Today we spoke with Cynthia Ruchti. Cynthia is an award winning author and speaker with 33 years of radio programming experience. Her most recent book is Ragged Hope: Surviving the Fallout of Other People’s Choices. We talked to Cynthia about our pain, the pain of others, and how Christ comforts us all.
1) Was there a particular hurt in your own life, caused by someone else that became the catalyst for this book?
The primary catalyst for Ragged Hope: Surviving the Fallout of Other People’s Choices was the pain I saw in others’ eyes, heard in their voices, recognized in their stories when I listened carefully to those struggling to breathe through the fallout ash of someone else’s unwise, unkind, or vile choices. The people whose actions make the headlines draw an excess of attention. But the highest prices are often paid by the innocent who are left to pick up the pieces.
Have I ever known that suffocating feeling, fighting hard to breathe? More than once. Those times added color commentary to the book, but the core of the stories within its pages belongs to people around me—or around you—people I care about who are living in the fallout. Grandparents raising grandchildren because the child’s mom or dad is in rehab. A new bride thrust into full-time caregiving for a husband whose drinking led to the accident that made him a quadriplegic. A young man coping with the childhood damage his wife suffered, damage that is emerging in fresh waves of pain as they bring children into their relationship. The stories poured out. I listened.
2) We have a kind of "up-by-your-bootstraps" mentality in America, where we praise those who have "made something of themselves" does this make the pain more difficult when we are the victim of someone else's wrong actions?
Although the concept of pulling ourselves up and moving on can be courage-producing, it can also distance us from what we most need at times like that. When the pain cuts that deep or the soul-injury is cripplingly severe, assuming we need to “Do this myself!” prevents the healing, sustaining action of leaning into God. We erect invisible force-fields to keep the pain hidden. But behind the force-field the pain intensifies with no outlet, no confidante, and no counselor. Even the strongest of us reach the end of our resilience resources before the pain runs out. As admirable as it might seem to bravely bear it alone, a solitary stance can either prolong the healing or create a chasm between us and the One who offered to enter into our grief with us. Choosing to keep our healer, our protector, our refuge at arm’s length in the fallout of other people’s choices is counterproductive to our longing for a breath of hope.
Choosing to keep our healer at arm's length is counterproductive to our longing for a breath of hope.
3) The easy answer for us with a friend or loved one who is a victim is to quote Romans 8:28 or talk about sovereignty, but those words can sound cold to someone in pain. What should we say?
It’s not surprising that our automatic response is to search for something appropriate to say. But verbal comfort is so often ineffective in penetrating pain’s fog. The bravest comforters are those who show up even when they have nothing to say. They’re the ones who listen without madly trolling for a response. I often use the illustration of a young child with a skinned knee. The parent’s first response is to throw his or her arms wide and welcome the child into the warm embrace. The parent comforts the child with his or her presence. The sobbing subsides. Then, the parent says, “Now, let’s take a look at that knee.” Can we train ourselves to resist the urge to offer a comforting word and instead offer our comforting presence? The time for words unfolds far more naturally that way.
4) How does the gospel help us become less bitter about those things we can't control?
The redemptive nature of the gospel casts a new light on the distress we bear—whether from our own or the sins of others. Hope lives in the middle of our need. We trust that we will survive not because we feel as if we will, but because God said so. We may feel abandoned by the people about whom we cared most deeply, but the gospel assures us that we are loved unconditionally and will never be abandoned. The gospel changes darkness to light. God’s power to redeem a human soul reassures us of his power to redeem the messes human souls make.
Trust is at the core of our response to the gospel. Trusting Jesus with our pain is an appendage of the heart’s initial response to the good news of Christ. We trust too that God rewards the faithful, even if we don’t see evidence of those rewards while slogging through our current crisis. It’s all so beautifully tied together. He is faithful. He can be trusted. Everything he does, in fact, is done in faithfulness, the Bible tells us. Laying back against the heartbeat of the gospel positions us to default to hope rather than bitterness over our circumstances.
Laying back against the heartbeat of the gospel positions us to default to hope rather than bitterness
5) If you were advising a pastor or church leader on how to apply grace to someone's pain, what would you say?
Sometimes knowing what doesn’t work helps us develop a plan for what might. We know that ignoring someone’s pain exacerbates it. We’ve seen harsh, hasty, or insensitive words raise a barrier. We’ve witnessed times when what we might have personally found comforting lands like dead weight on a bruised heart. And we can all recount incidents when we reacted from a place of knowledge rather than empathy.
There have been so many times I resorted to prayer after the comfort I attempted failed. I know better. We all do. We know the prayer that invites God to speak and move and love through us is much preferred to the prayer for him to clean up the relationship messes we make.
In my book, a common denominator both for the people whose stories are told and for the readers who take comfort in its pages is the bracing effect of their finding a small handhold of hope. If we approach the people in our care as if the goal is to hurry through the process, the hurting ones may not catch a glimpse of those handholds of hope.
Those of us in leadership are so often driven by a compulsion to solve, to share the knowledge we’ve gained, to prescribe and diagnose. What if grace penetrates more deeply when we listen with abandon? What if our initial words say little more than, “This is hard, so hard. But God is near, so near”?
Daniel Darling is vice-president of communications for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Activist Faith.
