Hope in the Crucible: How Perseverance in Suffering Conforms Us to Christ

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Wendy Alsup
All right, ladies, welcome to Hope in the Crucible. How perseverance in suffering conforms us to Christ. You may notice we are missing Corey Porter. Corey has a lot of wisdom, but she’s also in the middle of her own physical crucible, and I know she’d appreciate our prayers and encouragement. If you happen to know her, before we start, Whitney, would you open us up in prayer?

Whitney Pipkin
Lord, thank you that you know the story of every woman who’s walked into this room carrying hard and heavy things. Maybe not even presently. Maybe in the past. Maybe what’s coming in the future. And I pray that you, the suffering Savior, would minister to each of us deeply. That by your Holy Spirit, you would apply your Word to our lives, that you would give us hope, and that you would anchor our hope in the resurrection, in the resurrected bodies that are coming for those who trust in you, and in the fact that you know what it’s like to walk in bodies like this to face death and to face suffering, to walk with others who are suffering, and to do it perfectly, so that we who may not do it perfectly can look to you and your finished work on our behalf. Please be with us, help us to honor you and all that we say, and minister to each of these women by your Spirit. It’s in your name we pray. Amen.

Wendy Alsup
Amen. Mark’s session, if you heard Mark’s session just a little while ago on Psalm 102, has well set us up for this discussion. It’s a little unexpected to me. I’m like, oh, okay, you know. So we we have a foundation already for the discussion we’re about to have. Hope in the crucible, and I really love the intentionality that was given to the name of this session. All right, hope in the crucible, hope right, but a crucible. And somebody asked me earlier what a crucible was, and it’s a cool word to consider. So maybe you have a chemistry background, and you know of a crucible as one of those vessels that you might heat up in a chemistry lab to burn out impurities, right? Or we hear language: the crucible it’s a severe test the word comes from the Latin crux c r u x which is a cross it’s the cross so the cross is the ultimate severe test the cross of Christ was the ultimate crucible, and so the whole point of this session is how our perseverance and suffering conforms us to Christ, but also how does Christ’s perseverance and suffering inform our own? So I like that language, crucible, and I hope that maybe you’ll think about that word. You’ll think about how our severe tests are reflections of the most severe test, and we use this language. We carry our crosses, right? But who carried the cross first? So I hope some of that, as we talk, will be meaningful to you, and you’ll have some takeaways today. The questions we’re asking: How does Christ’s suffering inform our own? How does the cross of Christ give us perspective and hope? We’re in the midst of our own burdens, and we’ve got some wise ladies here to talk with us about that. So I’m going to let Whitney and Benitha introduce themselves and tell us a little bit of your story.

Whitney Pipkin
Sure. Thanks, Whitney. So I’m Whitney Pipkin, and I don’t need to look at my notes to know who I am. But I am-I represent on this panel the sort of suffering that feels common to man, right? The sort that we all can expect to experience. I have some inferiority complex about being on this panel because the main suffering that I’ve written about and walked through would be the loss of my mom. So she had cancer for 20 years, kind of middle school to until 2020 when she died, and I wrote a book called “We Shall All Be Changed: How Facing death with loved ones transforms us, and I think if you are in this room thinking I think others are suffering more than me, like me too, because there are seasons that we feel the really intense suffering, and then there are seasons where it ebbs and where it flows again, and each one of those prepares us to walk well with others who are suffering, and also to meet with the person of Christ in our suffering. So that’s the hope that we have: is that we have a Savior who cares about our capital S and our lowercase s suffering. I joked that I’m like I’m going to be on this panel and talk about paper cuts, but all of it matters before the face of God. I also am a editor at. Common Good Magazine. We have a booth out there. Come visit us. And I have another book coming out on called “The Life I Live in the Body” on kind of developing a better theology of the body. So, in light of living in light of our end, what does that look like practically?

