Modern Day Missionaries

S06E09 Suffering Well & Walking in Faith: Can You Do Both? with Scott Shaum

• Scott Shaum • Season 6 • Episode 9

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What does surrendering to God mean? Can someone be walking in faith and be surrendered to God? Is surrender giving up? How do we balance the reality of suffering with believing in God as our provider and healer? How can we know when we’re using faith as a way to try and control God versus having faith that pleases him?

Uff. Suffering brings up SO many questions. In this week’s episode, we wade into the waters of suffering, surrender, faith, and hope with former missionary, member care veteran, and ordained Anglican priest Scott Shaum.

This conversation is rich, challenging, comforting and discerning. You’ll receive fresh insights and new ways of seeing whatever difficulty you may be walking through.

✍️ In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • How we can navigate the tension between faith and surrender in difficult times.
  • Practical ways to walk through pain while still holding onto hope and faith.
  • How suffering can be a key part of our spiritual growth and maturity.
  • Insights on how our view of God shapes how we handle suffering and hardship.
  • How we can trust God’s presence even when we don’t get the answers we want.


💡Questions to Ponder as You Listen:

  • Am I truly surrendering to God, or am I trying to control outcomes with my faith?
  • How do I see God as both my healer and provider, even in seasons of suffering?
  • What does it look like for me to hold onto hope while walking through pain?
  • How can I embrace surrender without feeling like I’m giving up?
  • Am I allowing God to use my challenges to shape me, or am I resisting His work?


Thanks for listening! Email us your questions at care@modernday.org

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[00:00:00] Stephanie Gutierrez: Welcome to this episode of the Modern Day Missionaries podcast. Today you'll hear from Scott Shaum and we're going deep, so you're going to want to lean in. Scott and his wife, Beth, have been serving with Barnabas International for over 20 years, where he is currently the director of pastoral advancement.

Before that they lived for a season in Asia doing missions work, and Scott's been a pastor at two churches here in the U. S., and he's an ordained Anglican priest. Scott and Beth have been married for 39 years, and Scott is a profound and deeply wise minister who has been serving missionaries for years. I find his voice to be challenging, comforting, insightful, and full of hope.

So today, listen with your ears, but also listen with your heart. So let's dive into today's episode with Scott Shaum.

Hey, Scott, thanks so much for joining us today.

[00:00:55] Scott Shaum: Absolutely. It's great to be with you. 

[00:00:58] Stephanie Gutierrez: And I'm looking forward to what we're talking about today. A lot of times I'll say I'm excited about what we're talking today, but excited feels like the wrong word in as much as we're talking about a little bit of a heavier subject today. We're talking about suffering. We're talking about the difficult things that we go through in life. 

[00:01:16] Scott Shaum: Yeah. Yeah. Well, God's in the middle of all that stuff as well. So it'll be good to press into it and work, talk it through. 

[00:01:23] Stephanie Gutierrez: It will. And you know, I love that your perspective, as I've heard you share on suffering before when I was at the PTM conference a while back, and then reading through your book The Uninvited Companion, there's a lot of hope in there. You, it's a, it's a book that's not just sitting in the darkness and the heaviness of suffering, but you really press into the beauty and the opportunities and what God's doing in the midst of it.

And so I appreciate how you're able to hold that tension so well, Scott.

[00:01:53] Scott Shaum: Yeah. Well, thanks, Stephanie. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean, when I look back, it's, this is a lot of hindsight now, but I don't ever want to experience some of the hardships I've had in the past. But seeing what God has done in my life, they, they are profound gifts. So it'll be helpful to talk through what that, what that looks like today.

[00:02:12] Stephanie Gutierrez: It is. And I mean, it's a human experience. We all go through suffering and, and for missionaries, how much more in the context that they're at. Cause not only are they going through it, but often they're living surrounded by the suffering sof other people. So, and I'd love to just kind of even begin on that note, talking about the Western view of suffering compared to how the rest of the world sees suffering.

What have you noticed?

[00:02:40] Scott Shaum: Yeah, well, that's a complex question because of the different worldviews that are out there between an honor and shame culture and animistic culture or our culture here in the West. Um, we tend to have a sense that because of our technology, because of our wealth, because of the resources we have in ourselves, challenges and difficulties are just simply to be overcome.

