Episode 348 - Michelle Keener, "Comfort in the Ashes: Job, Trauma, and Healing in the Church"

On today’s episode of Restoring the Soul, Michael sits down with Dr. Michelle Keener, biblical scholar and author of the new book Comfort in the Ashes: Explorations in the Book of Job to Support Trauma Survivors. In this compelling conversation, Michelle shares the personal story and scholarly journey that led her to explore the Book of Job through the lens of trauma theory. Together, Michael and Michelle dig deep into how Job’s ancient story parallels the experiences of trauma survivors today—from grief and ruptured worldviews to the silence that so often follows devastation.

Michelle brings a rare combination of biblical expertise and lived experience, showing how Job’s journey isn’t just about suffering and eventual restoration but about what it means to wrestle with God, faith, and meaning after trauma. They discuss the church’s struggle to meet the needs of trauma survivors, the importance of presence and lament, and how embracing a trauma-informed reading of scripture opens up new possibilities for healing, compassion, and honest faith. 

Transcript

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Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Restoring the Soul podcast. I'm Michael, and today it's an episode with Dr. Michelle Keener. And Michelle is the author of a brand new book called Comfort in the Ashes, Explorations in the Book of Job to support trauma survivors. Dr. Keener, welcome. Well, thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to be here. I'm really, really excited to talk about this with you because your training is as a biblical scholar. You have a PhD in biblical studies. You have a number of different places where you teach and where you offer your knowledge. But this book came out of your own story. And what you decided to do was to look at what everybody knows to be about this book of suffering, the Book of Job. But to look at it through a lens of trauma and the biblical scholarship is fantastic. There's a lot of great specific nuggets, there's a lot of big ideas that were so encouraging to me, but I don't think I've ever read anything that looks so deeply at a biblical text. But through a clinical lens. You didn't just take a couple of verses and say, oh, this is how it can encourage you with trauma. It's. Here's how to actually see a trauma framework in this ancient story. So tell me how, how you got started with, with this. How did I end up with Job and trauma? That's a great question. So I was, I was actually, in the end, towards the end of my Coursework for my PhD, I was in an Old Testament writings class, so looking at, like, Job, Psalms, Song of Solomon, those texts, and I happened to just go through a really dark season on my own. I went through a lot of trauma, and I went to my Old Testament professor, and I was supposed to be writing a paper, a research paper on the Book of Psalms. And so I asked her, I said, would it be okay if I worked on Job instead? I just, I feel like I need to spend some time with Job. And she asked me, well, have you ever thought about using trauma studies? And Job? And I said, I actually haven't. Let me go see if it would work. And that's what started me on this path. And this wonderful, wonderful professor, Dr. Jen Jones, she ended up being my supervisor. So this one little comment she made ended up taking up like the next three years of her life as well. But that's how I ended up here. I want to read from the opening. It's the introduction to the book, and this is a lengthy paragraph, but I have a question at the end of it. You wrote Trauma Devastates, it dismantles. It goes to the heart of our most deeply held beliefs about God, the world and our place in it. It hits us at the very core of who we are and what we believe and leaves us forever changed. So listeners would go, yes, that's it. Because so many of our listeners have heard trauma. But then the next sentence, and it was a standalone paragraph, so it was a one sentence paragraph. And I love one sentence paragraphs. The next sentence was. And so often the church is unprepared for it. You're not a harsh anti church person. You speak about the church with great honesty, though. And I think a lot of people reading this book will go, oh, this is not one of those books that's going to get me to try to fit into the job mold. And at the end, everything's going to be okay. But you talk about how the church is often part of the problem with trauma survivors. Unpack that. So I, I would like to acknowledge first, you're correct. I'm not an anti church person. I love the church. I serve in a local church. I have been a part of the church for decades, absolutely love the church. And at the same time, I have seen churches who are not prepared and who are ill equipped to deal with trauma survivors in their congregations. And so part of my passion for this book was to make it very practical for pastors, for church leaders, for believers. How do we come alongside people who are walking through the devastation of trauma and minister to them and support them in a way that is both mentally healthy and also biblically accurate? How do we do both of those things and how do we do it well? And so as I was working on the book, it was not meant as a criticism of the church. It was meant as, hey, this is an opportunity where we can do better. Yeah, I appreciate that and that the book is practical. It would have been easy to write a book that was just biblical scholarship or to write a book that was just trauma, but you did both. I think that readers who are needing hope and encouragement can find hope