Vaneetha Rendall Risner
Well, I’m Beneatha Reisner and live in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I have. I do want to say to Whitney’s first of all, paper cuts hurt. Like I mean, and I’m you put lemon juice on it, it’s pretty bad. So I want to say like I’ve lived through some suffering with a capital S, which I will talk about. But it all matters. So I don’t want you to listen to our suffering and think about whether your suffering was harder or less hard because we meet Christ wherever we are. But I would so I started my story. I got polio when I was three months old, and the doctors gave me the wrong medicine, so I was left pretty much a quadriplegic. So then they realized what I had, but there wasn’t there much we could do. I spent most of my childhood in the hospital. I had 21 operations by the time I was 13. Went through a lot of bullying. Came to Christ at 16 in high school, and I really thought I’m going to live my best life now. I was pretty sure, you know, I was done with suffering, and I had a lot of years without a lot of suffering, and that was wonderful. Life was great until it wasn’t. Now I had learned to walk, even though I was a quadriplegic with all of that surgery. I had learned to walk, which was amazing. So I had a pretty normal life, but got married to a classmate. Then I had an infant son, Paul, who died because of a doctor’s mistake, and then six years later, I was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome, which you know I could walk then. I led a pretty normal life, but then they told me my body is going backwards. So post-polio is characterized by escalating pain and weakness. So I am in more pain than every year is is harder, and eventually they say I will probably be a quadriplegic. So I use my wheelchair most of the time now. So physically, life has been hard, and then several years after that diagnosis, my husband left me for someone else, and I parented two adolescent daughters as a single parent, so I understand suffering. But sometimes it’s not even those things that put me under the table. It’s the everyday things because suffering every single time is an opportunity to either turn to God or to turn away. And I have found that God has really met me in my suffering in ways that I wouldn’t trade for anything. So I am very grateful to the Lord for doing that. And I know I sound like a really fun, upbeat person here talking about major suffering, but I-I mean, I’m fun. So anyway, and I do write and speak about suffering. So I have a memoir, Walking Through Fire, that tells all about this story. I’ve written Bible studies, books, devotionals. It’s pretty much all that I write about, except my latest book is on divorce. So there we are.

Wendy Alsup
So what has perseverance and suffering looked like in your life?

Vaneetha Rendall Risner
That’s a great question. Perseverance for me is a mindset. I mean, what God has done in perseverance is to help me remember truths. Because we had talked about in the panel, like, what does it look like practically for us? And for me, practically, it’s making sure I know where my mind is going, because we’re the most influential people in our lives, and I find, in the midst of suffering, my first thought is not faith. My first thought is fear, like where is this going to go? But really, often I think the hardest part of suffering is not what we’re dealing with in the present. It’s our fear of what is about to happen, what could happen. It’s not the pain of the present moment. It is that this pain will not be gone in the next moment. And so I have found I really need to tell myself the truth. And Martin Lloyd Jones has this quote: “We need to stop talk, stop listening to ourselves and start talking, and so that perseverance for me has been talking to myself and reminding myself of God’s truth. And there’s, there’s three things that I remind myself of, and the first thing is that God loves me and God is for me and with me. Those sound like three, but they’re really one that God God is good and He loves me and He is never going to leave me through this. So just leaning into the presence of God is the first thing that I do. And remember, in this moment, no matter what I’m dealing with, God is with me now, and I will not walk through another. Moment that God is not with me, so that to me the presence of God in my suffering and kind has been a huge thing to me, and I think we forget God’s love in our suffering sometimes. You know, the question a lot of people ask is, if God loves me, why did this happen? Like that’s the question, and that’s the question Satan wants us to ask, because that’s how Satan tempted Jesus. You know, if you are the Son of God, so Satan wants us to start with if, and I think we need to change that question to because because God loves me. Why did this happen? And that changes how we view it. So that’s the first thing I do. I won’t answer all of the questions this thoroughly, so don’t worry. You won’t have to hear from me quite this much. But the second thing I remember is my suffering is not meaningless. Like God is going to use it, and I tell myself that because it feels pointless a lot of times. Like I don’t understand, and in the midst of it, I don’t think any of us ever see what God is doing, and we may not see till eternity. But knowing that God is doing something really spectacular in all of our suffering, and then the third thing I try to remind myself of is this will not last forever, because in the midst of it we think it’s going to last forever. And there’s this quote by Warren Weersby that I love, which is when God puts His people in the furnace, so in the crucible, He keeps His eye on the clock and His hand on the thermometer. He knows exactly how long and how much. So our God knows exactly how long and how much. So he’ll he knows when this will end, even when we don’t. So that’s what I do for perseverance: is rehearsing those three truths, and then just remembering, like for all of us, we are on a battlefield. Like we have different battlefields of suffering. For me, often it’s post polio. That’s my battlefield, but my the battle in all of our suffering is for our hearts, and so remembering whatever we’re fighting, that is not the main thing; it is for our hearts, and so I have to remember that to persevere because I will spiral into fear. So

