When Life Throws You a Game-Changer

The Glorious Table is thrilled to welcome Aubrey Sampson to the table today. Aubrey is the author of Overcomer: Breaking Down the Walls of Shame and Rebuilding Your Soul (Zondervan, 2015).

Whoever said pain is a wise teacher hasn’t had their sixty year-old mother-in-law carry them to the bathroom. I woke up one morning in October 2015, the very same week my book, Overcomer: Breaking Down the Walls of Shame and Rebuilding your Soul (Zondervan, 2015) was released, unable to walk. My knees and ankles had swollen to the size of watermelons and my pain level was so high that I could only put a feather’s weight of pressure on my legs. My mother-in-law, dealing with her own illness at the time, came over to carry me around the house, tend to my children, and literally walk me through this new reality.

Prior to that fall, mine had been a summer of aches and pains and what I misunderstood as carpal tunnel and running injuries. I’m a stubborn sort, and so it took me actually scooting around the house on my derriere, like a dog scratching its booty, to realize something bigger might possibly be going on. After a trip to the ER, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease—one that is chronic and lifelong. And while many people live with this disease and find relief in medicines and dietary changes—I know I will too—for now I’m just trying to wrap my brain around this initial diagnosis. I can thankfully walk again. Although going back to my three-miles-a-day running routine feels like a pipe dream at best. And my emotions? Well, they have mirrored my pain and swelling: up and down, tender and raw, new and scary. My life is being re-imagined. My marriage and mothering redefined. My career path reexamined. This experience is, in a phrase, a game-changer.

Many of us are familiar with the cry of the desperate father in the book of Mark, “Lord I believe; help my unbelief.” Those words have become memes, popular tattoos, and even common Twitter bio lines. But in seasons of real confusion and suffering, doubt in God can feel less like a friendly motto and more like a prison. Mine is a season of uncertainty, and I’m not a fan of it. Can I find God in the midst of this pain?

I believe I can and somehow, simultaneously, I don’t.

“What does, ‘he ascended’ mean except to say that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions?” asks Paul in Ephesians 4. “He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens in order to fill the whole universe.”

This is one of the difficult mysteries of faith to me—somehow the fullness of Jesus fills up the whole universe and yet we still deal with pain, grief, and loss on this earth. [Tweet “I take comfort in that even though we suffer, ours is a God who has known deepest suffering.”] As Paul implied, Jesus has known ascent and descent, heaven and hell, joy and pain. He has borne more than me, more than you, more than all of us, because he has actually taken upon himself all of our sufferings.

So, like that father in Mark, I will hold my doubt and my faith in brutal tension. I will fight. And if (dear God, not again!), my children’s grandmother has to carry me to the bathroom, I’ll do my best to find holy moments in the midst of these difficult earthly ones. I will choose to worship, commune with, and seek Jesus—whom I believe loves me enough to share in this pain with me, even as I doubt. Even as my game continues to change.

Aubrey Sampson is passionate about empowering women of all ages to experience freedom from shame. An author, speaker, and church planter, Aubrey lives and ministers in the Chicagoland area with her husband, Kevin. She is also a mom to three young sons. Her first book, Overcomer: Breaking Down the Walls of Shame and Rebuilding your Soul was published in 2015.

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