in the biblical story and in the way that you unpack Job's experience and traumatic experiences, but also how you actually have big ideas from trauma theory. I would call this a trauma informed exegesis, if you will. I would take that and I would be honored by that, especially coming from a trauma therapist. I will take that as a big endorsement. So thank you for that. Yeah. And by the way, I just want to also do a shout out. You had a forward from Dr. Scott McKnight I did indeed. You know, nothing against you, but when InterVarsity, who's my publisher, also sends me books, a lot of times I just go through the pile and, nope, not this one. Not this one. And the title of your book captured my attention, and I wanted to read it. But when I saw that, you know, one of the foremost New Testament scholars who wrote, along with his daughter Laura Barringer, the book A Church Called Tov, which is all about people that had been wounded in churches and tov, the Hebrew word for good, obviously. So, wow. And it was a beautiful foreword. So honoring of the work. It was. I was genuinely so humbled and so honored that Dr. McKnight was willing to do that. And he and I have been able to have a couple of conversations, like when we bump into each other at conferences. And he is just. I mean, not just brilliant, but such a kind and generous man. And if I scoot it out of the way, you see behind me a church called Tove and Pivot are both behind me. I greatly admire all the work that he has been doing. I have only interacted with him a little bit as we both spoke at a conference. But there is a man that runs the Ace Hardware store. He's the owner, and, like, he could be Scott's twin. And, you know, the thing about Scott is that he is this brilliant, prolific, you know, I think he's written at least 40 books. He's constantly writing on substack, and he's incredibly generous with his time, but he is just an everyday guy. And so, again, kudos to you for that. And it just testifies to the scholarship and the work that you put in. Let's jump in to what you call Job's experience of trauma. You know, anybody that has even heard a sermon on the book of Job and maybe not necessarily read through it, they know that Job lost everything. So you also point out that there were a lot of issues in this book that can't be addressed in this book because it's about trauma. So we're not going to get into the historicity of job, etc. But you framed it around silence, traumatic rupture, the unmaking or de creation, and then denial, avoidance and change. And as a trauma therapist, I was like, that's pretty much what people's traumatic experiences are. And those are not clinical words, but they're experiential words. So can you talk a little bit about that, how when you look at Job's experience in the book, how you came up with those categories? Sure. So when I decided that I was going to come at this through a trauma theory lens. I had to dive deep into, well, what is trauma and what is our current state of research on trauma? What are we thinking? What's the neuroscience? How are all of these things interacting? And then once I had kind of that basis of knowledge, I went back and I started reading the book of Job again. I was like, oh, my goodness. Well, it makes perfect sense why, at the end of chapter two, right. So Job has lost everything, and he's sitting in the ash heap at the end of chapter two, and his friends come and visit him, and they say they sit together in silence for seven days. And that struck me as a scholar, biblical scholar, that's very significant. Why do we have this literary silence in the text? And then looking at it from a trauma informed perspective, silence in the aftermath of trauma, that makes perfect sense. And it's a very. It's a very common reaction. It's a very logical reaction, because how do you describe something that you don't even understand at the moment? Yes. And so if we look at the idea of shock and silence and this crisis of language. Right. That trauma can inspire, that little passing reference to silence in the text suddenly becomes so important. Yes. And then when the silence ends in chapter three, what happens then? Well, the book switches from prose to poetry out of nowhere. And I mean, there's no lead up to it. There's no, you know, stage direction that says, oh, now we're going to embrace poetry. It just switches. And it seems like. And there's a lot of scholars who would look at that and say, well, there's no real reason for it. And so there are arguments about, are they different stories that got mushed together? Are these different authors? And for me, once I had that, that foundation of knowledge and trauma, I was like, oh, no, this actually makes a lot of sense. Yes. Why? And that goes to your question about the. The idea of a traumatic rupture, that Job's story is progressing along this narrative path, which is how we normally experience life. Right. Very linear, very step by step. And then trauma intrudes and it doesn't exist in that same linear state. It's fragmented, it's disorganized, it's chaotic. And how perfect is poetry to start engaging in that? Yes. And so for me, that was a real light bulb moment of, oh, my gosh, I get why the genre is switching here. I get why we go from this devastation to the silence to a change in genre, which that seems so, so cool and so Powerful to think that a text that was written so long ago can reflect a traumatic experience so well. So I mentioned before this conversation began, before we hit record, that I've not read the entire book, but I did do a heavy, heavy skim. And after doing that, I want to go back and do a really deep dive. But I'm going to take