One way or another, we can figure this out. We can fix this thing. And then when life doesn't fix right away, man, does that mess with us. And we also know that God can heal and deliver and relieve problems. He promises he'll do that. And sometimes he does break in and do that. And then other times things just don't get resolved.

And that is confounding to us. And so, yeah, there's, as you said, in some places, the world where there's abject poverty, or maybe there's a significant political or spiritual oppression, hardship and suffering is just everyday life. And it's just people learn how to navigate and live through that. So there is a wide separation there.

And when we go from the Western world into these other places of the world, it can really catch us off guard. Anything from the spiritual darkness that we begin to run into, um, the realities of poverty and how complex and difficult it is. Yeah, it's quite a challenge. 

[00:04:05] Stephanie Gutierrez: It really is. And I just even reflect on, I think, sometimes the way I grew up thinking about suffering or difficulties. And I think I felt a sense of entitlement that if I was good enough, that those things shouldn't happen to me. I mean, there's just, there's a whole different threshold. Like you said, I growing up in so many other places. It's a given you're going to go through hard times. 

And even I think about the Western perspective too. There's things that we perceive as suffering that to somebody else wouldn't necessarily be suffering. Like, I'm sorry, why is that difficult? And that doesn't mean that we're bad in the Western world for those people who are listening, who are in the Western world. It's just a different way of viewing things. Certainly. 

[00:04:49] Scott Shaum: Yep. Absolutely. 

[00:04:51] Stephanie Gutierrez: I'd love for you. to share a little bit about some of the challenges that you've been through in life and what you've seen when that's produced in you.

[00:05:04] Scott Shaum: Yeah, well, my story, um, with real profound difficulty and what would be personal suffering, um, goes back 15 years or longer, where I had a series of viruses I contracted doing my work in different parts of Asia. And it was the second round of viruses unnamed, undiagnosed, I picked up in a remote developing country in Asia.

Um, it just wreaked havoc in my, in my body, cognitively, neurologically, in my heart. Um, I had to start wearing glasses. I mean, it impacted everything. And I was seeing all the specialists––neurologists, cardiologists, infectious disease doctors, you name it. And they couldn't find anything. There was nothing diagnosable.

I mean, they could put their fingers on a couple of markers, like an irregular heart rate, arrhythmia, that type of thing. It wasn't until I ended up at Mayo Clinic, a really well known, prominent hospital system here in the United States, where they ran a bunch of tests on me, and basically what they sent me away with was, you seem to have chronic fatigue syndrome.

Well, we have a term for what I have now that we've been through a global pandemic. It's called long COVID. Long COVID is a post viral disruption of the autoimmune system. I basically had a post viral chronic fatigue syndrome that disrupted a lot of symptoms that’s kind of superficial to talk at a medical level. What that was doing to me emotionally and spiritually was a whole other level of challenges around fear, anxiety, uncertainty, wrestling with what in the world God was up to. I mean, I was so angry at one point. I said, Is this what I get? I go to these tough places in the world to, to work with your people and this is what I get.

And initially his response was silence. And that was all the more infuriating and confounding to me. And eventually later on, he did respond to my question and he said, Yes, sometimes this is what happens. Are you willing to follow me? And so it, it was some of the most challenging times and transformative times in my life.

So that's a bit of my story.

[00:07:23] Stephanie Gutierrez: What were some of the ways that you saw it transform you?

[00:07:27] Scott Shaum: Oh my goodness, Stephanie, it's layers there. Um, I mean, God's redemption in our life is always particular and personal to who we are, our personal story, our narrative, the homes we grew up in, what we've experienced, the career tracks we're on, all kinds of things. And one of the, one of the gifts, for example, my sense of silence and relationship was a form of punishment. God took me into silence to address that with me. And what I began to realize many, many months, a year or more, I began to realize that God wasn't punishing me. He was with me in the silence and he was doing a very quiet, deep work in me. I'm not afraid of silence anymore in relationship and such, but that was a family of origin dynamic that he just worked through in my life.

