"The View From Rock Bottom" Excerpt
Today we are thrilled to share an excerpt from Stephanie Tait’s book, “The View From Rock Bottom,” available now. You can also watch her video interview with Rise executive director, Holly Stallcup, at the bottom of the excerpt.
Jesus experienced anguish, fear, and sorrow in the garden, and instead of glossing over the realities of His suffering to put on a brave show of faith, He invited His disciples to connect with Him more deeply by witnessing and even participating in His suffering. Now Paul and Peter both call us to that same invitation: to know Christ more by communing with Him inside our own pain.
When I lay pleading on that linoleum floor, I was inexplicably connected to Christ pleading on the ground of Gethsemane. Each time I wept in grief as I lost another child, I was tethered to Jesus weeping in grief at His friend Lazarus’s death ( John 11:33-35). When my body was overcome with seemingly unbearable physical pain, I was joined in sacred bond with my Savior in the pain of crucifix- ion. The more I learned to let go of my brave facade and count it as loss, the more I could press deeply into knowing Christ more fully through participation in His sufferings.
This sacred intimacy holds more than our intertwined suffering though. “As we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too” (2 Corinthians 1:5). We serve a God who willingly took on flesh and experienced the fullness of the pain, grief, and struggle found in the human existence. It is because of Christ’s earthly suffering that we serve a God uniquely equipped to comfort us in our own pain and loss. I can’t help but think of the gods in both classical Greek and Roman mythologies, deities who so often ignore or even revel in the suffering of humans down below. What a stark contrast Paul offers when he shares about our God, who doesn’t comfort out of pity or try to manipulate humans for personal gain, but rather deeply understands our pain because He willingly walked among us and experienced it firsthand.
Too often we reduce the significance of the life of Christ to “He came to die for our salvation.” Yet if the sole purpose of God’s incarnation was to be killed as a sacrifice for our sins, He could just as easily have allowed Herod’s soldiers to kill the infant Christ and accomplished the same end. We see in the Christmas story, though, that Jesus is very intentionally spared when an angel comes to Joseph and specifically directs the holy family to flee (Matthew 2:13), which serves as pretty solid evidence that Christ’s continued life on this earth had more purpose than His death alone. Just as the goal of salvation is to end the divide sin has placed between our souls and our Creator, the suffering He willingly experienced throughout His time on this earth connects us more closely with Him as well.
The gospel offers a powerful message of a God who so relentlessly pursues our heart that He would not only choose to die for us, but to live for us as well. The Bible contains glimpses into His life while on this earth, but try to imagine the volume of experiences that hap- pen in more than three decades of life. Picture every bruise, every illness, every scraped knee, every headache. Picture every tear, every loss, and every heartbreak. Picture every moment of feeling misunderstood, lonely, anxious, falsely attacked, bullied, undervalued, or misused. Every moment of human suffering that Christ willingly lived and endured was in pursuit of you, a chance not only to know you more intimately and draw you closer to Himself, but also to be equipped to comfort you perfectly in your own pain.
This is the single most important reason to confront and root out prosperity-gospel thinking in our theologies: When our faith becomes marked by triumphalism and false positivity, we miss the intimacy with Christ that our pain makes uniquely possible. It is impossible to press deeper into the heart of Jesus or to participate in His sufferings if we are either looking for ways to avoid our pain or simply refusing to acknowledge it affects us. It’s as if suffering is a magnet designed to pull us toward Christ, but prosperity-gospel theology reverses the polarity so that our suffering only creates greater distance from Him instead.
A painful illustration of this truth played out over a number of years in my marriage. The numerous miscarriages weighed heavily on me, and my grief was all-consuming, and yet I didn’t share myself wholly with my husband and bore much of the pain privately. I believed it would better preserve our relationship if I could spare him from having to help carry me, and I was worried that he couldn’t possibly love me as much if he saw me as too broken or too changed from the woman he first fell in love with. But walling off such an enormous part of my heart could never draw us together more intimately, and the invisible divide it created started to widen more with time. I began to resent Bobby deeply for not grieving as much as I did, assuming that he didn’t love our children as much as I had. Despite the fact that I had hidden much of my pain away, I felt bitter that he didn’t somehow see it anyway and shoulder part of my load. We had both lost these children, and yet we were each grieving separately. What could have been a deeply intimate experience where we shouldered each other’s pain and comforted each other in a way that is only possible when two people know the same loss instead became a wedge between us, pushing us into our own separate worlds and growing deep resentments that took us years to begin untangling.