a stab at summarizing what I'm going to say is my new perspective on the meaning of the Book of Job. And I've debated with people for years about this, as many people do. And at the end of the day, our conclusion about the meaning of a book should only be as meaningful as it helps people. And so I kind of, in light of what you're saying about this silence and then the rupture, and this is right out of attachment theory, that the Book of Job is not about Job, but it's about God saying, job, I get you. I get you, and I'm here with you. And in it all, you've never been alone. And there's obviously other complex questions and other ideas there. But it's interesting, the silence is Job basically saying, I don't want to talk about it, but to go deeper, you know, somebody could say, well, of course you don't want to talk about it, but for God's sake, you need to do that. But it's really, I can't talk about it. That he could not verbally process it because he's frozen. He's the deer in the headlights. And I've always said that the very best counseling in the Bible was Job's friends for that first seven days. And then they opened their mouth and it all went downhill from there. And you comment about that as well, about intended helpfulness, the rupture, this idea of, I can't talk about it, but when I can talk about it, I can't make sense of it. And then the beautiful thing you said in a later chapter about the poetry in this genre shift, that when we understand the physiology of trauma, and suddenly it makes sense why there's this shift where it goes from prose to poetry. And one could think this isn't exactly accurate, but that the prose is left brain and the poetry is right brain. And you need to heal from bottom to top, right to left. And it's as if God's wisdom, long before Bessel van der Kolk ever wrote the body, keeps the score, that God knew that. And he was saying, let's. Let's shift into the right brain so that you can begin to process this experientially and all of this, as you're writing is just making me go, wow. God so intimately foreknew what might unpack and unfurl in science in 6,000 years later or whenever that was. That this story becomes an invitation that gives us a lot of space to take what we now know from science and psychology and to put it into it. So not to fit Job into modern psychology or trauma, but to actually drop all of that into this story, and it just becomes so filled with God's kindness and graciousness and sense of. It's horrible and it's unthinkable and you've lost everything. And yet somehow, in the middle of it, there's a way to access this place and this person that is Yahweh in the story, where it's actually. Okay. That's a really beautiful way to put it. Thank you for that. That was lovely. And I think it's fascinating not to spoil the end of the book for you, but I put a great deal of emphasis on what happens when God shows up in the whirlwind. Right. Job is still on the ash heap. Job is still wrestling through all of this. He hasn't changed this very aggressive language that he is using towards God. And yet in the midst of it and in the midst of his friends, maybe not being great listeners, that's where God shows up and he meets Job right where he is. And then what's fascinating is God doesn't show up and say, job, let me tell you exactly what happened. See, there was this heavenly council and there was this wager. He doesn't say any of that. He doesn't offer Job any explanation for why any of this happened to him. But it's his presence. It's the presence of God. In the midst of Job's pain, it really starts his ability to heal and to eventually leave the ash heap, which I kind of use as sort of the metaphor for his trauma. Yes, he's able to leave the ash heap. He goes and he rejoins his community and we see the genre again. It switches back to prose. And so how beautiful is it kind of from that attachment perspective, that it's this presence of this secure, caring parent figure that meets Job, and that's where we start to see healing start. Yeah. And I am going to jump to the end. We'll come back and we'll talk about what's in between. But you talked about God showing up in the whirlwind, and then there was a chapter after that. But I love this Phrase, what does it mean? Question mark. And that's the question of the hour. Right, but your question, what does it mean? Wasn't, for example, what's the correct exegetical perspective about the Book of Job, but what does all this mean in terms of his traumatic experience? And I'm just going to read right from, from the book. You said God's question to Job are to help him rebuild his deeply held assumptions about the world. And I just put my hand up in the air and went, yes, fist pump. Because every single person that goes to therapy, whether it's for a struggling marriage or for the worst trauma that a therapist has ever heard, something is happening that is bumping up against their deeply held assumptions about the world, about themselves, about how secure they are in the world, and then ultimately theological questions about, is there some benevolent person or place where I can rest and trust in their goodness? I'm saying that in very philosophical terms, but I've never actually heard that on target. But also just resonating with my sensibilities as a trauma survivor and, and a trauma therapist, how that just rang so true. And I think that I, like I was thinking outside of the Book of Job, what would happen if in churches, from pulpits, that we, that we preach Scripture and we related to people to just say, today we're going to take these stories, these verses, etc. And we're going to bring it up against your deeply held