Whitney Pipkin
those are great. I have like just my own 3p’s. Yes, help me with perseverance. So staying put, and gaining perspective, and remaining with the person of Christ. So, I mean, sometimes when you are in it, my kind of my day-to-day suffering often is migraines. We’ve talked about. I mean, these conferences. If anybody has headaches, they’re like the worst. This lighting, those strobe lights in there-it’s terrible. But I think sometimes when you’re suffering, you can get so fixated on what is the way out. How can I make it stop? And we have an internet that would love to sell us 1010 products, promising a quick fix for what ails, and we can just be so desperate that we forget to take a deep breath and remain and receive this moment from Christ. Not only is He with us, but He intends to use it. And so, the second is to gain perspective. So, when we compare our suffering to, I mean, yesterday was a good day, and today is worse. Or to the person to our right or left, that’s not going to give us the perspective we need to persevere. When we compare our suffering, you know, it says in Second Corinthians 416 through 18 that our suffering will be light and momentary compared to the weight of the eternal glory that is coming for us. So it’s in those that final scale, that final weighing of our suffering against the glory to come, the glory that Christ has earned for us, that will give us the perspective we need, and that’s where we can fix our gaze now-not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. So, even in the little paper cuts and migraines as well, to have that eternal perspective, so that we’re not just fixated on like, how do I get out of this moment? But in this moment, don’t waste it. Like God, please don’t waste my suffering. Don’t let me miss what you could do to transform me in the midst of right now.

Wendy Alsup
Yeah, so much of the time I’ve spent in my own my my story is that my husband, well, part of my story, but my husband was diagnosed with symptoms of schizophrenia in 2012, and then in 2015 he divorced me, and that’s been a big conduit of a lot of long-term pain and suffering. But you spend so much time. How do I solve this? How do I get out of it? But then there comes a point where I told my pastor my suffering’s terminal, and it doesn’t mean that I I don’t have a terminal illness. But I’ve I’ve lost any perspective that in this life these things are going to change. And so, how do you discipline your own mind when when you get to this point of acceptance? It’s not going to resolve in this life.

Whitney Pipkin
I mean, we do not lose heart, right? What does it look like to not lose heart? Well, sometimes it’s just not doing the very thing you know not to do, right? So it’s not necessarily chronic positivity, like Mark talked about. It’s not falling into the to the ditches of either despair or what was the other one? Despair or denial. Good job. That was a test, and you passed. I also think distraction can be in that same ditch. So it’s not falling into those, but it is just clinging to Christ, remaining with Him, abiding with Him, and not losing heart, like not losing hope, which is an incredible thing for him to say to us. And only Christ has the opportunity and power and ability to say that to us. I, you know, I think of when we talk about Romans eight and people quoting that to each other. I’m like, wait for the sufferer to quote it to herself before you bring that to bear on their lives. Model what it looks like for God to somehow be good in the midst of suffering, but don’t bring that word to the sufferer because that’s going to cause them to lose heart. Like, oh, if I have to perform that, if I have to perform Romans eight for you, that is a heavy burden that only Christ can bear, but Christ can invite us-the one who has suffered for us and before us and goes before us-can invite us to suffer well because He’s done it perfectly. Therefore, we can just trudge along in trust and hope and just really meager perseverance.

