Dr. Curt Thompson on How to Stop Silencing Your Suffering

Hey there. If you are new here, you may not have heard my first conversation with Dr. Curt Thompson, where we talked about shame. I was so moved in that conversation, not only marked by his technical academic excellence, the knowledge and the skill that he brings to the topic from a clinical standpoint. I was more so marked by the personal experience that he brings, his own stories of healing from shame. When you can marry the knowledge with the experience, that is wisdom in the room. Today, Dr. Curt Thompson is with me to talk about the impact of suffering, the glory of suffering, the benefits of suffering, and how, if you embrace those tough parts of the journey, and believe that suffering is a deep place that can produce something, that it can produce hope that carries you with a different expectation through your life, then you've learned another skill. And as usual, my conversation with Dr. Curt Thompson was deep, mentally challenging, and emotionally healing. If you find yourself in a place where you're suffering, You owe it to yourself to listen to this conversation in full. And if so, continually led to pick up that book, The Deepest Place: Suffering in the Formation of Hope, from one girl who has lived long enough to experience some suffering. If you allow suffering to send you running away from your place of healing, which I would consider that to be the place of community, the place of your relationship with Christ, and the place where you live with expectant confidence that tomorrow can be better than today. If you allow the suffering that you're experiencing to rob you of that hope, then you are not allowing yourself to live in the full throttle of the beauty that life can give. You can't close yourself off to trouble if you want to live with a full throttle experience, which means you've gotta embrace hope and suffering and the hope that comes from suffering as a part of your journey. If that makes absolutely no sense to you, or if you're like, Chrystal Hurst, I straight up don't wanna do it, then I'm doubling down cuz you're actually the one that needs to listen to this interview or watch it if you're watching it as well. So This is me telling you from one person who's had my fill of a few things in life. You should walk through the suffering, looking for hope and looking for the glory of God that can invade your mind, your soul, and your circumstances, regardless of how you feel today. But Dr. Curt Thompson says all of this so much more eloquently than I. So let me jump into our conversation. Dr. Thompson, welcome so much to the show. Thanks for joining me.

Thank you, Chrystal Hurst. It's a pleasure to be with you.

You know, you write so deeply. And I remember thinking, I've done a lot of interviews. It's 10 years of podcasting for me. And very rarely, and it's not even a good or bad thing, it's just a remarkable thing. Does the gravity, depth, seriousness and the level of soul palpitation happen at the same degree of a book as it does in the interview. Like, you know, the book is written to be monumentally life-changing. And then you have a conversation with the person and it's still just as life-changing, but, you know, the person isn't necessarily embodying the same level of depth emotionally or, um, weightiness of the book. And I'm— what I was marked by in our last conversation was I'm like, you wrote the book. You've done a lot of interviews about the book. You've given talks about the book. You counsel people about the book. Like, this is not— you're not currently in the middle of it, but your conversation with me had me in my feelings as if you were. It was— every question was a thoughtful response. Every question was internally assessed before the answer was given, as if you hadn't given the answer before. So when I was looking at the topic of our conversation today and just the title of your latest book, The Deepest Place, Suffering and the Formation of Hope. I wanted to ask you, the books that I've seen, and who knows what other writings that you've done that I haven't, are just very deep. They're just very deep and can be weighty. If I'm going to pick up your book, it's going to attract me because I'm suffering and because I need hope and I'm reaching out from that place. Do you live in this space? Just thoughtful, contemplative. Is this how you present in the interviews, how you write? Is this where you live? Because if so, I'm like, how does someone walk around that contemplative without feeling that weighty in their everyday?

You know, I don't think Anybody has ever asked me this question before. I do think that I write out of my experience, my experience of the people with whom I work and my experience of myself. And so, so that, so there is an element in which I think what I'm putting on paper, uh, reflects what's going on internally for me most of the time. Now, I, I will say a couple of other things. I do think I walk around with, uh, I guess, I guess the way for me to say it is I feel like I am in contact with and have access to a fair bit of grief. And I mean, even right now as we're talking, like, I know that you know what that, what that means. Yeah. Like there are moments when you're in touch with your own grief, but then you, you know, you open the front page of the paper or you hear something or whatever, or you're speaking with your friend at coffee and you find yourself accessing a certain depth of emotional tone about what they're talking about. It sometimes makes you think that you're even in greater access to their grief than they are.