assumptions about the world. And I think that's what Jesus did. So, so kudos to you for that statement. And I just want to let you expand and expound and riff off of how you came to that conclusion and any of your perspective. Well, thank you again for your kindness and your encouragement. That is, it is genuinely a blessing. It's like, oh, okay, I was on the right path here because, you know, as an author yourself, there's times when it feels like, I don't know, am I getting it right? So I appreciate that very much. And how did I get there? Well, I think as we start to, to realize that the response of trauma, rather than looking at trauma as an event. Right. The, oh, the car accident was the trauma. No, the trauma is how I'm responding to the car accident. The car accident was the event. Right. Once we start focusing on, well, what does that mean for me? Right? What does it mean that I was in this terrible accident or that I went through this, this awful suffering? What do I think about the world now? And we see that in Job, because Job was operating and his friends were operating from this very clear perspective of, you do good, you get good, you do bad, you get bad, and Job, you're getting bad, therefore you must have done something bad. And Job all of a sudden, in his own experience, like, that doesn't make any sense anymore. I can't hold on to that. And so the very foundation of his world is totally shaken. His theology makes no sense anymore. And what is it like to have to wrestle through that? And you even use the word safety. So when trauma shakes our sense of security and safety in the world, which is what happened with Job, what does that mean? Where can I turn? Who's safe? What's safe? And. And all of a sudden, the chaos surrounds us, and if we don't even know what we believe anymore, where's the foundation that we stand on? And as I kind of made that connection in my head and then went back to the book, and you start looking at some of the things Job says where he starts talking about God as the one who shakes the foundations, as opposed to earlier, when God is the one who establishes the foundations. We can see Job's theology take this massive hit in the wake of his personal experiences. And how do you reconcile what I'm walking through and what I've been taught or what I thought I believed? Yes. When they don't match anymore. Right. And not to judge either one of them, but to allow them to be held in tension. And then the trauma lens says, oh, well, what if God being the one who's shaking the foundations is a cognitive distortion or a negative interpretation out of his own dysregulation in his nervous system, and he just can't see goodness anywhere, including what he formerly knew. So that you're writing about this, it's a very compassionate way of looking at Job as the character in Scripture. And it. It allows, when you hold those two things in tension, our own personal messiness in the trauma doesn't have to resolve in one direction or the other. Because so many people with trauma, myself included, whether it's the church or sometimes even a. Probably a counselor with an agenda of, you need to get over this faster, you need to bring resolution, you just need to trust God, etc. You should be over this by now. And it really allows a person to stay in there and then allow what is, from a Christian perspective, I might say, to allow truth to rise up inside when that person begins to feel safe and secure. Yeah. And I think that's such an important point, is that so often we have churches or counselors with, as you said, really good intentions. And I'll speak more from the church perspective because that's sort of. That's the world or the ocean that I swim in is we have pastors and church leaders who just desperately want to help, but they want to help. Let's get this person back to normal with my little air quotes, right? Let's get them back to normal as quickly as possible. That normal doesn't exist anymore. That normal has been completely shattered and shaken by what this person is going through. And while I believe most of the time it comes from a very good place of sort of those bumper sticker verses, right? Let go, let God, you know, just pray more. All things work together for good. All of that may be true. Is that helpful in the moment? Is that what this person walking through the complete shattering of their world really needs to hear? Or is it what we, as the pastor, the church leader, the witness? Is it what we want to see? Because that trauma is sure scary for me. So I need you to get better and get better real fast, because I don't like what it's making me feel. Right. Yeah. You talked about Dr. Keener dialogue, and it was early on in the book where as you talked about the genre changing from prose to poetry, and this was along the Ministry of Presence chapter, I believe you talked about how you said, there's a lot of talking, and then you said, there's actually a lot of talking, and you might have used an exclamation point. And so from a trauma perspective and a biblical scholar, why was that important? Yeah, lot of talking in the Book of Job. Right. And the funny thing is, it's part of the reason why I didn't used to like the Book of Job very much. Like, I would be reading it and I'd get to Job and I would just sigh like, oh, oh my gosh, we get it. You're bummed out. Move on. Right? Yeah. But then when we start looking at it from a trauma informed perspective, what is the role of all of this talking, doing, Right. What is the. The importance of Job as a. If we are willing to look at him as a trauma survivor, what's the importance of him having to try to verbalize this and process this over