Wendy Alsup
Yeah, and I love the title of this session: Hope in the Crucible, but I think we’ve all experienced times where hope maybe was projected onto us by someone else in an unhelpful, sometimes even hurtful way. So, have you seen hope misapplied or misused, and and what was helpful to you in that?

Vaneetha Rendall Risner
Yeah. Well, I think we often look at hope like hope in an outcome, like I hope this is going to happen, and and so hope is like wishful thinking that we hold on to, and sometimes it’s because it’s a godly outcome. Like for me, I realized before after my husband left, I felt like the only godly outcome was that we would get back together. Like that was the only thing that would honor God, and so my hope was in that in every way. That’s all I prayed for, and finally I sensed the Lord was like, “You are putting your hope in this outcome, and you need to put your hope in me. Like our hope is a living hope in Jesus, and so I think when we put our hope in lesser things, then we’re disappointed. But hope doesn’t disappoint us when it’s in Jesus. and And I always say, like, my hope is in the goodness of God, and that does not change. But what that looks like in my life often is is not what I would consider good at first, but recognizing God is good, and so this will be. I will see this as good one day.

Whitney Pipkin
I don’t know. I’m kind of going off of what you said. I don’t know if it’s going to answer the question, Wendy. But I think we need to testify to each other about our suffering because we need imaginations for hope. What hope might look like in these different types of suffering? I that’s why I struggled in the face of death. Even though I’d been walking toward it with my mom for 20 years, I didn’t know what to hope in once she’d reached the end of the 10th clinical trial. Like when you’re no longer hoping for healing, what is the Christian? What do you tell people to pray for? Like, what does it look like to make that pivot toward what is the actual Christian hope, which is in resurrection? But we just didn’t have that script to give one another. People just get quiet and kind of disappear when they don’t know when they can no longer pray for healing. And like, it would be weird at a certain point to be like, I’m still hoping for healing. I’m like, well, hospice just came in, so that’s actually not what we’re asking for right now. I’m asking for a good ending. I’m asking that mom would come alive to the spirit and to her great hope in the future resurrection that is right now. And so I wrote my testimony because I wanted to give us an imagination for what God, how God might be good in the face of the worst you can imagine. How do you make that pivot from “I’m hoping for this, I’m hoping for this” to “God, you could still be good somehow, even if this, right? Even if you don’t. I mean, that’s what Hezekiah prayed. Like even if you don’t, or no, sorry, that was Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They prayed, even if you don’t save us in the fiery fire, you know you’ll be good, and so we can look for those those but God moments in our lament, and also for those even if moments in our prayers. And it helps when we tell each other how God has been good in the worst places.

Wendy Alsup
I like that but God moments. We long for those, but. Even if God moments. All right, so we’ve seen hope misapplied, but also hope. How how have you found hope? Not despite your crucible, but maybe even through your very crucible.

Vaneetha Rendall Risner
Well, I feel like God has brought me hope in Him through my suffering, and I feel like I depended on so many other things. And I love Second Corinthians one eight and nine. Paul says, “You know, we were so utterly burdened beyond ourselves. We we even despaired of life itself. We thought, okay, I am butchering this verse. So anyway, but we thought we had received the sentence of death. But this was to make us rely not on ourselves, but on God who raises the dead. And so when we’re burdened beyond ourselves, it teaches us we can rely on God who raises the dead, and that’s where our hope is. And so, I think in the crucible is when we see when everything else is gone, that we have a hope we can hold on to that’s sturdy. And you know, I know I’m sure in your mom’s last days, it’s like this is my hope. It’s Jesus.

