When we as Christians are forced to confront the reality of our limited time on earth, whether through our own mortality or the suffering of loved ones, it can be a challenge to find meaning and peace amidst pain and uncertainty. Amy Low, who has faced terminal cancer for five years, offers a profound example of how to navigate this difficult terrain in her book, The Brave In Between: Notes from the Last Room.
In this episode of The Good Faith podcast, Amy and Curtis explore the themes of this book and discuss how even in the face of the inevitable, life can still be rich with purpose and connection, helping transform the experience of suffering into one of mutual support and resilience. By sharing her own personal journey through health and family struggles, Amy uses both humor and vulnerability to illustrate how joy can coexist with pain, and that facing suffering well doesn’t mean erasing it, but rather allowing it to deepen our compassion for others and ourselves.
By living with intention, humor, and love, Amy shares her experience of grace in the face of uncertainty, fostering a legacy of kindness and forgiveness that transcends the temporary nature of physical time on earth.
This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.
Amy Low: I promise you, fear and laughter cannot commingle. They just fly at different altitudes. I think that we are living in an era that’s over-indexed on fear. Fear has become monetized, it’s become weaponized, and it’s causing extraordinary harm. Humor can be one of the greatest antidotes to that.
Now, this is tricky because what you don’t want to do is minimize things that are truly awful and are truly scary. There’s a place for fear, but as you work through the reality of whatever it is that you’re grappling with in your life, my invitation is find places to be generous and to be open because when you can bring some humor to the moment, what you’re actually doing is giving a gift to others in the room with you.
You can laugh by yourself a little bit. I can find things that are funny and I laugh at myself, but that’s not quite the same thing. When you bring humor, you’re inviting someone who’s proximate to you to say, ‘look here, this is actually hilarious.’ And when you do that, you have all of a sudden brought new sense of human connection. You’ve created a place of not necessarily confidence, but a place of peace.
And what you’re able to do is also say, ‘this is awful, but there’s a bigger story that’s going on here.’ And when you live in a bigger story, you’re able to find those moments. And it is a gift that you can give anyone that’s in your life, whether you’re standing in line buying groceries or in a really tense medical appointment.
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Curtis Chang is the founder of Redeeming Babel.
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