and over and over again? And if we look at each of the dialogue cycles that Job engages in with the Friends, we can see a shift in his perspective in each cycle and the way that his thinking develops. The Friends, not so much. They stay pretty much entrenched in Job, this is your fault. Say you're sorry and It'll all get better. And so to understand both the. The. The need to process with a trusted listener, like, I know I'm going to say a bunch of stuff about my trauma and it's not going to make sense, but I need to do it anyway. And at the same time to understand, as I'm sure you, you have experienced, the repetitious nature of trauma. Yes. I can't say it one time. I have to go back over and over and over again as my brain is trying to make sense of this and recognizing from the biblical perspective, this makes a lot of sense. Why do we have these dialogue cycles? Why does the third one break down? Why is it important that out of nowhere a fourth friend shows up? Well, if we look at trauma and again, the verbal processing and the repetitious nature of trauma, all of that, again, makes sense not just from a trauma perspective, but from an exegetical perspective as well. You really have opened up a whole new window of understanding this book. And my hope is that whether it's psychology in general or trauma informed perspectives like this that are very sensitive to our embodied reality, that it opens up a window on scripture that allows trauma survivors to experience God's compassion, but also it helps us to understand the compassion of God. Because I think the number one question that I get from survivors, as we start to talk theologically, and it's not a separate conversation, it's all woven together, is this question of, well, how could I trust God? Because on the surface, this looks like what Philip Yancey called in disappointment with God about the Job question. God's cosmic wager. Like God did this wager with Hasatan or with the devil. And so it looks like a big setup, right? God just set me up to test me. Oh, well, thanks. I didn't really want to be tested. But this perspective, once again allows us to see the book from a different perspective. That things that appeared to be negative and indicting God for being cruel and punishing suddenly begin to show the compassion they're in. And the permission that Job has to be a human being, to struggle with faith, to doubt, to need this conversation. And the repetition on and on and on, and it's a completely different perspective. I love what you just said, right? That God is giving Job permission to be a human being. And that when we look at Job and recognize that God was listening the whole time, and Job says some pretty. He says some pretty wild things about God, right? Comparing him to an archer and his arrows are in me, and he has splashed open my Kidneys. And that's not language we normally associate with the Bible. And yet there it is. And how beautiful it is that we do have this compassionate God who's like, I get you're mad. I get you don't understand what's happening, and it's not fair. Lay it all out there. You can say anything you want. And, and how freeing that would be for trauma survivors, especially in the church, if we gave every trauma survivor in our midst permission to lament, if we gave them permission to be angry, if we gave them permission to doubt and to be confused and said, you can bring all of that here to the church. We're going to welcome it and we're going to walk with you while you're angry, while you're doubting, while you're confused. We're going to stand with you. And how freeing and how healing that would be if we made space in the church not just for the victory after the fact, but just for the perseverance in the middle of the pain as well. Yes. Yeah. Because that's where God is. God is always in the mess. God is always in the brokenness. He's always in what's unfavorable. So I love that vision and I share that vision. Our ministry is to Christian leaders, clergy, missionaries, parachurch workers. And I believe that for that vision to come to fruition, we need not just biblical scholarship, which pulls back the curtain and says, here's how the biblical scholarship can demonstrate why this trauma informed perspective is so powerful and necessary. But it also requires that leaders, the ones who are the ones doing this inviting and this caring and creating the safety that, that they need to deal with their trauma. Because at one level, every human being is traumatized. We are not, you know, we're out of Eden, we're not in heaven, and we all bear attachment wounds. And you allude to this in so many different ways, but. And you just said it, that our own discomfort with people's pain and messiness is what requires us or what, what encourages us or makes us try to have premature closure or to do spiritual runarounds, to try to have people just trust God more. And again, I think there's a uniqueness with the fact that you're writing all of this from a biblical scholarship perspective, that it gives a new level of credibility actually, as you unpack, that this is what the scripture is about. Oh, I certainly hope so. I mean, we don't have to look very far to see some tensions at times between mental health and the church. Yes. I come from A perspective where I say, I don't think we need that tension. Right, Right. We can be working together on this. And I think one of the pressures maybe that we often feel in the church, especially for leaders, is this idea that I have to have all the answers. And so it takes a great deal of humility to talk with a trauma survivor and say, I don't know why this happened to you. This is terrible, and