Yeah.

And you're like, why? You're talking to them and you're like, why are you not in a puddle of tears? Like, because I'm about, you know, I think, yeah. And so I think some of it is about temperament for me. Some of it is about, you know, what I was introduced to as a kid. Some of it is about being loved in the way that I was. Some of it is about experiences I had in my teenage years in which, you know, you just feel like you've been touched by a white-hot rod in your soul by things. And you just— and then you just feel like you can't escape it for— like you're just left with it forever. And I would also say, you know, I do this imperfectly. I mean, you know, somewhere in the last 4 weeks, I'm sure in my kitchen, I probably got snippy with my wife. And I'm thinking— I'm guessing she's thinking like, well, gosh, now would be a lovely time for you to be in touch with your grief rather than snipping at me. So it's imperfect. But I think it is true that I— I mean, I walk around with a fair degree of joy as well at my— at the incredulity of creation.

Hmm.

I mean, you're having a conversation with a human being And they are, and they're discovering a moment of healing. And you're thinking, like when we talked about these confessional communities and things happen in these spaces where the Spirit is at work and something happens. And I'm thinking like, I can't believe I just saw what I saw.

Mm-hmm.

And I don't deserve to be in the room where it happened.. And, uh, I think there's a fair bit of that.

Well, I think as you were talking, I think what makes it especially remarkable to me is, and I'm sure you've experienced this in all of your work, your research, your, your learning, your growth, um, that oftentimes when people have a clinical understanding of what's happening in the brain or in the emotional places of a person's life, that work, that investment of work to understand sometimes results in communication in an academic response to very heartfelt, deep things. So I think I'm duly marked because, uh, obviously you have done the scientific work and the academic work, to have a deep and broad-spectrum understanding, but you bring to those conversations, obviously your own experience, but it translates as deeply empathetic, deeply compassionate, and deeply personally felt, which is what makes the conversation with you so marking. So I would, I would love to know, with that said, what made this the next topic? What made this book, The Deepest Place, talking about suffering and hope, the next work that you were compelled to put into the world?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think there are two things, two general— well, one thing is that this passage from Romans 5 and the topic has been percolating for a number of years. And then, you know, just in the trainings that we do, in the intensives with our— the Confessional Community intensive trainings that we do in our practice, I started to work out some of this, as has been the case for most of the stuff most of the works that I've written, you're kind of like practicing it before you write it. You know, you're discovering that, oh, this really has substance to it. So that's one thing I've been working on. It's been kind of banging around in my head. But I will tell you, there was a moment. So there was a patient of mine, who has been like just getting after it. And I've been her physician for 20 years. And in one of these moments, in one of these group settings, these confessional community settings, and this is, you know, we tell people, you know, you think that as you, you know, if you have parents who are aging, you think that your parents somehow are going to magically like snap out of it. If you have parents who have unfinished business that they're not working on, you think at some point, oh, they're going to reach their 70s, 80s, 90s, and either it's just going to— it's all going to kind of dissolve into the ether, or they're going to get better, or it's just not going to matter as much or whatever. And then you discover that there are plenty of people who are living in the world in their 40s, 50s, 60s, who have parents in their 70s, 80s, and 90s who still— who are cognitively intact. And who are still finding ways to behave really badly. And you're thinking, I didn't know somebody could behave this badly at age 89. Like, how do you pull that off? Like, you, you, you, you need a walker to get around the house, but like your words can knock the house over. Like, how do you still do this?

Yeah, yeah.

This woman, this patient of mine was— and again, this person is light years away from where they were 20 years ago. And yet there was yet one more moment where her parents behaved in such a way that all the old demons, you know, the unclean spirits of the spiritual realm, like they don't ever go to sleep. Like we might You know, it's like what Jesus says. You can clean the house up, but if the demon checks around and sees that it's empty, like, it's not like it's dead. It just goes someplace else. And if it comes back and it's, it's going to come, it's going to go get its, it's going to go get its friends and come back and take the house by storm. And this woman had another one of those episodes and was just distraught. And she said, how is it? Because she'd been in counseling for 5 years before she came to see me. She said, how is it that after 25 years, it is still— this still has the power to do this to me.

