. Why did I do that? I don't know. But you want to put a plug in for Anna Vikerman, if you're—oh, I do. Yeah. Thank you.
Guys, let me tell you right now, if you're listening to my voice and you want your relationship to be great with your kids, and you just—you know, everyone needs a little bit of coaching. It's like, you know, when we're pastoring, we really believe that every now and then couples need to go see a couples' counselor just to freshen up a bit. Yeah. Tune the system. Align yourself with what Jesus is doing in each other's lives. And the same thing, I think, for parents and kids. You know, there are—anyway, OneLife Group. You can go to youronelife.co. Look for coaches and look for Anna Vikerman. She's a parent coach. And I'm going to tell you how it goes.
But I've heard just rave reviews from people that she is an amazing parent coach, specifically as it relates to ADHD and all other behavioral things. And the health and connectedness between parents and children. So we're going to start this next week, actually. It's an eight-week thing that she's going to have us do. The ADHD people in your life, Amy, are going to get some help. And you had mentioned the other day, you're like, "Well, I'd love to see a brain scan." Not of us, but of you. Of the people that, like, interact with it on a regular basis. Yeah. "What is that due to my brain? What is that?" Done to your brain. What has it done? What has it done to me?
But yeah, so anyway, love covers a multitude of sins. Thank you. Okay, full circle. Love covers over a multitude of sins. This is this mysterious passage, because love—you want to look up the citation there. Yeah, go for it. Love covers over a multitude of sins. It's not like love itself just makes it go away. So we're sort of reflecting on our experience of love covering over a multitude of sins. And I think it has a lot to do with suffering in relationship with other people's sins. So when I'm moving toward someone and it actually hurts—it actually is going to cost me something to come into proximity with them.
Yeah, I mean, you see this all the time. Parenting would be a great example. Your kids are not grown-ups yet, and there are certain ways in which it costs you. It's hard. It is challenging to navigate the waters of a free-will little creature in your life that sometimes says and does things that cost you something. They hurt. I mean, whether that's racking up charges on your Amazon account, or getting in trouble in school and needing to navigate those waters, or having difficult relationships with other children or other parents, or all sorts of things. It costs you something.
So the idea of love covering over a multitude of sins is: you and Christ are choosing to build a relationship even though all that stuff hasn't been dealt with yet. So you're actually continuing to form a relationship, even though it costs you something, even though it's not always good for you. That's 1 Peter 4:8. Thank you. It's not always feeling good, and it's hard, and it causes you a certain kind of suffering. And I think the ultimate way we see this, right, is Christ, who moved toward us even when all of our sin was a violation of the loving relationship that he would have with us. And the ultimate pain and suffering to engage in relationship with us.
So it's almost like love built a bridge over all of that dysfunction and pain and junk so that he could get to us. And then if we choose to build a relationship with him in that place, then we start to deal with the things that are in between our love. So we begin to actually, like, build and repent and grow and become formed after his likeness. But he took—he absorbs the cost of that very damaging relationship. So how is—you know, as we're talking about love covering a multitude of sins—in what you're saying, how is that not just ignoring sin? Yeah, because you're not ignoring it at all. It actually does cost.
And once again, when we are walking into that place, it's only in an upcycled-through-Christ way. We, in and of ourselves, do not have what it takes. We are not a safe holding receptacle for other people's pain and sin. But in Christ—we actually, in the broken body of Christ, when we are in Christ, as we choose to love, and it costs, not us as Christ, but Christ in us—it actually allows us to participate and share in that same kind of love that covers over multitudes. And so it costs us something. And that's the beginning, I believe, of unitive love. So before we move on to the next one, when you talk about the beginning of unitive love, which comes from a place of unitive suffering.
Yeah. Can you just give our audience a picture of what a moment in prayer would look like to do that, to upcycle the suffering? Like, what would that look like in your prayer life if you're suffering because someone is sinning against you? And, you know, this doesn't just happen once. Yeah. It could be ongoing suffering. What would it look like in your prayer life to do that? Yeah. So I think first it looks like naming all of the honest things before the Lord. Like, how you're feeling, what they've done, how it hurt you, and how you feel right now, with absolute honesty and integrity. And you may need to do that out loud to another person in prayer so that there's a witness.
There's a way in which somehow that really does help with the healing process and bringing those things to God. So that means naming the real things. And then, just like before, we're actually choosing to not only release those things to the broken body of Jesus in the faith that he's trustworthy with the outcome. You're also releasing—how do I say this—your own attachment to the situation. So you're saying, "Jesus, I—in and of myself, I can't heal or fix this." And there needs to be a full and free release, because he may then—you're welcoming his instruction, his leadership, his guidance. He may at that point remove the relationship.