I don't know why it happened. That takes humility. It's much easier to say, oh, this happened because God has a plan and you just need to trust the plan. Right. The other option or the other pressure there sometimes, I think is we feel a need to defend God. And that maybe goes to our own insecurities. Yes. If someone is doubting or if they're challenging or asking that question, where is God in this situation? Where is God? In my pain and this instinct to, well, I have to defend God, because if. If everything I believe about God isn't true, then my world is going to be shaken, and I'm not prepared for that. Yes. And yet one of the things we see in the book of Job is that God doesn't need our defense. And when he shows up, he is not defending himself at all. And he's not explaining his actions. He's just showing up and being God. And if we could just trust God enough, if we could just trust him like that, that God doesn't need me to defend him. God doesn't need me to tell people, you can't ask those questions that God is God. And I'm pretty sure he's got this. That frees us up to just come alongside the survivors, to come along, people who are in pain and sit with them and be with them. Yeah. I think we could have a whole conversation about that, about God doesn't need us to defend him. I think even early in my career, and I've been a licensed therapist for 31 years, that I did a lot of defending of God because I thought that's what he wanted me to do. But people don't feel safe in that environment. They might. They might nod their head and say, yes, I agree, but their nervous system is not going to feel safe. They're. They're not going to experience soothing from information, but from relationship. You know, as we're talking about all of this, and as we went into a little deeper dive about Job's experience, it reminds me of a line that you used and you said at the beginning that most people bypass or skip right over Job's intimate experiences with trauma. Right. That, like, how did this actually impact him? And what was it like? And where do we see that in the text? And what they want to get to is the big finish where God shows up and everybody goes, well, what's the meaning? What's the purpose? What's the big idea? And I think the reason why I want to do a deep rereading of Job along with your book is I don't think it's about the big idea. I think it's actually about the process. It's not about the outcome. And as we understand the process, it's almost as if somebody said a while back, the problem with Christians is that they have the answers, but they're not living the questions. Oh, that's good. Yeah. And that your book invites us and names what the questions are that are there, and then the answer actually means something. I think that's such a great way to put it. And so now I think you'll like the end of the book, then, because I come at it from a very similar perspective, which is the. The general tendency that I saw in a lot of Job scholarship is to deal with the big theological questions. Yes, well, what does this teach us about theodicy? What does this teach us about where evil comes from? What does this teach us about unjust suffering? And. And those are great questions to ask, but we run the risk of missing what I would argue is one of the key purposes of the book, which is, let's look at this one individual and how he is walking through this suffering. Isn't it possible that the message of the book is not so much where does this Satan figure come from, but the message is, let's look how this one person has navigated this, and let's look at this process of healing that we see in the book of Job. So hopefully you will like the end of the book. Yeah, I'm sure I will. And I won't go down different pathways right now that my mind goes to in terms. Terms of the. What. What you just said about how. What if the whole story. And here I'm doing what I said I wouldn't do. But what if the whole story is framed as a way of saying this was one man's experience, that he felt as if there was this cosmic wager, and he felt as if God let everything rip and all evil could come against him, and he had his permission. Why? Because it seems like there's no goodness anywhere, and that was his inner experience. So that. I'm not saying that's academically astute, but as a therapist, I'm going, wow. So there's two other things I want to cover. Justice is a huge subject in this story. You know, from. From chapter two. Where is justice? Why is this happening? That's not fair. And you address that. Both the. The legal aspects. I loved how you touched on revenge fantasies, how that's there in the text, and that's a big part of how trauma survivors feel power, powerful and get empowered. And then, of course, forgiveness. So you can talk about that. And I've got a couple questions around forgiveness. Okay. So, yeah, I do see the theme of justice. It is so important in the book of Job and in trauma processing as well. Right. So again, we see kind of how this intersection is happening. And when we see Job asking this question of why does God let the wicked prosper? And why am I suffering? And doesn't that resonate with those of us who have walked through trauma with that big why me Question, what did I do to deserve this? Why did it happen to me? And how that unfolds with this concept of revenge fantasies and this idea of if I could just. If I could just get an acknowledgment or if I could just make them pay, then somehow I will feel better, that my healing will come. If someone says they're sorry, if the person who wounded me ends up wounded in the same way, and we don't always get that, and how do we make peace with that? How