Yeah. Yeah.

And it, it felt, it felt like a stone to me, this notion that this, like, oh my gosh, like the suffering never stops. You can, you can do this work forever and there will still— and evil is not going quietly into the night. And our old neural networks, our old memory, you know, They're still around and something is going to get access to it and it's going to catch you off guard. And so it hit me for some reason in that moment. This is some years ago. It hit me in that moment that this notion of this person is suffering in many respects because they are running to the light. They are suffering because they are not willing to live in the system that their parents created. And it is their resistance to that broken system that is creating so much trouble. Because, you know, a lot of times when people are just willing to live in the system that, you know, wants to squeeze them into its mold, you don't really know that you're suffering sometimes. You're just putting up with stuff. It's like, you know, when I'm addicted, when I'm addicted to alcohol, I often don't know that I'm addicted to alcohol. I'm just living my life. It's not until I decide I'm going to enter into recovery that my suffering becomes conscious to me. That, you know, I was suffering and didn't know it. Now I'm suffering and I know it like I've never known it before. And that process doesn't stay the same in its acuity. This is a long-winded answer to your question. But I think when she— when that happened, I thought like, oh my gosh. But I think another purpose is I really wanted to honor her suffering. We want to say to her, the fact that this is still difficult is not a comment that says you're not working hard enough, that you're not— that you're stupid, that you're weak. And we want to honor that. And we're not leaving the room. And I think, you know, when Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, it's— there's a lot that's happening in that moment. I'm at, you know, for him, but no small part of it is his awareness of the suffering and that they're suffering, they're going to suffer alone. And that's a big part of what makes suffering suffering in the first place, is that we're by ourselves. And, you know, the Christian story, Chrystal, is the only story in the world that honors suffering. It doesn't say it's good. Eastern metaphysics is prone to want to imagine that suffering can just be meditated into, like, the ether, like it's not really real. And Western metaphysics does everything it can to kind of demonize it and say it's bad and we need to get rid of it. We'll do everything we can. And in fact, we'll do all kinds of things that will turn to all kinds of coping mechanisms themselves that are not all that helpful.

Yeah.

In order to get rid of suffering. And Jesus comes to the world and says suffering is the natural outcome of a world as beautiful as this that God has made that has turned its back on its maker. And, um, and Jesus says, I'm not gonna let— I'm not gonna let that keep me from coming. Even, uh, and, and, and I'm even gonna like, uh, enter into it with you, uh, not to say that suffering is good, but to say that even in the suffering, uh, God's love is still the most potent thing in the room that we're going to pay attention to. And so let that transform the suffering. And so in hindsight, when I look at my rearview mirror, I will say, you know, it's— I think of— I have— I had 3 older brothers, all of whom have passed from cancer. And when the first of my 3 who died in 2004, he lived with pancreatic cancer for 3 years. And suffered mightily and was transformed by his suffering. I mean, his was a life that I would say that, you know, when he died, this is a guy who knew Jesus in ways that he didn't at all before his diagnosis. And I will never forget his words when he said to me, you know, I wouldn't wish cancer on my worst enemy. He said, but I can say without hesitation that I'm not sorry that this has happened. And because the whole thing, you know, brought him into the presence of Jesus like nothing else had in his life. And, uh, yeah. Wow. I didn't know we were going here today.

You mentioned Romans 5. Years ago, I was in a Bible study for moms. And at that time, it's like any Bible study that would let me not have my kids for 3 hours, it's a Bible study I wanted to be at. Um, but one of the things I recall and how this verse got planted in my mind, and I've never forgotten it, and I've wrestled with it over the years, is Romans 5:5. If I recall correctly, one of the mothers in the Bible study had had a miscarriage, but, you know, beyond that first trimester. So it was pretty traumatic experience for her, and she was really struggling with that. And someone said to her, Roman, they quoted Romans 5:5 as she was saying, I'm just afraid of what happens. You know, if I get pregnant again and, you know, am I gonna lose that baby too? Is it gonna be this traumatic? And Romans 5:5 was given to her. Hope will not disappoint. And I remember thinking, yes, it does. Yes, it does.