There was all kinds of other elements, identity––an identity primarily formed in performance and what other people think of me. When you take away the performance from chronic illness, who are you? All of that stuff had to be tended to and addressed, and it was a way of he was addressing me. He was inviting me to grow up, to mature in a lot of different ways, and he was wanting to reorient me around a different identity of his love for me and his care for me.

So there was all kinds of ways that he was at work in my life through those years. 

[00:08:55] Stephanie Gutierrez: Yeah, it's, it's hard to even on the front end of a, of a suffering or even in the middle of it, realize just the profound ways it's going to change us. But it is, it's, it's huge. We, we would never choose to go through something like this, but I think for most people on the other side of it, you go, I can't really imagine my life not having gone through this when you allow God to do the transformative work. You know, I think for some people, when you can't have that perspective, of course they would change everything. Uh, but yeah, it's, it is a profound thing, you know, for people who are in suffering. 

How can we acknowledge suffering as a part of life without becoming fatalistic, without becoming overly passive, uh, without just kind of saying, okay, let it be. How do we engage that?

[00:09:51] Scott Shaum: Yeah, well, um, you know, nobody likes suffering, and there's all kinds of suffering. There's the suffering that happens to us, like maybe we're diagnosed with cancer. There is suffering that is afflicted upon us. Somebody abuses us or somehow manipulates us. We're in a toxic environment that elicits a different response.

So there's all, there's a whole spectrum of suffering. But in all of those cases, um, the pain that is involved is, we want to honor the human experience. We never want to over spiritualize this. There's a lot of loss involved in this. There's a lot of grief and sorrow involved in this. It hits us emotionally, spiritually, relationally, hits us every way.

And so we need to honor the human experience. And the Word of God always does as well. It never minimizes suffering. It lays out the narratives of people that we read in the Bible, and it's hard in difficult and dark times. So the first thing we need to do is we need to honor it. 

However, an important element is that our life circumstances don't define God. It's the other way around, and that's hard to remember when we're in the midst of the hard. Because when I'm, when I'm going through a profoundly difficult time, it's easy to go down paths of God's not loving. Or maybe there's something wrong with me. If I can just figure out what my sin is and, and fix it, then he'll take this away.

When we go in all kinds of dark places, uh, to remember that we have a loving father who's always gazing lovingly upon us, this is not how he punishes his children. Even if he's disciplining us, he will always discipline us as a father with a child, and that will be thoughtful, loving, and kind and gentle; it will not be punitive. So we have to orient ourselves around who our God is to begin to start making peace with some of the difficulties we experience in life. There's all kinds of layers there, so we'll see where we go to unpack all that.

[00:11:50] Stephanie Gutierrez: Yeah, but that's really good. You're right. If you don't have a right perspective of God or who you see God is, I should, it will affect how you see the different challenges that come up in life.

[00:12:03] Scott Shaum: Absolutely.

[00:12:04] Stephanie Gutierrez: So there's a question for our listeners right there. How do you view God?

[00:12:07] Scott Shaum: Yeah, if your view of God is that he is a pharaoh and he's building his kingdom and we're all his minions scurrying around and it's up to us to get the work done, well, that's one perspective of who God is. Um, if our perspective is that we have a loving father who has come after us in Christ and made us his own, and we are his daughters and his sons and called by name, that's a whole different perspective.

He's at work. Christ is still at work in the world. We're just invited to join him. So when suffering comes, do I have a sense where I've got a feral God who's now cracking the whip and punishing me because I'm not, getting enough done, or do I have a father who's saying, I know this is hard, but we've got a path to walk together, so let's do that.

Radically different perspective of who our God is.

[00:12:54] Stephanie Gutierrez: Yeah. Okay. Scott, I want to dig in a little bit here. Uh, when we think about faith and we think about surrender—because right now we're talking about letting God do a work in us through those suffering moments. And yet there's the other side that is, that is faith that is believing for God to rescue us…we can have faith in many different for God to do many different things. I guess, how do we walk that balance between surrendering to God, letting him do something in us, and pressing in for faith to be released from that? 

[00:13:31] Scott Shaum: Yep. 

[00:13:32] Stephanie Gutierrez: How do we look at that?

[00:13:34] Scott Shaum: Yep, sure. That's a complex question. Um, lots there. First of all, our faith is not in our faith. It's not a matter of if I have enough faith or not. Our faith is in a person. It's in a living, true, speaking, present act of God. Um, so we always are invited to surrender to Him and the reason we surrender to Him is because He's a God who has promised to always care for us.