do we heal? If that's never going to come, which has been one of my own struggles, how do I heal? When I look at the people who hurt me and they're still prospering, and that's awful. It's a terrible feeling. And so then that leads us kind of to this question of forgiveness, which I touch on, and I take a couple of different approaches to it. But one of the key things I talk about is a tendency to make forgiveness some sort of finish line. Yes. That if I will just get you to say, oh, I forgive this person, then you're healed, you're done, and we're never going to talk about it again. And then the. The. The imposition on the survivor with that is, well, you. You said you forgave this person, so why. Why are you talking about it anymore? And how that can actually short circuit the. The healing process. And so we need to have a very broad and a very generous view of forgiveness. Not just the forgiveness we extend, but the way we talk about forgiveness to people who have been wounded. Yeah. I like how you use the word of the book, agendas that we need to be aware of, our agendas for why we want people to forgive. And it's often, you know, well intended but deep downside. It's more for us than for them. And, yeah, I've seen that happen over and over and over again where there's been people that I work with, pastors and other people have told them, well, if you just forgive, then you can. It can help you to move on. And. And people can even say the words and sincerely mean it and say, I forgive. But then a month later or the next day, their body gets dysregulated and they go, oh, I must not have forgiven. No, no, no. It's not about whether you've forgiven or not. It's about whether your nervous system has begun to actually feel secure, live within a window of tolerance. So people that have actually done that act, and when they feel like they've not or they get angry at the abuser again, then, oh, you must not have forgiven. Yeah. At the end, me not having read the entire last chapter, I was thrilled that you used the Kintsugi metaphor. The COVID of my book has a Kugi vase on it. And when InterVarsity said, you know, give us your thoughts about the COVID I said, the only thing I care about is I want there to be a Kugi theme, because that's our ministry's logo as well. So talk about why you chose that and what that means to you as a trauma survivor as well as a biblical scholar. So that's so funny, because when IVP academic asked me about the COVID I said the same thing. I said, I'd love to see this Kintsugi theme. And they ended up not going with it. And there's this big whirlwind theme instead, which I love. But it's funny that I was thinking the exact same thing. So Kintsugi, it's this beautiful Japanese practice, right, of repairing broken pottery with gold. And so we gather up these broken pieces and put them back together. And we're not gluing them back together or we're using gold in the glue. And so you end up with these gold scars, essentially, on this beautiful piece of pottery. And when I first learned about that, gosh, that hit hard, and it just sort of settled in my soul. And so when I started doing my own trauma work and thinking through that, this idea that the scars make us more valuable, that the scars are not. They're not indicators of our shame or our failures, but they actually make us More precious. And that just. Gosh, that just feels so powerful. That. And it's not just us, that we can use it, that God can use it, that everything we've been through can make us more precious, more valuable to. Not just to ourselves, but to the people that we minister to. And. Yeah, so I think it's just this beautiful practice and a beautiful metaphor for healing from trauma. It's. It when you just use the word metaphor. And there again, the kintsugi, even though it's a physical object, it's. It's poetry, it's art. And there have been a number of times I have some different kintsugi art in my office where people have been in despair about the future and will they be put back together? And even. How could God allow this? And I say, I don't have an answer. And then I'll hand them the piece of kintsugi and I'll just say, I'm going to step out of the room, and I want you to take 10 or 15 minutes and just gaze upon this almost like in a visio divina kind of exercise. And if you want to journal about it, you can. I even say, you know, if you want to get up and walk out of the room, that's fine. But invariably, people get into their right brain, the poetry, the art of it, and it's somehow very moving and it doesn't solve anything. But there is something about our sensibilities. We're just looking at that fractured piece of pottery that's put back together and is not only, you know, more valuable because of the art form, but it's more beautiful. There's this addition of the gold that wasn't there, and that. That has been healing. So I was delighted to. To see that at the end. I want to thank you for your time. This has been an extended conversation, but for your. The labor that went into, not just academically, but practice personally and and spiritually to create this book. I'm going to hold it up. Comfort in the ashes. The COVID is beautiful in and of itself. I. I did not initially, until you said that, realize the whirlwind, but it does have almost a Japanese art form to it. And it's. It's really interesting because now that I'm gazing at it with that lens, it's almost got layers to it where you go from the top to the bottom and. But Dr. Michelle Keener, thank you for this work. Thanks for this conversation today, and blessings to all that you continue to do. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.