Yeah.

Uh, there are lots of times where I've hoped for an outcome that I didn't get. Um, I've hoped that relationships would be repaired that weren't. I've hoped that people who were not well would be healed and they weren't. I have hoped that there would be resolution or a lifting of heavy circumstances, and that didn't come. And so if someone picks up Romans 5:5, and if we are attempting to not let the suffering that we experience in this world, because we will, even if comparatively the suffering that we have isn't as bad, you know, air quotes, as someone else's suffering, we will have our own experiences that make us feel about our life ways that we don't want to feel. And forming hope, reaching for hope, holding out for hope in some of those circumstances. Feels very painful if you've been disappointed when you hoped before. Right. And so hope is this concept, obviously all through scripture, we hope in the coming of Jesus again. You know, we hope and pray for people that don't know the Lord or for children who are not on the right path. We hope that our marriages will, uh, that there will be some coming together, some respite, some relief in difficult times. We hope. And because we hope in the Lord, we pray and we lay all these things before him and say, help. Can you give me a sign? Can you show me what to do? Can you fix this? Can you give me another answer? This is not how I wanted it to go. And the hardest thing about hoping in suffering is if you hoped before, even if it was to some lesser degree of suffering in hindsight, but there is fear embedded in that hope because you experienced what feels like a greater disappointment when you hoped before. So what do I do right now if I'm in a difficult situation? Whether it's physical or relational, whatever it may be. And hope is already hard because you don't want to be disappointed. But if I look back and I hoped before and was disappointed, how do I not bring fear into this next hoping experience? Totally.

And I think, you know, Chrystal Hurst, in many respects, you've really you have really distilled all of our fears and questions into this reflection. I mean, this is the thing. How do I hope when I've been burned? How does one do that? And I think this is the question that every human being has at some level. So for just a second, I want to take a moment and just offer a couple of reflections and to, for our audience to imagine with me two things. One has to do with the neuroscience of hope. We're going to talk about hope, how it normally works anyway, like what it actually is. And a second thing has to do with this passage and a proper posture toward it. Let me just say a little bit about hope as the mind, hope about anything. We typically find ourselves thinking a lot about hope when it comes to important things in our life. I hope to have a baby. I hope to get that job. I hope the Buckeyes beat Michigan next year, or whatever it is that we're hoping. For, as I say, we're hoping. What we don't realize is that we actually live every single moment of our lives as hopeful people. It's just that so much of our life that is lived that is hopeful is so common that we're not aware that that's what we're doing. So for instance, this morning you were living, hoping without knowing that you're thinking this, you're hoping that all of the technology when you like sign on, right? There's that, right? Yeah. Yeah.

It's going to do what it's supposed to do.

Right. Exactly. Like you're living with the anticipation of a good outcome. That essentially is what hope is. It is a future state of the mind. It is the mind anticipating the future that has— that holds within it a good outcome. And there are, you know, infinite numbers of moments in the course of my day where I'm walking down the hallway and I'm hoping that the floor will hold. I don't know. I'm not thinking that. I'm not thinking, oh my gosh, I hope the floor holds. No, but that's exactly how I'm living. We like to say that the brain is one big anticipation machine, and I'm hoping. So I think that's pretty clear for us that, number one, that hope is not a thing that only shows up occasionally about the big items in life. It is a function of what it means to be human. And that's— and this is important, um, because another feature about hope is— and, and this is why, this is why we have the subtitle Suffering and the Formation of Hope— because we, we tend to think of hope also as a thing that happens to us. Like, I hope that hope falls into my lap. I don't have any, like hope is this thing that is independent of me. Like I'm hoping for this outcome. Like I don't, there's nothing I can do about the outcome. Maybe I will or won't get the job. I'm not in charge of it. Like I hope, and like, so I see hope as being independent of me when in fact hope is something that I am forming every day of my life. The reason that I hope effectively that the floor will hold, that the technology will work is because you have practiced on many occasions coming and sitting in your chair and your technology actually works. You have formed an anticipated future by practicing. You, you are forming hope in your technology, not just because somebody else told you that it would work the very first time you did it, but because you sat down and it worked. And most of the time, most of the things that we engage in in this way, they do so because we have lots of practical experience, embodied experience, that tell us that a future with a good outcome is worthy of anticipating. Now, this is true. This is all— this has everything to do with the neuroscience of how— of what we do with time travel, what we do with, you know, the capacity of the brain to imagine a future in ways that other animals don't. Now that's part 1. Here's part 2. It is crucial that when we read this text, you know, there are a lot of folks that we're familiar with Romans 5:3, "For not only this, we glory in our suffering. Suffering leads to perseverance. Perseverance, character. Character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us." Or in the more recent NIV translation, "Hope does not put us to shame," which I find to be probably not just a more accurate expression of Paul's words, but it is accurate actually an enlightening and I think accurate expression of what we mean by the word disappoint in the first place. We wouldn't think about this, but when you peel the layers off, you recognize, we come to find out that disappointment actually has its root in the experience of shame. Because my disappointment has everything to do with my powerlessness, my inability my, like, you know, if I, I'm going to Disney World and the hurricane comes through and it's like, I'm just, I'm disappointed because like they close it and I, and I, but then I, you know, because I have no power, I'm not enough to change this. But you know, if, if on the third day of the hurricane I get a call from my boss that says, hey, we heard about that hurricane thing. Like, why don't you just take next week off and go back? And I get a call from Disney World, says, hey, y'all come. Cause like the hurricane, like screwed that up.