He's generous. He's lavish. He's a beautifier of our lives. He will always be acting towards us in that way. The tension with that is the reality that we live in a fallen world where bad stuff happens. So we understand the dynamic of paradox. Paradox is when you have two truths that coexist at the same time.

They think they are, it looks like one of them should you know, equal out the other one or eradicate the other one. How can we have a loving, kind, generous God and bad stuff happen in the world? That's the paradox we live in and we are smack dabbing that tension and it is a difficult place to live, but it is our reality.

So, we have a loving father. He's always up to good. We have hard stuff in life. So, we want to, we can surrender and yield our lives to a loving father. We're also called out to pray and to ask for deliverance, to ask for healing, to ask for him to do his work in our lives. 

Both my wife and I have experienced instant healings in our life. My wife right now has lived through 10 years of chronic pain. It's very debilitating. The Lord has opted this time not to heal her. When I tell my story at length and at depth, I will say that God used physical illness to heal me. He was healing me spiritually. He was healing me emotionally. He was reorienting me around a much greater reality, a Trinitarian reality, a Father, Son, and Spirit, a Gospel reality in the Kingdom of Christ, but he didn't take away the physical stuff.

Uncomfortable? Yeah. Full of a lot of tension? You bet. I, I prayed for a decade or more. Lord, I'm so grateful for what you're doing in my life. You know, I'd still be happy if you'd heal me, take this stuff away. I don't like the symptoms. Um, but he was still up to beautiful things in my life. And I am in part who I am because of living in that tension and that paradox with him.

[00:16:09] Stephanie Gutierrez: Thank you for sharing that. I know for a lot of our listeners, we have listeners of all different theological backgrounds. I know a large portion of them are charismatic and so come from the perspective of a strong emphasis on Jehovah Jireh, Jehovah Rapha, God our healer, our deliverer, our provider. It sometimes can be difficult to hold that tension when we know what God is able to do. And we know what he so often does do. And then we don't experience that in our lives. So I think any other thoughts on how we can hold both those things in our, our hands? 

[00:16:50] Scott Shaum: Yeah, we want to normalize suffering. The New Testament does normalize it. Every, every New Testament author speaks about some level of suffering. Um, yes, persecution, but more than that, I mean, one of the most prominent words used for suffering in the New Testament, like in 2 Corinthians 1 or Romans, numerous places in Romans, it's a very generic word that includes, it's inclusive of the human experience.

So, um, every, every, Book of the New Testament speaks about it. Uh, Jesus himself said, In this world you'll have many troubles. Don't be afraid. I've overcome the world. But you will have troubles. He didn't pull any punches there. Um, the Book of Philippians seems to hold the tension. I mean, two of the prominent themes in the Book of Philippians is suffering and joy.

It's a fascinating read through to consider that. So we want to normalize the dynamic of suffering. Sometimes God delivers, and he delivers in remarkable ways. He does still heal today. He does it all over the world. It's interesting to me, it seems to me that he does, I think I have witnessed more instant physical, emotional healing, spiritual deliverance in third world developing countries, animistic and Islamic environments, more so than I see in the United States, although it does happen here as well.

It seems like God's up to different redemptive works in different parts of the world. It requires faith for me to walk with God when he doesn't take the problem away. So that he's also inviting me to trust him in all matters of life. so, that has been one of the stretching points for me. 

It's easy to trust them in the good times. It's more difficult to trust them in the hard times. It's clearly in the New Testament that a mark of a mature follower of Christ is endurance. Every New Testament passage that speaks on suffering talks about perseverance. or endurance, patience. All of them do. So that's clearly a mark of a mature follower of Christ, is to hang in and walk with him through the tough stuff.

So again, we're just left with some mystery here. Tension. I don't want to, I don't want to remove the tension. There's no easy answers here. God doesn't give us a formula. He doesn't give us answers, but he always invites us into relationships. That's always the opportunity is deeper relationship with him. 

