How to Let God Redeem Your Pain
Tyler Staton
5 min read ⭑
It was a wet, gray Saturday in January — the sort of winter day I’ve grown accustomed to in Portland. We were driving up to Mount Hood where, in less than an hour, the drizzle would turn into a magical snow globe, perfect for sledding. Hank and Simon, five and three years old at the time, had dozed off in the back seat. Felix sat next to me in the passenger’s seat.
I met Felix while volunteering at an organization serving dinner to the homeless and hungry. He was in the rehabilitation program, nearing the end of his first year of sobriety. One thing led to another, and through serving side by side Felix and I grew into friends.
I’d swung by the sober house to pick him up and now, stuck in traffic on our way out of the city, Felix and I were talking the way you do on a road trip — meandering conversation about anything and everything, letting the dialogue wander.
Michael Ali; Unsplash
“Tell me about your kids. I’ve never heard you talk about your kids,” I said, filling a lull in the banter. Felix is the father of two, both in their early twenties, a son and a daughter. He hadn’t seen either of them in over a decade but had occasionally told me stories of when they were Hank and Simon’s age — when he was still in their lives. That was before a string of prison sentences exceeding two decades, a bout with drug use and a long absence that their relationship had never recovered from.
So I asked about them — their names, where they lived, what they were doing. And he just got quiet. Eventually I looked over, and he was softly weeping, this hulking giant of a man wiping tears from his weathered cheeks. He kept opening his mouth in an attempt to respond, but the emotion wouldn’t allow him to get a word out.
Felix had served three separate prison sentences. He’d used and sold drugs. He had a thousand nights he couldn’t remember. And then he met Jesus, and we’d celebrated God’s forgiveness together! But this — the dad he wished he’d been and still couldn’t forgive himself for not being — this was the untouchable place in him, the shame he kept covered, the one wound he’d convinced himself God’s grace couldn’t reach.
The New Testament is unflinchingly honest about both the power of God and the suffering of this world. The book of Acts tells plenty of stories of supernatural power, God’s indwelling presence working in ordinary people in miraculous ways. But it’s equally chock-full of suffering, confusion and pain.
If you tell the story of the Holy Spirit apart from the world of suffering, you rip the story from its context and turn a gritty, real-life hope into a fairy tale — a hollow fable that’s entertaining in peace but powerless in chaos. This creates a false division between the heart of God and the power of God, a misconception that God is more present in a dimly lit auditorium full of inspired people than in a car stuck in traffic on a road trip.
That won’t do because the truth is that every last one of us is Felix in that passenger seat, a living mixture of redemption worth celebrating and persistent patterns of chaos. We have all been rescued by a God of perfect love, and the plotlines of our redemption stories are breathtaking. But we all have unfinished storylines where pain is more apparent than renewal and suffering is more profound than rescue.
When the biblical authors use the metaphor of water to introduce us to the person of the Holy Spirit, they draw together what we are ever-tempted to separate: unflinching honesty about the suffering of this world and unwavering hope in a Redeemer who gets his work done in the darkest places.
“By Jesus’ wounds we are healed. And by our wounds we join in the healing of the world.”
Felix sat there, weeping and speechless in the passenger seat. His past mistakes loomed with a shadow where he kept his deepest wound hidden from everyone. Even God. Even himself.
Felix knows about chaos. He knows — personally and intimately — the agony of addiction, the exhausting search for today’s fix, the dehumanizing robbery of true life in the name of a numb escape. All of it. But he also knows about the Spirit whose waters flow into dead places and bring life.
Felix has become like a father to my children, particularly my youngest. Amos runs to him every Sunday morning at church and won’t leave his arms. Each time I see Felix — one hand raised in worship, the other cradling my two-year-old little boy — I become tearful thinking of that Saturday stuck in traffic. I see the Spirit slowly but profoundly healing Felix’s deepest wounds, hovering over his personal chaos, exposing his shame not to condemn but restore.
Felix also serves as the head chef of Night Strike, Portland’s largest ministry serving the homeless, hungry and addicted. He learned to cook in prison, where he was assigned kitchen duty, and now cooks for hundreds of self-imprisoned, wounded individuals every Thursday evening. Felix came to Jesus to drink of living water, and streams of living water now flow from within him. Because from his wounds, God is healing others.
And, of course, Felix is still waiting. He’s waiting on the day he lives in the redeemed city. Waiting for the God who will swallow up all his deepest desires in God’s consuming presence. Waiting on the chaos to subside once and for all. He’s waiting. But in the meantime? Felix has planted himself in the place where his wounds bleed hope to those similarly wounded.
God’s not in search of a remarkable few who have it figured out. There aren’t any spells to master. By the Spirit, the powerfully healed become power healers.
By Jesus’ wounds we are healed. And by our wounds, we join in the healing of the world. The Holy Spirit’s healing presence means that the addicted can become a safe harbor for others to find freedom. The depressed can be filled with incomprehensible joy and then give it away. The insecure can become courageous, inviting people into the very life they previously hid. The quick-tempered can be flooded with self-control, so that their transformation heals those they’ve wronged. The chronically anxious can become a non-anxious presence in their high-strung workplace, pouring living water into the Dead Sea. It goes on and on in every variety imaginable. Our deepest wounds, healed and redeemed by the Holy Spirit, become the sources of living water flowing with teeming life into the broken places in our world.
Tyler Staton is the Lead Pastor of Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon, and the National Director of 24-7 Prayer USA. He is passionate about pursuing prayer in the honest realities of day-to-day life. Tyler is the author of Praying Like Monks, Living like Fools: An Invitation to the Wonder and Mystery of Prayer and Searching for Enough: The High-Wire Walk Between Doubt and Faith. He lives in Portland with his wife Kirsten, and their sons Hank, Simon and Amos.
Taken from “The Familiar Stranger” by Tyler Staton. Copyright © 2024. Used by permission of Thomas Nelson.