Suddenly, I'm fine.

I'm fine. I'm fine. Because somebody else has had the power to— otherwise, I'm powerless. I am not enough. This is the root of shame. I don't have what it takes. I'm not enough. I am inadequate to the task in a way that leaves me without a good outcome for my future. Won't put you to shame, disappoint. They're deeply linked to each other. But many of us know that verse and we think, oh, this is suffering, perseverance, character, hope. But we forget that Paul first mentions hope 2 verses earlier when he says, and we hope, right? We boast in the hope the glory of God. We don't boast in the hope of the job or the hope of having a child or the hope of this or the hope of that. Not that those things are not worthy of hoping for. It's just that the glory of God is the one thing that we can practice experiencing. Now, this is, this is where it gets back to the question of how we form hope. Because in the very first verse, when he says, therefore, since we've been justified by faith, we have peace with God. There's a whole— in the book we talk an awful lot about, like, why, why those words are so— that, that faith and justification are— have a lot to do with secure attachment. Why secure— why the whole notion of peace with God is really significant. Many of us read that verse and think, like, I don't, I don't Yeah, okay, great. Without being aware that there are many parts of us— we, we Jesus followers still have many parts of us that believe that we are at war with God. And I live as if I am. I live as if God is a tyrant. That's how I live. There are parts of me that believe this. It's not until we get to this notion and we hope— we boast in the hope of the glory of God. And this is where John's Gospel and the whole notion of the joy-filled experience of secure attachment speak to us. John's Gospel, when John talks about the glory of God, Jesus comments about the glory of God, "Glorify your Son even as I have glorified you." All these words of glory in John's Gospel. The word glory in the scriptures is a placeholder for lots of things about God: his power, his wisdom, his beauty, his— all these things that are all part of that package. In John's Gospel, the focus of the use of the word glory has everything to do with the beauty of the love of the Father of the Son and the Son of the Father. This notion that there is nothing more beautiful, nothing more glorious And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory. We laid hands on his glory, the glory of the Father of the only Son. If the glory is in the relational experience of being loved— C.S. Lewis, in his sermon The Weight of Glory, you know, he gives this metaphor. And if any of our listeners are dog owners, we know this to be true. If you, if you own a dog and you like the dog, that's probably a stipulation. We hope you like your dog. But when you come home, if you have a dog that really likes you, we, you know, the dog just comes running. And if you like the dog, then you bend over and you grab the dog's head and you rub the dog. And the dog is like in his— what he is in his glory. And as Lewis points out, There is no greater glory for the dog than to know that he is the object of his master's pleasure, of his owner's pleasure. And this is what Lewis is pointing out, that we are like the dog. We are— we are the object of our king's pleasure. And if you can imagine, you're at home and God walks in the door and he walks over to you and he pulls you into his arms and then he holds your face in his hands. He goes, "I'm so glad to be home with you." And you're like, "Are you talking to me?" This glory that Jesus lives in and out of his— in his response is obedience. His response is loving obedience and not as this just dry mechanical obedience, but this obedience because he loves his Father. And this is what's crucial. That glory, you know, Paul writes, we boast in the hope of the glory of God, that he's thinking down the line. He's thinking new heaven and new earth. He— the glory that comes, that we, we hope in the— like, I'm hoping, like, the glory is going to be mine, that, that God's going to come home. Like, appearance, the parousia, the appearance of our King when he walks in the door. I've been waiting a long time to get home. And you're like, you can't, you can't believe this. And in anticipation of that day, we who are the body of Jesus are called to practice that very thing. We who are with each other— in the book I talk a fair bit about confessional communities again, and we talk about how in these spaces we experience the first fruit, the first taste of this glory. When we are in a space where people are coming into the room who are saying, my goodness, I can't believe I get the privilege of being in the room with you, and I'm not leaving. And this is where we practice glory. And this becomes the glory that we sit in when we suffer. Mm-hmm. This is the glory that informs our life such that it does not take my suffering away. I say in the opening page of the book, look, if I were going to buy a book on suffering and read it. I would want to buy a book that when I read it, they would tell me how my suffering, I could eliminate it. And so this might not be very helpful for many people.

