This Too Shall Last by K.J. Ramsey

Author:K.J. Ramsey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2020-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

FULLY HUMAN

Jesus Joined Us on the Floor

The Savior assumed a body for Himself, in order that the body, being interwoven as it were with life, should no longer remain a mortal thing. . . . He put on a body, so that in the body he might find death and blot it out.

—ATHANASIUS, ON THE INCARNATION

Only the suffering God can help.

—DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, LETTERS AND PAPERS FROM PRISON

The year I got sick, I was a resident assistant tasked with emotionally and spiritually supporting a group of nearly thirty college women. I spent hours each day in the library writing papers, the day punctuated by meals and coffee dates with women from my dorm. After copious amounts of tea sipped between fervid research binges, I would walk across the dark, quiet campus to my hall, where I would stay up even later attending to the tears of peers getting over breakups or venting anger about their roommates.1

Suffering has an inelegant way of reversing relationships, and where I was used to being the comforter, I suddenly found myself learning the harder role of recipient. Out of nowhere the majority of my life consisted of crying tears of my own within the confines of four cinderblock walls, too sick on most days to even get out of bed. The body that had effortlessly carried me through the winding, steep paths of my mountainous college campus could now barely hold itself up in bed. The limbs that climbed limestone cliffs between classes now struggled to walk fourteen steps to the bathroom.

At night I often couldn’t sleep because of pain, and after hours of no relief, I’d cry from the excruciation. One suitemate in particular would often find me awake in the middle of the night, weeping on the floor of our shared study room. Instead of turning the other way or quipping about how early she had to get up for an exam, Katie would join me on the floor, massaging my aching hands as I sobbed into her chest.

In the first half of my college experience, I had started to better learn the gospel story, where weakness is welcome and hurt is held. But I didn’t know it yet in my limbs and ache and shame. I had to learn that on the floor, where Katie came to find me, willingly holding my weak body in her embrace. When I went to college, I signed up for an education of books and lectures. I didn’t realize the education I would need for the rest of my life was the nearness of Christ and his body to the indignity, brokenness, and shame in my own.

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