[00:19:22] Stephanie Gutierrez: Yeah, you're so right that perseverance and endurance are the things that make us mature and are marks of a mature believer. And how do you get those if you don't go through some hard things? Because watching a movie on a couch, that's not enduring. Like you didn't get through anything there. Yeah, you gotta get through some tough stuff, and I like that you talked to just about faith in God in the tough circumstances because we go back to that verse, faith pleases God. And so faith for healing pleases God, faith for, uh, miracles for salvation, but also just faith in Jesus, faith in God as our loving father in a difficult situation, that’s another way that faith pleases God. 

So question for you, when does faith please God? And when does another version of faith––“Faith”––we could say, try to control God?

[00:20:13] Scott Shaum: Yeah.

[00:20:14] Stephanie Gutierrez: What's going on in our souls?

[00:20:15] Scott Shaum: Yeah, absolutely. I find I get myself into trouble when I start going down the line of Hey, I'm praying like you taught me to pray. I'm asking for the things, you know, you say, will a father give a snake or a rock to his child if they're asking for bread? No, you said you'll give us good things.

Um, so I'm wrestling through these dynamics. Lord, I'm doing what you said. So therefore, either I'm the problem or you're the problem. When I start going down that line, I know I'm getting myself into trouble. Um, when I go down a line that I do have a father and maybe he's giving me gifts that I'm not aware of that are really profoundly good.

And the gifts that he gave me through suffering are the richest gifts I've received in my life. I just, as I said earlier, I don't ever want to go back through those days again. I am so grateful for who he's made me, how he's redeemed me, how he has grown me in his love by walking with him through hard times.

And I, I just do. I'm so grateful for that. So, when my faith begins to be about my faith and the things that I'm doing, as opposed to waiting upon a God that I cannot see and don't know that I necessarily understand, or if I'm trying to take biblical passages and come out with a kind of a cause and effect formula, That's what I want to just pause and consider.

And another important thing in all this is that, um, we can't do this on our own. I mean, I had a spiritual director through, I mean, I've had a spiritual director for 20 years. I've had counselors, I've need therapists, I've need mentors. It's great to find older saints, 70s and 80 year olds, if you can find them out there, because they've got scars to hear their stories and what they've learned.

That was invaluable perspective when I was losing perspective in the midst of the difficulties.

[00:22:18] Stephanie Gutierrez: Hmm. And where are some places that you would recommend to people, uh, where they can find that type of supportive community to help them in those moments?

[00:22:29] Scott Shaum: Yeah, well, it's, there's an increasing amount of member care resources out there. A lot of amazing organizations. Um, if you're going to be stateside for a while, there's places like Alongside and TRAIN International, MTI, these organizations provide great debriefings, great counseling resources and such. Um, there's an organization called Grafted Life Ministries. They have a whole list of spiritual directors all over the world, mostly U. S. based, but you know, you can do things online for spiritual direction. There's an increasing number of international counseling centers in Chiang Mai, Budapest, different places in Africa, um, so there's a lot of resources in different places in the world to find, find the care and people can come alongside you. 

[00:23:22] Stephanie Gutierrez: Hmm. Yeah. It's so good for people to be aware of those. You and I were talking earlier. I didn't know about any of that stuff when I was living in Peru. I found about it after the fact. So that's why I'm excited for everybody who's listening. They can find these types of resources now. They don't have to wait. So we'll post links to a lot of the things that you mentioned, to all those things that you mentioned in the show notes as well. Yeah, I appreciate that. 

I want to dig a little bit more into, uh, surrender. We were talking about that earlier, surrender and what we do in the moment of suffering. Because I think sometimes we can see what God was doing on the other side of suffering. Like when we've gotten through it or when we've been in it for a long time, we see all the beautiful things that you were talking about earlier. 

How can we surrender to God? How can we open our eyes to God when we're in the beginning of suffering or in the middle of it when it just feels so heavy? What are some ways people can notice in the moment? 

[00:24:31] Scott Shaum: First of all, I want to, I want to normalize a few things here. Um, life is really difficult, um, as I said, for me, it was some of the darkest days of my life. Fear, anxiety, confusion, frustration, a sense of God not being present, maybe absent, um, feeling misunderstood even maybe in your community or your team because we don't…I've never had cancer. I have no idea what it is like to live or fight cancer. Until we've lived it, we don't really know what it's like. Those are all normal human experiences. So I just want to normalize that. Whoever's listening today, And of this, if you just find yourself experiencing these things, God has not abandoned, He's not punishing, and there's not something wrong with you.

