In addition to hands-on practice, she has also spent the past 15 years researching youth mental health.

But it is Katherine’s own personal experience of suffering that makes her new book, The Discipline of Suffering: Redeeming Our Stories of Pain, one of the most powerful and practical resources on this topic to date.

Katherine’s journey through suffering began at age 14 when her life was “derailed” by acute back and nerve pain. Her pain, and the resulting two spinal fusion surgeries, caused Katherine to miss months of school and to become isolated and lonely.

“Early on in my Christian walk it meant that I had to rely on God for everything, and I think that was very character-forming for me,” she tells Eternity.

“My journey has been very much that suffering has been intertwined with my faith and God has walked with me through it.” – Katherine Thompson

After a 10-year reprieve, Katherine’s back pain returned at age 27 when she was pregnant with her son. This forced her to make tough decisions: to only have one child and to limit her career to jobs that could be sustained with her health condition.

Now in her 40s, Katherine lives with chronic pain that is getting worse as she ages.

“It’s forced me to rethink how I live life. Certainly, you can’t just go through every day as if things don’t matter or as if things are easy,” she says. “So it makes you think a different way about what you’re doing, how you’re spending your time, how important your faith is, what’s motivating you to get up in the morning and get out of bed, basically. My journey has been very much that suffering has been intertwined with my faith and God has walked with me through it.”

Katherine’s book The Discipline of Suffering brings together all the tools that have helped in her own journey through suffering as a Christian. She combines theological and biblical insights with cultural analysis, psychology techniques, including narrative therapy, and Christ Centred Mindfulness – on which Katherine has already written several books.

In addition, she interweaves real-life stories. She shares her own, including losing her brother to lung cancer, and also records the stories of numerous others as they move through suffering, from a place of despair to a place of “redemption” – where they recognise what they have learned and how they have grown in their faith through suffering.

“That’s what I’ve tried to do with the book: present stories so that you can see how other people have gone through suffering and have come through the other side with their faith intact.”

“I don’t find some of the existing books [on suffering] that helpful because they intellectualise the problem of suffering and faith, and then that leaves a disconnect between how we think about it and our personal experience,” says Katherine.

“… I think what we need in our culture is something that’s relevant, up to date, that speaks through the vehicle of story and experience so that it’s relatable. But not just so that we can understand it easily; it has to shift us past that so we actually change as people.

“That’s what I’ve tried to do with the book: present stories so that you can see how other people have gone through suffering and have come through the other side with their faith intact, but also give tools that help you work with your own stories and values so that you can change those with God’s help.”

These tools include practical mindfulness exercises at the end of every chapter to help understand and rewrite the false narratives about suffering that stem from our culture, the church and ourselves.

“In our culture, we tend to run away from suffering – we want to block it out or avoid it in some way. But mindfulness very much encourages us to sit with the difficult feelings and thoughts that we have, and also to be able to sit still with that before God,” says Katherine.

It is “almost impossible for any of us to escape” suffering, despite what our culture tells us.

She gives the example of the biblical story of Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42), where Martha is distracted by all the things that are bothering her, while her sister Mary simply sits at Jesus’ feet, listening to him.

“That story is a really good reminder of what we need to do in times of suffering. We can panic, and just grab anything and try to hold on to it. Or we can have the courage to sit there and be still and actually listen to God. And I think that’s ultimately the thing that we’re meant to learn through the discipline of suffering,” Katherine explains.

A book about suffering also sounds like a hard sell, but on the flip side, the target market is enormous. As Katherine notes, it is “almost impossible for any of us to escape” suffering, despite what our culture tells us.

“We have been sold this idea that we’re meant to be able to own a house, we’re meant to have a family, have a partner, hold down a full-time job, be a perfect mum at the same time, and also be really awesome at Christian ministry,” Katherine says.

“So we need to be careful not to just take on our Australian culture’s idea of who we’re meant to be, whether that’s within the church or outside the church. And we need to really think about suffering as not a bad thing. The Apostle Paul talks about suffering as developing our character, forming us as Christian people, by creating perseverance, character and then hope.

“Suffering also helps us rethink what are the values that we’re meant to be living by …”

“As Christians, we need to embrace that. Suffering also helps us rethink what are the values that we’re meant to be living by in our culture. Is Australian culture really selling us the right idea? Or do we need to be thinking about life from the perspective of Jesus Christ and how he lived?

“I think that’s really where we see the ultimate example because Christ died on a cross willingly for us. So he is our brother in suffering. He identifies with our pain. He certainly feels it with us, but then there’s also the resurrection. Suffering brings us hope. It brings us redemption and change. And that is the positive I think we lose if we try to avoid anything that’s negative and painful in life.”

The Discipline of Suffering, published by Acorn Press, is now available from Koorong. Find out more about Katherine Thompson’s Christ Centred Mindfulness books here, as well as her devotional series here.