Reviewing Suffer Strong: How to Survive Anything by Suffering Everything

 by Katherine and Jay Wolf (Zondervan, 2020)

Behold, blessed is the one whom God reproves;
    therefore despise not the discipline of the Almighty.
For he wounds, but he binds up;
    he shatters, but his hands heal (Job 5:17,18).

 What do you pick up to read when your life has been shattered, when your 26-year old wife and mother of your 6-month old son has suffered a debilitating stroke, survived a 16-hour operation to save her life, and you are now sitting by her comatose body in the ICU? For Jay Wolf, the answer was the Book of Job. As he read, Jay was reminded that God provides healing hope. 

Since that April 2008 day, “healing hope” has proved a critical theme for both Katherine and Jay Wolf, so much that they both launched a ministry and wrote a book (Zondervan 2016) called “Hope Heals.”

            Katherine is much healed since her forty days in ICU, but she still remains dependent on her wheelchair and faces the daily challenges of a greatly compromised right side. She has relearned how to talk and even to swallow—this latter process took over a year. Her crooked smile and gravelly voice, which you hear if you listen to the audiobook, remind us that she is at once a miracle and a body in process. In their second book, Suffer Strong, the two spouses offer the wisdom gleaned from a life of allowing God not only “to shatter” but also “to bind up.”

            Suffer Strong is practical and heartfelt. It is also vulnerable and transformative. Not only do the authors discuss the realities of life with disabilities, but they also expose the “invisible wheelchairs” that restrict us all. Advocating the “good hard life,” Jay and Katherine alternate chapters as they accomplish their book’s subtitle and redefine “everything”:  the past, celebration, trauma, loss, failure, beauty, commitment, calling, community, healing, calling, and hope. 

Suffer Strong is not a dour book. The authors are funny and self-deprecating, honest and pointed. They upend incomplete definitions of God and life, suffering and health. They emphasize that God is in the business of reversal.

Christian ministry is never far from suffering: Paul tells that Christians are called to fill up “the sufferings of Christ” (Col. 1:24). Suffer Strong helps us to understand Paul’s cryptic comment. It is a book that every Christian leader should read for enlightenment, for empathy, for perspective, for praise. Katherine and Jay Wolf explain the goal of their book in this way: “For all the broken bodies, broken brains and broken hearts, there is more. More God, more learning, more wisdom, more than conquerors.” Christian leaders need this message, and their disciples need it as well.