It's how He's created us, and that's normal human response. So when you're in those times, a lot of times, a sense of surrender is, you just, you don't have a choice. Um, when I was very sick, I didn't have to say whether the symptoms were going to show up that day or not. I just felt like a leaf in the wind.

Whatever was going to happen was going to happen, and pleading with God to do something to resolve it. Um, so, in one sense, you feel very out of control, and in another sense, there is an opportunity. To echo many passages in many of the sayings through the Bible. Anybody who, any stories we read, any narrative in the Bible, Old Testament, New Testament, everybody suffered.

Paul, 2 Corinthians 12, he, he healed, I don't know how many people healed, hundreds, thousands. He was an apostle, an apostolic authority on his life to proclaim the gospel and to heal people. And yet when he asked God three times, to take whatever the thorn in the flesh was away, God's response to him was no.

So God didn't heal the Apostle Paul. There was a purpose for God to allow Paul. So Paul's choice at that point is to fight God on that, or to submit to him. And he realized that actually the thorn in the flesh was an act of grace on God's part to protect Paul's heart as he went about the work that God had given him to do.

Now that's a mouthful. Timothy had sometime a stomach problem. Paul told him to drink wine to help him. Why didn't Paul just hop on over there, lay hands on Timothy and heal him? Apparently he had the authority and the power to do that. I don't have answers for these questions, but they begin to normalize my life. If God didn't heal Paul, if he didn't heal Timothy, maybe that's true for me too, and God's up to some greater good. 

I'm going to throw one more twist in here. This is going to go a little bit deep theologically. Salvation only happens through suffering. So what do I mean by that? Well, let me say it this way. An essential element of salvation is suffering. My justification is won by the suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross. And according to the New Testament teachings, all the way through, Jesus onwards, an aspect of our sanctification, of growing into Christ likeness, of becoming the men and women God has redeemed us to be, called us to be, an aspect of fulfilling our callings on our life, is also suffering.

We, we must, at some level, go through adversities mature. And we need a whole lot more than that. We need revelation, the word of God and from one another. We need grace, forgiveness, love, community. Apparently it takes time to grow up, decades, but we also require adversity. Paul teaches that clearly in the book of Romans and elsewhere, um, and so part of God growing us up is through adversity, and so I don't like that economy, frankly.

I'd like for salvation to be devoid of suffering for everybody, Jesus included, but as I read the old, as I read in my Bible, that seems to be a clear indicator that suffering is an aspect of our life in Christ. 

[00:29:05] Stephanie Gutierrez: It is. And you know, I'm thinking about what you're saying now. And then even what we talked about earlier about finding resources and things. And I thought if I were to look up a mentor or look for somebody in a helping profession, I don't think I'd ever seek out somebody who hadn't been through something difficult.

[00:29:24] Scott Shaum: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:29:26] Stephanie Gutierrez: And yet it's like, we want to, there's a piece of us that wants to be that. But if we're in a helping profession, because as missionaries we are, and we want to serve others, what credibility do we have if we haven't went through anything difficult? 

And suffering can be physical things, like you said, like a sickness or a disease. Suffering can also be immersing ourselves in helping people in a difficult situation. Suffering can be, yeah, not getting an answer that we want. I mean, there's so many different kinds of suffering, like you said. And as missionaries, we are choosing to enter that world. There's, there's no such thing as signing up well, first of all, to be a human, but second of all, signing up to be in missions work and to think you're not going to experience suffering. So I think most missionaries have a sense of like, all right, I'm going to do this. I'm signing up for something difficult. And yet it's still somehow catches us off guard. 

[00:30:26] Scott Shaum: It does. 

[00:30:27] Stephanie Gutierrez: Like I wasn't expecting this. This is beyond what I thought I could handle.

[00:30:32] Scott Shaum: Yeah. It's true. We, and, and there is a sense in which we've been created for beauty and life and goodness and truth. And then we come face to face with the darkness, the evil, abject, poverty, human trafficking, you name it. We, we come face to face with that stuff and it undoes us.