He may at that point gently encourage you to draw a good boundary. He may at that point welcome you to, man, you know, those times when you just have to push the reset button, and you're not going to get the justice that you want in that relationship, but you gotta keep going. I see—you see that with kids all the time, right? That they may not fully understand the consequences of their own behavior right now. But you are going to push reset, and you're going to let them kind of start the day over clean. So you've got to be able to receive his leadership in that place, not just your own figuring it out. And sometimes his leadership then in that place is him then—
Befriending you, to use a 21st-century term. Yeah. And it has been my experience, as I have walked this out, that he has, in that place of my fully and freely—not because I feel like I need to, or because I'm trying to win his approval or anything else, but as I truly release those places of suffering to him—he sometimes will share his own pain back with me. And it's in him that I then engage in those relationships that cost. And it has been an astounding and humbling and also the most challenging place of prayer that I've ever engaged. But also the most mysterious and beautiful, and—yeah, I mean, it's the gospel, right? I mean, Paul prays for it.
37:36The Fellowship of His Sufferings
He prays in Philippians that we would not only know his power, but also the fellowship—that we would know Christ in the fellowship of his sufferings. Which then leads us to this final part of suffering, which is unitive suffering. And perhaps you can continue to talk about our prayer life—you know, how that looks in prayer. We talked about imaging prayer. Yep. Like, actually holding the pain before Jesus, picturing it in our hand, putting it in his riven side. Yeah. You know, and letting him bear the cost of it, because we cannot. That's right. So in unitive suffering, it is related to the suffering that's caused by other people's sin, but it doesn't necessarily involve sin. Yeah.
And it's all through the New Testament and the Old Testament. But we see it especially in the New Testament. We see—I think the first really clear example would be Mary. She's told that, as she is the Christ-bearer, that her own heart will be pierced—her own. Yeah. That this is going to cost her something that is unfathomable, and it's because she is the bearer of Christ. Like, because of her intimacy with God, this is going to hurt. He's going to share with her not only his physical life in her womb and his relational life as a child, and then—she's also going to share with him in his suffering. We see it.
Paul talks about bearing the marks of Christ in his body. He doesn't seem to see his persecutions as something separate from the sufferings of Christ. And the early church had a much clearer imagination for this. I think there's been a lot of theologizing around it after, you know, after several hundred years of Christianity kind of went by, but you see it really poignantly. I mean, Augustine—Gregory the Great talked about it. If you're looking for just things to look up and you want to Google some stuff. But there really was a sense that when the church suffers with Christ, they are participating in his suffering.
So they're actually becoming friends and fellow lovers of Jesus in those places of shared pain. There's a real partnership. Yep. Real fellowship. Koinonia. Yeah. Union. Yeah. Partaking. Yeah. Participating. Participating in it. Participating with him. I like that word. And that is truly mysterious. It's not something that we earn. It's not, you know—we're not—and what's the result of that? I mean, you know, real friends share one another's burden and pain, and they're vulnerable about it. What's the goal of that? I mean, if we're sharing in his pain, someone might be listening and saying, "What the heck, what's that all about?"
Well, I would say—I thought Jesus died to make me happy and pain-free. Yeah, no, he died that you might know him. Come on. He—love it. He wants you to know him, not just to know about him. He wants you to know him. He wants you to know what he is like, how he feels, how he thinks, and we'll spend forever gazing into that reality and receiving it into ourselves and offering it back with thanksgiving.
It will be a full Eucharist—not just of, you know, receiving communion once a month or once a week or however you practice that, but the full eternal reality of drinking in who he is and what he's like, and experiencing that in our bodies and our minds and our emotions, and then that overcoming us with the love of it. I mean, we will be overcome with the love of that reality and turning in thanksgiving with him. This is a real—I think this teaching is so important in our getting close to Jesus and becoming like him. Yeah.
I was just having a conversation with someone about someone that they're counseling, and it was—they didn't share names or so; I don't know who this person is, but there's pastoral counseling. Change as many details as you need to. Yeah, I am. But basically there's a partner in a marriage who is deeply dissatisfied with their partner, who doesn't know Jesus like this one does. And the comment was made, you know, "I just don't—I don't think that Jesus wants this for me, that I would be in this place where, you know, my partner doesn't share the same concerns that I have, or doesn't share the same love that I have for—" I hear that a lot, actually, so you're not—yeah.
That's not an isolated scenario. Right, right. I hear that kind of story a lot. So it's like, "I'm deeply dissatisfied in this marriage," basically, "because my spouse is passive, my spouse, you know, it's just not meeting my emotional needs," basically. Yeah, I hear that story a lot. And I think we do people a deep disservice when we kind of buy into that cultural, you know, understanding that, you know, you need to be self-actualized to the point where you—it's all about you. It's all about you, and it's all about your happiness, and it's all about—yeah. And this is what it looks like.