But listen, expectations matter when you pick up a book.

Right, right, right.

That's good.

Yeah. So anyway, I think this notion that hope is a thing that we build in terms of if I am practicing being seen, soothed, safe, secure by you, in the room when I'm in the middle of the storm I'm in the middle of, I begin to recognize that I'm paying more attention to Chrystal Hurst than I am paying attention to my suffering. And your attunement to me— and by this I don't mean just like the facts that you're telling me. You're not quoting scripture at me. No, what you're doing is like, I see your tears, I hear the tone of your voice, I see your eye contact, I see the your body language— I'm being loved by Chrystal Hurst in the room. And this becomes a thing that I take with me if I'm practicing this over and over. I'm seeing the face of Jesus in you. I'm hearing his voice in your voice. And this becomes a thing that I take with me into the suffering with my cancer, into the suffering of my grief of my lost pregnancy. This is what I'm going to pay attention to. And that's what I'm gonna pay attention to recognizing that It is frightening for me to imagine getting pregnant again because what I'm most fearful of is the grief if I lose it again. I'm not afraid of losing the pregnancy. Losing the pregnancy is a placeholder for the grief that I will feel that I'm afraid I won't be able to get rid of, that I won't ever be able to leave it. And what we're saying is actually if Chrystal Hurst is in the room with you, The Spirit is going to change the nature of your experience of your grief. It's going to use your grief as a way to draw you closer to Chrystal Hurst, which means you're being drawn closer to me.

One of the things that you say is, and then I know is a premise of the book, is that right alongside hope being something that we form in community, is that faith can grow out of anger, cynicism, and doubt. Um, I think we struggle to believe that, which is why sometimes we suffer in silence because is it okay for me to be angry with God? You know, if I'm cynical or if I doubt, I'm so glad that, uh, Thomas asked for proof. I'm so glad that the disciples said, Lord, help my unbelief. I'm so glad that Peter thought that he was down for the cause. Without any, any room for error, because it's those stories that tell me even the ones that were in his physical presence, they struggled. They struggled to hold on to their belief. But I do think there's a double wrestle when— in fact, I was with someone at Bible study at church last night. I was watching it real time. And one of the questions that we were discussing was your level of commitment to Christ. Well, she's a mother who lost a son to cancer, and she was struggling with sharing about her current commitment to Christ. She even said, I thought I should be better by now, that it wouldn't— I wouldn't still be struggling. And she was actually struggling with her perceived level of commitment to Christ. Because she still had questions. She couldn't hold the same two, that I actually can still love God and have questions. I can still love God and be angry that he took my son home to be with him. I can still be loved by God, even though I'm wondering, does prayer even work? You know, that cynicism is building. And so, I think for Christians, there can be a double whammy. Of not only am I walking with the disappointment of hope, but like, I actually still want to be a person of faith, but I'm angry, but I got questions and I'm not sure I believe that God can do what he says he can do. So when you make that statement that faith can grow out of these things, can you explain how that's possible? Because I think there are a lot of people who are holding their breath and they're holding it even in those confessional communities because they don't want other people to know the depth of the questions, the anger, the cynicism that they have. And how they perceive it's impacting their faith.