And it's, it's, the reality is, though, is that God is in the midst of all that as well, and he's doing a profound work, and he's doing it through his people. He's invited us to join him, but we can't expect to go into those things without being impacted. And, um, I know that an aspect of fulfilling my pastoral calling in my life is to suffer on other people's behalf.

So, when I sit down and I hear another person's story of how maybe they were abused, or they were raped, or they were carjacked, or they got inappropriately dismissed by a team leader, or I'm receiving their pain, and I'm choosing to enter into their story with them. And that is appropriate. That is a part of my calling to give my life away to other people.

That's going to cost me something. And it's costing us to go to another country, to learn a language, Immerse ourselves in this culture that is foreign to us and begin to learn the idiosyncrasies of all that. Begin to immerse ourselves in the lives of the communities we find ourselves in, with all of its messiness and pain.

That's where the beauty of Jesus Christ shows up, is when His people are willing to sacrifice for the sake of other people, as He did for us. That's The full reality of the gospel. My suffering is not an indicator that something is wrong. It's an indicator that I'm following a Savior who gave his life for me.

And now he invites me to give my life for other people. And it's also reality I live in a fallen world and bad stuff like car accidents happen. And it's just, it's part of being a human being. And one day, it'll all be gone. But we're not there yet. 

[00:32:43] Stephanie Gutierrez: Yeah. So well said. So well said, Scott. You're right. We were like, we were created for this, not created for suffering, but we were created for battle. We are created to engage things. We were not created to sit on a couch our whole lives. We were made to enter into this world, work with God. And I think the more we embrace that, like you were talking about, even if we're in seasons where we're not suffering, how can I go alleviate the suffering of somebody else?

And in a sense, like you said, suffer with them by taking that on. Like we were made for this. We are, we're tougher than we give ourselves credit for, not without Jesus, but certainly with Jesus, we have more grace available to us than I think we ever have realized. 

There's this one quote that you say in the book that I want to remember to mention because it really caught my attention and it said, Pain has a focusing impact on our hearts. Could you say a little bit more about that?

[00:33:42] Scott Shaum: Yeah, I think we all experience that. When life's going well, you know, we're just cruising through life, enjoying life, and, um, we are, as the hymn says, we're prone to wander. We get easily distracted. We all have our little idols that we use to comfort us and keep life feeling manageable and comfortable and controllable and that type of thing.

But man, when life gets hard, I pray differently when life's going hard than when life's going well, and I find myself far more dependent. I'm far more aware of my necessity and my need. I'm learning. I'm learning in my challenges in life that my needs, my weaknesses, my liabilities are not They're actually gifts because they're the pathway to intimacy with God and with other people.

I need other people and I need God. And so, yes, um, I, I feel far more focused, dependent, praying, watchful, hopeful. Curious when life's going hard, then when life's going easy, and I tend to get distracted pretty easily. So, yeah, and I, I think another important thing I say in the book is, um, and I want to circle back around to this, Stephanie, if I can, is I just want to normalize something else.

A normal life question on life as hard as why, why God have you allowed this? Why are you doing this? Why won't you take this away? That's such a normal response, and we want to give voice to that. It's part of a lament. It's part of a part of our human cry. It's, it's important not to get stuck in why.

Usually, we will not get a response to that. I don't, when I look back over the hardships of my life, I have maybe suspicions of why something happened, but I really don't know. I think a wiser question to ask is how? But I don't like where I'm at. I don't like what's going on in my life. How do I walk with you in this?

That opens me up to a different paradigm. It's a relational paradigm. The why kind of pits me and God against each other, like, as I've said earlier, am I the problem, are you the problem, maybe you don't love, maybe you're not powerful, or maybe I've got, I've done something wrong, or I'm not doing something right.

It just paralyzes us. The how question invites us into relationship and forward movement. And so, yeah, it can have a very focusing, and I think the opportunity is focused on relationship. If there's anything God is after, it's always intimacy. It's always good to see a relationship with us. 

[00:36:22] Stephanie Gutierrez: Yeah. And I think of all the moments of pain in life. And those are the moments, I mean, at least for me personally, I can say they're so often the ones that I've heard the most profound things from him or received revelations from him or felt close to him. Even in moments of silence where you feel far away, there's just still something that's so raw about it that you can't capture in any other season. Not that you'd seek it out, but when you look back on those and go, something really special happened there.