It looks like you standing up for yourself and doing this and this so that, you know, you can achieve some modicum of happiness. Yeah, you may need a great boundaries book in that conversation, so—yeah, Townsend, maybe—yeah, yeah. There's some real great wisdom in what boundaries look like, and just marital difficulty in general, believer or unbeliever. So, you know, I wanna put that kind of in the hopper there. But I also wanna say that Jesus offers fellowship with him. He never demands it. So there is a cost counting. Yeah. There is a—it does cost to find him and to find intimacy in him.
And there is a place of growing up in God where we do start as infants, and he really does offer—how do I say this—he covers over the whole multitude of sins. Yeah, but we don't even know that. And your prayer life is pleasurable, and the, you know, provision is abundant, and it just seems really easy. And a lot of times we take that to mean, "I'm really good at this Christian thing. Like, I'm doing a really good job." And it's just like having a little kid, right? I mean, when they're very, very small, your expectations are at net zero, right? A two-week-old, you have no expectations for it. They don't even smile to show you that what you're doing is pleasant. Yeah. And if you think they're smiling at you, it's just gas. I don't believe that.
44:52Invited Into Friendship With Jesus
I maintain that's not true. However, there's no feedback. There's not even feedback. I mean, you're just pouring out love. And at the beginning of our life in God, it's like that. He just pours and pours and pours out love. But there are these moments where then he invites us into friendship. He says that in the Upper Room discourse in John, John 15 through 17, he actually says to his disciples, right before he dies, "I no longer call you servants, but I call you friends, because you know my business." Yeah. There was a transition in their relationship there. That's not automatic. You don't become a Christian and automatically become a friend of God.
When we look at Jesus' pattern with even the humans that he was with, there were some he was closer to than others. There were some that he wanted with him when he suffered at the end, and it broke his heart that they fell asleep instead. Yeah. Well, he says, "I no longer call you servants, but I call you friends," right? What did I say? Did I say something else? No, no, no, you didn't. No, but there seemed to be a progression. A transition in the relationship. That's right. And he brought certain people close enough that it broke his heart. He wanted them to be with him while he was sorrowful. Right. He wanted their love in that place.
And they failed him, which is real, but we see this humanity, this deep feeling of a desire that God had for humans to know him. To join him even, and to be his friend, even in that place of suffering. And so there's a place of progression in our own spiritual lives, where, yeah, at the beginning, you're an infant, and God is just going to pour out that, like, yes, all of the good things, all the good feelings. But there are moments where then he invites us to grow, and invites us to choose to love, and to choose even to join him in places that are hard. And that is real suffering. It's not like, "Oh, if I love Jesus, that's going to be easy."
No, it's going to be genuine, authentic suffering. And it's in that place that union with him is formed. That's right. And I think a lot of suffering with people that we minister to is in their marriage. Oh, yeah. Because here's the person that you're supposed to be most connected to in the whole world, imaging the intimacy that exists between the Trinity, and you are completely disconnected from this person. It costs. It costs to be close to people. My sense is that in the Christian church, it's like, this is the place where true love is forged, where you grow up in love, where you become like Jesus and his self-sacrificial love. That's right. You don't have to be married.
Your voluntary self-sacrificial love. No, no, no, you don't have to be married to do that. No, absolutely, absolutely not. Yeah. But I think that we often miss out and misconstrue what marriage is for. Yeah. And it's not to make you happy. It's meant to make you holy. And in holiness, you experience human flourishing. That's right. You experience what it looks like to receive love and give it away. That's right. In a way that is deeply joyful. And so suffering can look like suffering in your marriage. And that doesn't mean that you stick around if you're being sexually abused or emotionally abused or physically abused. No, that's what your anger is telling you. Your anger is telling you—
That, like, this is not a safe and wholesome environment for me to move toward. And it's really important to—right. And loving your spouse also means not being codependent and stuffing it. Yeah, and not enabling their rage or not enabling their abuse and allowing them to live in a lifestyle of—because, in violation. Because in your drawing boundaries, they're gonna become more holy and you're gonna become more holy, 'cause they'll be forced to deal with their stuff. Or at least to not continue to be able to do it in your direction. That's right. Yeah. Not gonna help facilitate their brokenness in that way. That's right. We don't wanna be peacekeepers. We wanna be peacemakers. That's right. So.
48:59An Honest but Fixed Gaze
That's right. Awesome. So. I'm just gonna say, I feel like we've covered a lot of ground, and we may wanna just kind of a couple of closing remarks about the suffering that doesn't go away. But I feel like we've kind of covered the territory. Absolutely. So why don't you just close us out then? So, you know, suffering is sometimes a mystery, isn't it? Yeah, it doesn't always fit into these tidy categories that we've created for you to listen in a 45-minute podcast. Suffering is a mystery.