I’m able to look back now and see just how much I made this same mistake in my relationship with Christ. The false positivity I was so sure He wanted of me only widened the divide and led me to secretly question His love for me. The more I attempted to carry my own pain and show Him just how strong I could be, the more removed I became from His strength and the chance to experience Him shouldering my burdens. When my poor theology of suffering ultimately led to doubts, frustrations, and even anger at God, I tried to hide my true feelings from Him even more—which only widened the divide further. As is true in a marriage, the only chance I had to reverse this cycle and relearn how to connect more intimately was to communicate the whole truth with downright painful honesty.
Bobby and I couldn’t begin to reverse the damage done by the years of walling off my grief until I was able to admit to him my bitterness and resentment, giving him the first real chance to respond. In the same way, by trying to hide my feelings from God, I wasn’t giving Him a chance to speak to my resentments, disappointments, bitterness, and doubts. Much like I had worried that my true brokenness would dampen Bobby’s love for me, I feared God wouldn’t love me as much if I admitted just how human I really was. That night on the bathroom floor, when all the pretense disappeared and I simply didn’t have the strength to pretend any longer, I was fully honest with God for the first time in many years. I had always assumed that owning my pain and admitting my doubts would be the beginning of the end for my relationship with Him, but it proved to be the turning point that opened up a level of intimacy I had never even imagined possible.
That night, I repeated over and over, “I don’t understand, God. I just don’t understand.” As my walls came down and my honesty grew, my lament became more desperate. I cried out, “How could You do this to me, God? Have You just abandoned me? Do You even care?” Eighteen-year-old me would have been horrified by such a prayer, certain that this was blasphemy and likely to bring on God’s punishment and wrath. But that lament was a sacred thread, drawn across time and connecting me directly to Christ on the cross:
“About the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you for- saken me?’” (Matthew 27:46).
Just as Christ’s anguished garden prayers obliterate the idea that God requires a brave and unencumbered facade, His cry on the cross creates space for honest, powerful lament. The desperate words I feared would create a wedge between me and my Savior were but an echo of His own cries two thousand years earlier. This sacred thread doesn’t end there though. The same lament that connected me from that cold linoleum floor to Christ in His crucifixion also runs back even further in connection to King David as well.
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?" (Psalm 22:1).
What a powerful example of the connective tissue of suffering: David’s broken cry sent heavenward, only to return to earth about a thousand years later, spoken by God in human form.
When Bobby and I went to a counselor to work through our grief divide, we were taught a common technique called reflective listening. In essence, we learned that the best way to communicate to someone that they are heard, and that the feelings they are expressing are important, is to repeat back their words to them before any sort of response. How incredible to see El Shama, “the God who hears,” repeat back David’s words of lament, giving them new depth as He cries out from the cross.
Seeing God connect to David in suffering makes the psalms about His comfort that much more meaningful.
• “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18).
• “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (Psalm 147:3).
The Lord drew near to me on that bathroom floor, just as He drew near to David, and to the apostle Paul, and to all who bring their broken hearts and honest laments to Him. The God of the universe took on human form and bore all the suffering of the human experience so He could draw you into deeper intimacy with Himself.
Friend, don’t be afraid to lean into your pain. Don’t believe the lies that your brokenness will somehow be too much for God to love. Don’t be deceived into glossing over your suffering with a cheerful smile or prosperity-gospel platitudes. Jesus isn’t waiting on the other side of your pain, ready to show up in power after you’ve proven you are worthy—He’s right there in the midst of it, longing to bind up your wounds and share in the suffering together. Bring Him your fears, your doubts, your pain, and your grief. Come exactly as you are, without any pretense. No matter how irreverent that honesty may feel, offering yourself more wholly to God without any walls or reservations is the first step to the most holy intimacy. “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you” ( James 4:8). Find your bathroom floor, your prison cell, your Gethsemane ground. Just show up, and I promise: He will meet you there.