And so I always said when I was in those moments, I don't want to waste a good battle. So like, I don't have a choice about whether I'm in this or not right now. I'm here. Here I am. I don't want to waste it. Lord, help me see what you are doing in me. What you want me to do, what you want to say to me here, because if I'm going to go through it, bless God, I'm going to have something to show for it on the other side. 

I always felt I'm, I'm wired in a kind of a positive…I have a positive personality. And I think that always helped me in those moments, just knowing there's something I'm going to take away from this. Yeah, and I, I am positive by nature, but I mean, we've walked through, we have walked through such crazy things in our life. I've been through trauma therapy. So has my husband. Like, we've, we've done it all.

And so I, even in all of that, I believe that God can help you have joy in the midst of it. I believe he can renew your joy on the other side. Um, and I'm not into toxic positivity or brushing things away or saying, I'm not going to dwell in the past. I'm just going to look forward. No, there's times, like you said, to lament, to dig in, to, to go there. And yet, God, Like you said, he doesn't want us to stay there. He doesn't want to leave us there. There are good things in those seasons too. There's even moments of laughter and joy. I mean, have you experienced that in some of your dark seasons where you've had unexpected, even joyful moments?

[00:38:30] Scott Shaum: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It's a mixed bag. It's not just all one or the other, but absolutely. Um, I mean, I had three sons in the house at that time. They were high schoolers, middle schoolers, and we still lived life. There was ball games, and I was still doing ministry as much as I could, international travel. I love the people I get to work with. 

Um, so yeah, there's a lot of joys a lot of things to celebrate in the midst of dark times and Stephanie, just listening to you talk, I don't know your story, but you talk as one who has suffered and one who knows your God differently because how he met you in your suffering. And you can tell when you're with a person who has suffered and has experienced a father in that, that they've, we just don't experience in any other time in our life.

And so that's, that's the gift and the offering through the hardship is to come to know God in a way we don't know him any other way. 

[00:39:38] Stephanie Gutierrez: Thank you. And yes, and for all of us who've been through it, and I'm guessing every single person who's listening has been through it. Um, unless we've got some newbies who've just got on the field and they aren't there yet, and that's okay too, and we're not saying this to like scare you. Scott and I do not want you to walk away freaking out, waiting for the other shoe to drop, uh, but it comes. Like we said the Bible talks about it, it's, it is a part of life, but for those who have been through it, how can God use you with the suffering you've been through to impact somebody else in their life? 

You just get this… my pastor used to always say, you get the eye of the tiger. There's just something that changes in your eyes. There's something that changes in who you are and people can sense you've been through something and you're somebody who I can maybe trust. Because you're going to know what I'm talking about and what an honor and a privilege for us to get to be that, that safe space in other people's lives. 

So I just want to encourage everybody to get a little feisty today. You know, we can surrender to God and be feisty, and you can be feisty believing to be rescued and believing to have faith for your healing. Like do it. That faith pleases God. He loves that. And also get feisty about how he's use you in the season and afterwards. So. Yeah. I wasn't planning on saying all that, but, but Scott, I just, I really enjoyed this conversation with you. You got me thinking, and I appreciate so much of what you had to share. Thank you for using your story to do that for so many people.

[00:41:09] Scott Shaum: Yeah, it's my, my honor, my gift. I'm grateful. Thank you. It's great to be with you.

[00:41:14] Stephanie Gutierrez: And I want to make sure to mention, pick up The Uninvited Companion, which is a beautiful book that Scott's written on this. Scott, any other places that people can hear from you or, or connect with you?

[00:41:25] Scott Shaum: Yeah, I've got a blog that I dabble on periodically. A lot of resources I've tried to, uh, load on there as well. It's called tendingscatteredwool.com. So that's another place to check out some other resources.

[00:41:43] Stephanie Gutierrez: Well, thank you for the gift that you are the body of Christ, Scott. We appreciate you being with us today and all that you do for missionaries around the world.

[00:41:53] Scott Shaum: Thanks, my honor. 

People on this episode

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Stephanie Leigh Gutierrez

Host
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Luke Eubank

Producer