Real, genuine, deep suffering always has a component of mystery, or we would be able to fix it, and we would fix it. And we've kind of addressed things in these last two episodes—some things that can be fixed, and then there's just the ongoing way in which this world contains suffering until the kingdom of God is fully here. So I just—a few closing remarks on: what do we do in the midst of the mystery? Yeah. And the first one I wanna say is, some healing—so the ending of suffering just takes longer than we'd like.
Jesus didn't say to his disciples, to anyone that asked for healing, "Oh, come back later," but the distance between beyond the Jordan River and Bethany, where Jesus' friend Lazarus lay dying, was a real distance. We had four days—a four-day walk. Yeah, well, it was probably a day's walk, but Jesus waited. Oh, he waited four days, that's right. Yeah, yeah. There really is real time. And I think again, we frequently think, if it's spiritual, if it's supernatural, it's gonna be a light switch. And that is just not the case. Jesus is fully God, and he waited four days. There is a dynamic where we don't fully understand what God is up to, and we're growing to trust him. Some things take time.
Also, some kinds of healing—we don't experience the relief until the very end, but the healing is taking place all along. And I think we've talked about it before, but I use the image of, if you had a big block of ice sitting on top of your hand, that hurts. I mean, it hurts to hold ice on your hand. It's not good for your hand. And if healing prayer were someone, or you, putting your other hand on the top of that block of ice, that ice is slowly going to begin to melt. And that's an image for healing, right? The ice is—now it's not three feet deep, it's two feet deep. Now it's not two feet deep, it's 18 inches. And it's gonna continue to melt, which is progress. That is healing.
You won't feel it until the ice is gone. So a lot of healing is like that. Like, you're actually dealing with a constellation of issues that all are contributing to your felt pain. And it's not until the entire constellation of those issues is dealt with that the relief comes. And I think it's really important in this conversation just to give a shout-out to the reality of humility. Especially when you're dealing with other people's suffering. Never assume that you know exactly what's going on. Ever, ever—there's just too much mystery in suffering for you to assume you know the whole story.
Why the suffering is taking place—like, "Oh, if you just slap this verse on there, everything's going to be fine." If you just say these words, or if you just had enough faith—never assume you know the whole story. Don't be Job's friends. Yeah, don't be Job's friends. Avoid easy platitudes that prevent you from having to feel someone else's pain. As you watch someone else suffer, or when the suffering lasts longer than you like. So your buddy that you really love just isn't as fun while they're going through a difficult season. There's an invitation there to be with somebody who's not having a good time, instead of just trying to say, "Well, if you're not a fun friend, you're not my friend."
And then I just wanna say, as the last couple of things—maintain an honest but fixed gaze. So an honest gaze means you're honest with the Lord and some safe people with how you actually feel. Process the anger with God rather than changing your theology or walking away. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Don't stop believing in healing because it doesn't happen the way you want it to. That's right. Have a conversation. Be angry, but do not—don't sin by changing your theology or by adopting an aberrant theology that denies the power of God. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And then remember the story that Jesus tells in Luke 11. You can look it up, but in Luke 11, Jesus starts with the Lord's Prayer.
He says, "This is how you pray: your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven," right? He gives out the Lord's Prayer. And then he follows it with this story about a man who goes to his friend in the middle of the night asking for bread. And my takeaway from that story—you can read it, and, or you can join an EncounterLife group, because we do discuss this story. My big take from that story is, if your prayers never feel rude, you're probably not doing it right. Shameless audacity. I think Jesus said—that's the actual text: it's not because he was his friend, but because of his shameless audacity that he's going to do it.
So for me, the takeaway from that is, if your prayers never feel uncomfortable or rude or ridiculous, you're probably not doing it right. Wow. What a God, that he would invite us to do that. Yeah. What an invitation to intimacy. Yeah. You know, well, awesome. So glad to spend this time with you all. Remember to subscribe to our podcast. Don't just like it, but actually subscribe to it. And we want to celebrate the fact that we've had well over a thousand downloads now. And we're just 11 to 12 episodes into this thing. Yeah. Thank you to all of our listeners, and those of you who've been sharing, and thank you for your feedback.
It really helps us to curate what you'd like to hear and what's useful, and how to do this better. Absolutely. And we want to give a shout-out to our listeners in Croatia, and our listeners in Singapore, and our listeners—to our neighbors, our neighbors to the north in Canada. Oh, we love those. We love you all. And until next time, peace. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Between Heaven and Earth. We hope that you are stirred to curiosity and courage as we explored bringing heaven and earth together right where you are. Remember, you're not alone on this journey. We're here to support you in understanding what the Spirit of God is doing in your life and responding in obedience to his good leadership.
Also, check out our website, encounterculturene.com, for upcoming events and equipping opportunities for you and your church. Until next time, may you find joy living in between heaven and earth, and the courage to bring them together wherever you go.