Right. On the second page of the Bible, we get a statement from God that is winding its way throughout the history of the world. That's moving. And that is really significant. And is when he says, it's not good for the man to be alone. It's not good. This is our terror. Our terror is not just that I'm going to feel grief, sadness, rage. It's that I will be left alone with it, with no way out. I am going to be alone. Adam, one page later, when God comes walking in the morning after they've had their fruit fest, Adam presumes, because of what shame has already done to him, Adam presumes that God is coming to kill him. Yeah, because if you eat, then you're going to die. Adam does not presume that God is coming to have a real conversation, that God is coming and says, where— it's a real question, where are you? He wants a real conversation. Is Adam up to the very next test? The very next test is, will you enter into conversation with me even in your current state? And he wouldn't do it. He's too afraid. And this is what we do. And so the reason that this is important is because we are terrified of being left alone with all these parts of us that know that there's the part of me that, right, you're right. It's like the father in Mark 9, right? Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.

Yeah. Yeah.

And there is the part of me that is so angry with God, but I'm afraid to trot that part out into this because, like, you know, well, because this is like Adam, you know. I'm like, I don't— I don't know what's going to happen. And this is where, you know, we would say, well, isn't it interesting to me? Isn't it? It's striking to me. Like, look, you got 150 Psalms. Like, why? Like, why do we need 150 Psalms? Couldn't they have just pulled this off with like 5? Okay, maybe 10. I only need 10. I need a psalm of lament, a psalm of joy. Like, give me 10. I got 150 psalms. Because why is it? Because like the Jews, the Hebrews believed in a God. They had a sense that they were believing in a God who could take it and who was asking for it and who wants to work out the grief of our life until there's no more grief to talk about. He's not afraid. He's not leaving the room. And so, first of all, the woman that you mentioned from last night's Bible study, it reminds you like, oh, she's like my patient of 25 years, the one who's like, what the heck? Have I not gotten over— like, I like— I'm— have I not— have I made no progress whatsoever? Maybe I'm not nearly as committed to Jesus as I think. It was important in that moment a few years ago for that patient to be able to say all that. She was afraid to say that in the room.

Yeah. Yeah.

And there are just all their multiple layers of who we are and of your friend that you were talking about last night. I'm afraid to put these parts in the room. In The Soul of Desire, I invite the reader to consider, you know, in Matthew 12, where Jesus says that at the last day, at the judgment, everybody's going to have to give an account for every idle word. And then I thought, like, what if— what if the conversation is more like, well, Jesus is going to have the conversation, not unlike he's having a conversation with Peter in John 21, where we're on the beach and we're now— we're going to go after these parts of Peter that are unfinished, that still are afraid. That are still ashamed, that are still sure that Jesus knows about the part of me that doesn't love him, because if I had, then I wouldn't have thrown him under the bus 6 weeks ago.

Yeah.