Whitney Pipkin
Yeah, I mean, I I walked away from that experience saying like everything we believe is true, because if it’s not true, then then it’s not worth living for. If it’s not true in the face of the thing that Christian hope is really about, then it’s not true in in the paper cut days and the and the days that are just what why is this happening? It must be true then for it to matter. And we we have a great hope that I mean the Christian story is one of going down into suffering, knowing that it will go back up. We don’t know when we may go down, and then the bottom drops out again, and we go down more. I mean, you’ve heard that in these women’s stories, and there’s parts of my own that I could tell. You know, you’ve all felt that feeling of surely the bottom can’t go any farther, and the bottom drops out, and you go down a notch. And we see that in the story of Christ and the the road that he walked. I mean, imagine what he was going through physically, emotionally, and then all your friends leave, and you ask them to pray, and they all fall asleep, and you are truly alone. And that’s where, like, in the pit of suffering, when no one, you can lose somebody together, like with a sibling inside it, and you don’t have the same experience. And that’s why marriages struggle with child loss because your experience is so unique to a person. The only person who knows what that’s like, the only person who can uniquely meet you in the pit of suffering and companion you in it, is the person of Christ. And Scripture says we get to fellowship with Him, likewise in our suffering. So there’s something of knowing God that we get there, and so if we are like trying to scramble out of that pit the entire time, we’re gonna miss the whole thing that it’s about, the whole thing that God’s doing in that pit. So that’s what I mean. Sometimes it’s just just stay put, just receive this season, and let the frantic scrambling rest, and let God accomplish the work only he can do in the darkest places that you didn’t even want to go.

Wendy Alsup
Yeah, have any of you read the book Severe Mercy? I think a lot about my crucible being a severe mercy, and we were. I was just kind of getting my feet back under me after my divorce, I had moved across country, got remodeled a farmhouse, got my boys in school starting to get established in church, and maybe like just starting to feel like we were building life again. And I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and it was really that second round on top of the first that you know you felt like you were just coming up for air in the ocean to get knocked down again, and then you start to despair ever getting up. But it forced me into the Book of Job, and you know the really interesting thing about Job is that in the end, Job never got an answer on earth for what he experienced. What he got was a new understanding of God. The answer to Job was God speaking out of the whirlwind and saying, “I am God” And you know, when I first read that, I’m like, “Oh, that’s harsh, God! Like, can’t you like give him more of a pep talk? You know, you’ll mount up with wings as eagles. You’ll run and not grow weary, Joe. But he’s like, “I am God, but that in the end, that. Was like the thing that transformed Job mentally, and for me, at these multiple points of trials, and I’ve even had you know several just in the last few weeks that have really hit me again, and all I can do is say God is God, and I am not, and it’s not like a cop out or a negative thing. It’s like that’s hope. God is God. I am not, and I and the Scripture says I have a hope that will not disappoint. And so when I I just firmly believe that when I see Jesus face to face in heaven, I am not going to be upset about how He played out my life on earth. Like that’s the hope. When we see Him face to face in heaven, we will not be disappointed. There will be no disappointment, and sometimes it is excessive disappointment in this world that finally gets us to the point where we stop looking for excessive, you know, things in this world that don’t disappoint. So there’s there’s blessing through the crucible, not just in spite of the crucible, but through the crucible. I told the ladies yesterday. I think some of you might have been here in our session on ministry, ministry joys and struggles for single women, and I said, you know, for me, divorce and singleness has been like sanctification on steroids, because it forces me in a way that just regular life, apart from it, wasn’t forcing me to find in Jesus my all-in-all. We talked a little bit before this about Hebrews 210. I love that language. Jesus is a pioneer. It says he’s our pioneer in suffering, and I I find that language really intriguing. So if you think of a pioneer, they’re the ones who go ahead, they plow the path, they cut back the branches, they make a path for the folks that are, you know, it’s one of the guys that founded the West, Lewis and Clark. You know, they’re making the path ahead of everybody. But I think also of it like Jesus is like the Coast Guard icebreaker ship that goes ahead of the regular tankers to clear the path of ice, so that language has meant a lot to me. But how have you found Jesus, like the pioneer that goes ahead of you and makes a path for you?

