The Roadmap of Suffering

Psych Wards, Shared Grief, and Belonging

In 2019, I spent a short stint in the psych ward after many hard months of mental ups and downs. When I was released, my friends and family surrounded me and provided love and support that I could never express enough gratitude for. Surprisingly, however, I found another source of comfort in a group of strangers — strangers who had done their own time in the hospital, who had forged their own paths in the desert of mental illness.

I was put in a group therapy rotation with other men and women who had spent time trapped in their own minds. In their eyes, I saw my own grief. In their stories, I heard my own pain. I could speak freely about the pain that was radiating within me without fear of the person on the other end of the table flinching or misunderstanding me. They too had been in that prison and offered a unique kind of love to offer me that my healthy-minded friends were unable to at that moment of my life.

There is a saying that I’ve heard many times in my life: “Your scars become roadmaps for another walking the same path.” The idea that the pain we face is going to serve another meaningful purpose is extremely comforting, especially when you’re knee-deep in what can often feel like senseless or life-altering grief. Grief is never convenient or well-timed. We are taken in often with the shadow of shock still written on our faces.

But there is something to be said about finding comfort in another who has traveled the same road. We naturally seek out like-minded pain in those moments because the words that come from the heart of someone who has experienced that particular flavor of grief often brings the most balm to your fresh wound. Your pain then becomes a shared pain, a pain that is enveloped in a sense of belonging and understanding.

The love we are able to offer someone becomes richer and deeper when it comes from a place of shared grief. Grief absorbs grief, and that truth cannot be replaced with good intentions, however much we may try.

If this can be true on a human level, how much more true is it on a divine level? To have a God who, in the person of Jesus, steps into the pain of humanity. When we read words of comfort and solace in the Bible, we can be assured that it comes from a fellow traveler, not from someone calling out to us from a high place. In fact, God left his high place, and walked away from his throne, in order to climb into the pits with us, to not only meet our despair and grief but to absorb it. In his shortened time on this earth, Jesus experienced loss, pain, suffering, despair, betrayal, and finally death. His hands are as muddy as ours, reaching out to us, finding us in the dark in a way that nothing else can. His brow is sweaty, his body bruised and broken.

We are loved by a God who did not give us a moralistic roadmap out of pain and suffering, but instead willingly and joyfully walked into it, knowing that that was the only way we could join him on the other side, whole and wrapped in joy.

Our scars become roadmaps for our loved ones who must travel the same road as us. But in the scars that trace the body of Jesus, even after his resurrection, as his encounter with Thomas shows, we find more than solace and comfort. We find a timeline of our redemption, a roadmap to the only way out from beneath the crushing weight of sin and death. His scars — his own walk through the valley, the psych ward of the cross — tell the story that the entire biblical narrative tells. Jesus was, as the prophet Isaiah wrote, “pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.” The holes in his hands and feet, the gaping wound in his side, his scarred back and head all are strokes in the divine love letter of the gospel.

As we feel our heart break, when we feel our chest collapse and our minds reel, when we cannot see a roadmap forward amid our suffering, we can be assured that the bloodied hands of Christ hold us fast. Opening our eyes to look into his, we find more than a roadmap out of suffering, but an all-encompassing and unrelenting pursuit of every broken and hurting inch of our being.