And yet Jesus just is like, you know, he doesn't dismiss it. He doesn't pretend that it didn't happen, nor does he just like wink at Peter and say like, I know what happened 6 weeks ago, we're good, no problem, we'll just keep going. No, he's going to excavate this. And what if from Matthew's— from Matthew 12. What if the conversation— what if the giving of an account is Jesus like saying to your friend— he's sitting in the circle of people with your friend and he's saying like, tell me about how pissed you are at me. And she's like, mm-hmm. And he's like, no, I can take it. Let's talk about this. What happened when you did that? Well, tell me, what was that about? What was that about? And what was that about? And before long, we recognize that we are dealing with an honest broker. We are dealing with a person who is unafraid of everything because we already killed him once. And like, he— like, like nothing. Nothing stops him now. And including nothing. He's not afraid of anything, including your own fear, your own doubt. My, my, my rage, my all the Like, I'm glad, like, look, I'm glad we only have 10 Commandments, 'cause if we had 15 or 20, that'd be that many more that I'd be breaking every day. It's nice to know that my number is limited. And so this notion that when we are in confessional communities, we bring all these things, evil, our terror of being left alone if I reveal to you who I really am, my terror that you're going to see that part of me and you're going to run out of the room with your hair on fire is what evil is counting on. Evil is counting on our being so afraid. Evil is counting on our not reading the second page of the Bible. Evil is counting on our forgetting that atonement, at-one-ment, is Jesus dwelling with us in our suffering. Dwelling with us in the rooms of our houses where my doubt lives, where my shame lives, where my lying lives, where my adultery, my adulterous heart lives, where my rage lives. He is unafraid of this and he is waiting, but he doesn't twist our arm. He doesn't. He doesn't come breaking into the house. He's waiting for us to come. In our suffering. And as we do this in community, we come to discover with time, we learn that, oh my goodness, the sanctification process is about becoming increasingly unafraid of the process. It's becoming unafraid of letting ourselves be loved by Jesus. We, you know, we're not— I'm not very good at loving people. I, you know, you look around and like You know, we look around our world, the evidence is pretty easy to find that we're not very— it's hard for us to love again. But the thing that's even more difficult for us to do is actually, as it turns out, it's more difficult even for me to be receptive to love. Now, at first glance, we wouldn't necessarily think that, perhaps because, you know, all of our pop music and our culture and so forth, like, love, love, love. Yeah, well, everybody wants to be loved. Until love actually shows up. Because when it does, it's demanding, right? It demands that you be a person of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness. It demands, right? It demands all the things. It demands that you open the doors to the rooms of your house where you are enraged with me. Like, mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mm. And so it's not nearly as easy as we might think. And I can't give what I don't have. And so in the moment that I'm not loving my neighbor or my friend or my enemy for that matter, in the moments when I'm not doing that, we can be sure that what's in play at that moment is that there is a part of me that is now in the room that has yet to let Jesus love him. And in these communities, we give people real time and space to invite those parts into the room so that they can be loved in their suffering and allow the spirit to do its transformational work in the process.

So good. So good. Well, all in where we started, I think that you have a gift. Um, obviously you've done the work, but paired with the gift of empathy, the willingness to be open, The willingness to operate in your own safe communities and then bring the discoveries about your soul and your life to the forefront with the knowledge is what enables us to tackle the hard stuff. Um, what we know is that if we don't walk through the hard stuff, tackle the hard stuff, acknowledge the hard stuff, we don't heal. We don't build hope and we're not able to truly and deeply help each other. So thank you for the work that you've done and inviting us to dig into and discover the deepest place, even when it involves suffering, because we can look for the formation of, um, foundational hope. Thanks again for joining me today.

Chrystal Hurst, thanks so much. It's always a pleasure.

One of the best things that you can ever do, uh, Dr. Curt Thompson referenced this multiple times in our interview, is be in a community where you feel free to confess. Confessional communities. I believe that building your in-real-life community should be one of the priorities of your time because so many wonderful things happen in community. Walking through suffering is a big one. So if you haven't called your girlfriends in a while, if you've known for some time who you're supposed to be connecting with, and if you simply haven't made the connection or made the time to send the text, send the email, make the phone call, make space on your calendar for connections and the conversations. Well, this is me telling you to do that, but I never like to reference that challenge of community without reminding you that if you don't have community, or if your in-real-life community simply isn't meeting the bar, there is another community that I make available to those who follow me. And I want you to check it out. Um, sometimes the doors are open, sometimes they're closed, but even when they're closed, there's another way for you to connect. And I want you to check it out. You can simply go to chrystalevanshurst.com/innercircle, because if you're needing just a little more than what you have, then there are things outside of your real life to connect with. And the Inner Circle is one of those. Whatever you do, prioritize community because it's in the prioritization of conversation connection that we experience fully the love, the hope, and the victory that Christ meant through his death to deliver to us in time. Be healed. Do whatever you have to do to chase your freedom and refuse to live under the weight of suffering and shame. There is an outcome available to you. It involves community, but there's an outcome. If you believe that you're always marching to the light, It'll encourage you to take one step at a time towards the beautiful outcome that awaits. And here's me hoping that this conversation has given you a little nudge on your journey. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.