Whitney Pipkin
Yeah, I find such comfort in the fact that Jesus knows what it’s like that he put on a body like the weakest of forms, like Shane was saying before one of the worship sessions, that you know he was this Lord of hosts, Lord of armies, in charge of 185,000, and he came in a manger. He put on the weakness of of failing flesh, and so I mean it’s just you know what it’s like when someone’s trying to comfort you and they like are like oh my gosh this is really uncomfortable, and that’s where we get in those sticky situations where people say the wrong thing because they’re actually trying to comfort their own discomfort. They want to put a bow on it so they can be done and feel like they helped, and walk away, and that’s where we say the things we don’t really need to say. We should do the sit in the ash heap with tape over your mouth part. Like Job’s friends did a good job the first day, first seven days, no talking. And so we can easily. So it’s so much better when someone’s gone through some type of suffering, right? I I praise God that our pastors have suffered. I think it makes them better elders and pastors because they know what it’s like to face something you can’t theologize your way out of. That there is no easy button, no fast button. That it is going to be a long road of endurance with Christ, and so they know then how to minister with the comfort they’ve received, and so that’s the gift we get when we sit with Christ in our own suffering: is that we get to comfort others, but also before anyone else has said the right things, and when people have said all the wrong things, that is when the comfort and person of Christ meeting with you in the pit. I remember there was a moment in my own story. In every one of our grief stories, there’s layers that we won’t say from a stage, right? We all have things that were even harder than the thing that we can talk about. And there was a moment where I felt like the bottom dropped out again and then again, and my mom’s dog came and licked my. Tears, right? And it was this picture of no one knows what it’s like, and no one is with me. That was the lie. It’s just like no one is with me now. I am alone, and I am scared. And to then realize, as if for the first time, that Christ was with me, and that He knew what it was like to be on his knees, begging for a different outcome, for God to give him silence. He knew that moment of loneliness, that complete silence in the face of suffering, the the desertion of every friend, and what was still coming was his ultimate physical suffering, and that’s the Christ we pray to. That’s the Christ who companions us. So we-I-I don’t know how to describe what that changes, but it changes everything that He’s gone before us. It is the hope at the center of the Christian life. Every other religion does not have a God who suffers; they have a God who controls and does what He wants. We have a God who entered into our mess and put on something that could break, and was broken for us, and that I mean it changes everything.

Vaneetha Rendall Risner
Yeah, I also think about the sacrifice of the incarnation, like just the very beginning, the manger. You know, like God who made the universe is crying like a baby, and he can’t meet his own needs, and I think about that because I’m more and more dependent. I can’t do things for myself that I could do, and I honestly I hate it. I don’t like dependence, but I realize like what would have that been like? Like that sacrifice to me is breathtaking. That God would be a baby and take on flesh, and so recognizing He understands all of those hard things is pretty amazing.

Wendy Alsup
Yeah, I was I teach a religion class at our community college, Religion 101, which is like the concept of religion, world religions, and it’s so interesting to me, and I pointed out to my students that Christianity is so alone in having a God who came and dwelt among us and laid down His life, and He emptied Himself of His rights, and He suffered with us, but he suffered for us. That is really different than anything else that any religion has developed over our time or culture. And Tim Keller, I’ve been listening to a podcast series that he put out during COVID, and he really makes this point that we’re not going to be able to persevere in suffering with hope apart from understanding the cross of Christ. The cross is our sacrifice that reconciles us to God, but also the cross, the weight that He carried for us, so that when he asks us to carry a weight or allows us to carry a weight, he is not unaffected. And I, you know, our God is compassionate. I love the Latin for compassion. Pasio means to suffer. We think of it as passionate, but that really means to suffer. So we call it the passion of the Christ. It’s the suffering of Christ, and calm means with. He enters it with us. So his compassion is literally that he suffers with us, and and this is just an amazing thing that we have in our God, and I just I don’t think I could persevere at all without that hope and that companionship.

Whitney Pipkin
That reminds me of Jesus weeping in John 11 with Mary and Martha. Even though he knew he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead, right? And he pauses to weep. He validates the moment of weeping. I think sometimes as Christians we want to push people through that, like, well, he’s in a better place, and we have hope, and don’t grieve without hope. Jesus, who was going to resurrect in real time in just a few minutes, took time to weep. There’s a whole verse, two words devoted to it. If that doesn’t give us permission to do that with one another, then I don’t know what does. Jesus was still grieving and angry at death as he was going to conquer it, right? And we can do that for one another too.

Wendy Alsup
And one thing, as we get close to our time, how do you encourage? Because I know you’ve talked a lot about this. Your suffering, in particular, is very common to man-the loss of a parent. How do you prepare yourself? How a lot of you are going home to disciple ladies in your churches. How do you prepare yourself or prepare your ladies, disciple others, and in preparation for the suffering that is common?

Whitney Pipkin
Yeah, that’s really my heart is to be more prepared than I was for the thing that we knew was coming. We saw it coming. We were so fixated on how to avoid it. Right? It’s easy to be like, “There’s got to be a way out of this hard thing that’s coming. We could outthink it and outdo it. But to sorry, repeat the question one more time, Wendy. I just blacked out.

Wendy Alsup
How how do you prepare yourself or disciple others? And

Whitney Pipkin
yeah, so I think when I think there’s a fear, especially when you’re so you go through a season of suffering, you’re out of it, right? You talked about that season where you weren’t physically suffering. To like, if I hold very still, maybe nothing bad will happen again. You once you’ve been through it, the feeling that the other shoe is about to drop is a feeling of holding your breath, and it can make us afraid to draw near to those who are suffering, as though it’s contagious somehow. I don’t really want to go and cry with that person. I’m in a good place right now, and I want to protect this. And I think what we see in the life of Christ as he walked on this earth, he it says several times that his heart went out to someone. Right, we see this rut of compassion going out to people, and that rut of compassion goes both ways. The more you walk the road of compassion toward others, I think the quicker you return to the work you have to do, the mission that you’re in. It doesn’t actually take away from it. It is the mission. It is the Holy Spirit saying, “Here’s an opportunity to comfort with the comfort you’ve received, and to go about the work. There are several times where Christ’s life in a body limited Him to one person at a time, and there were multiple miracles He could have done. There was at one point a girl dying that He’s supposed to go save a daughter of Jairus, and a woman pulling on his the hem of his robe with her bleeding. Right, he is torn, like many of us are torn between all the needs around us, and this these ruts of compassion enabled him to pursue with wisdom each of these opportunities. And so we can carry in our hearts that same withness that Christ offers us, and we don’t have to be afraid of running out of it. Like we can go there with people, and we can come back. And I, I’ve just found, like you know, maybe get some waterproof mascara and keep it in your right. Like because just be prepared that when you go there with people, it’s a life of love, but it is so rich and deep and sweet. And it’s the very places that we experience Christ’s comfort as we comfort others.

Vaneetha Rendall Risner
Yeah,

Wendy Alsup
yeah.

Vaneetha Rendall Risner
I would say other ways to prepare for suffering, and and I don’t think we’re ever prepared. Like every piece of suffering, I’m like I’m not ready. My first question is why me? Then it’s like take it away, and then then then I try to I turn to God, but to prepare for suffering, you really need to read your scripture. Like if you don’t read the Bible, and that’s not a habit in your life now, it’s going to be really hard in the midst of pain to open the scripture. And but the scripture was life to me in the midst of darkness. Like I remember, just opening Psalms, Psalm 119. I remember my soul clings to the dust. Revive me according to your word, and opening the word and asking God to revive me. But if I had never opened the word before that, it would be hard for the Scripture to revive me, because let’s be honest, sometimes reading the Bible feels like eating cardboard, and but we need to develop this muscle of reading and praying. So I would say both of those things. Like I actually started using a sand timer when I pray, so I don’t have electronics, and I can just focus on. I have 15 minutes to just talk to God, and so those spiritual disciplines that we develop are really important when we’re suffering. And I would say memorizing Scripture because when you’re in the pit, sometimes and you’re in the emergency room or you’re by you know your mom’s bed, like when you’re in the midst of it, you want verses that you go back to, that you know by heart, that you can just say in the midst of pain. And so, I think those are really important things, as well as like as I mentioned at the beginning, like what, where is your mind going to go? Like, what are you going to tell yourself when you get that phone call, like, are you going to say this is meaningless? This is never going to end. This is the worst thing. God doesn’t love me, and you may say that the first thing, but what you say as the second thing is the most important. Like, what am I going to do when I’m spiraling down into fear? What am I going to remind myself of? And those are the truths that God is with you. God loves you. You have His presence. This is not meaningless. Your suffering is producing something, and heaven is real. and And so, I find that knowing those truths before is really important because so many people walk away from faith and suffering, and I’m. Sure, all of you know people who have, and maybe some people here are tempted to walk away because life has gotten so hard. And I would say, just do those things like rehearse the truths of God, open the Bible, beg God to meet you, because God will. He wants to, but you need to expect that he will, rather than just assume that he’s not listening, because he’s listening to every word. So that’s

Wendy Alsup
well. As we wind down, what are some resources that have been helpful to you, especially when it’s hard for you to form your own thoughts? Like, what’s come alongside of you and been helpful to you?

Whitney Pipkin
I love reading like older writers, like the Nancy Guthrie has a compilation of it’s called “Beast All My Soul, and it’s like Martin Lloyd Jones is in there, and you read these like a generation or two or three ago, people lost multiple children. It was just common to man to have 11 kids so you could have five, and the way that they talk about suffering, that just how practiced they are at it is so. It is perspective. It is, and it is, it is beautiful because we live in a culture that just values none of it. We really expect long lives and prosper, prosperous lives. So that’s helpful. And then I Romans eight is a great one to memorize. I was really helped. Emmanuel Nashville or Emmanuel, what is it called? Anyways, Shylyn. There’s a Romans eight set to music. That’s a great way to memorize it. It’s a whole album on Romans eight that that Emmanuel worshiped did, and Shylyn raps the Romans eight passage, and then there’s songs, and that was so helpful to have that in my heart, and then just like the scraps of of words too. When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul. That’s the one that was like on my wrists for many years. I also love Allison’s in the room, but she has a children’s book on lament called He Always Hears. Sometimes children’s books are like that’s what we need, right? We need our one scrap of verse, and we need a children’s book that can minister to us and our children together. And as Mark taught, the language of lament is something that we all need. So just praying through the Psalms, the third of the Psalms that are lament, and looking for the but gods, and and borrowing them in your own journal, I do find that rhythm happens when you pray and when you journal. Eventually, once you’ve wrung out your complaints, they’ve turned into laments, which way better to talk to God than to everyone else about it. And then you end up your heart, you feel it turning back. But God, you are the one that I’m looking to and the one that I’m trusting in.

Vaneetha Rendall Risner
Yeah, yeah, and I I feel like you just talked about lament. Wendy has an amazing Bible study, crying out to God on the Psalms of lament and lament, and it’s a beautiful way. Like if you’re not used to lament, I’m just I think it’s a great Bible study on how to lament and what does it mean. So

Wendy Alsup
thanks, and I’ve really appreciated. And we’re not we talked about this. We’re not just all stroking each other’s egos. But after my dad died, I read “We Shall All Be Changed, and that was so helpful to me. That language, even just the title, “We Shall All Be Changed, just to get my brain around death of a loved one and how to think about it, and then your watching for the morning devotionals. I sobbed reading them, and so you got a lot of wisdom here with these ladies. We’ll as we wind down, we’ll hang around here for a little bit. I’m going to go on over to the intervarsity booth in the main area, and they’ve got the crying out to God, experiencing grace through Psalms of Lament Bible Study. If you’re interested in checking that out, and it includes Psalms 102, which Mark did today. So, Venitha, would you close us in prayer?

Vaneetha Rendall Risner
I would love to. Oh Lord Jesus, thank you for what you’re doing in all of our lives, Lord. We all came into this room, I’m sure, with heavy hearts and suffering for ourselves or people we love, and Lord, I just pray that you would draw near to everyone here, that they would feel your presence in whatever crucible they’re in right now, Lord. That they would know that you are love them, that you are with them, that you will never leave them, Lord. And so, Father, I just pray that you would meet everyone here where they are, and they would remember the goodness of you, Lord. We love you, but not nearly as much as you love us. In Jesus’ name, Amen.