Finding ground amid life's uprooting

Learn more about Dr Boram Lee, Professor of Pastoral Care and Practice

To suffer is to realize how fragile our foundations truly are.

During my years as a hospital chaplain, I met families and patients whose lives carried the weight of pain in forms such as chronic illness, sudden accidents, the lingering aftermath of trauma, and the quiet ache of waiting and loss. Despite their differences, these stories of suffering shared a common thread—the experience of being uprooted from what once felt safe and sure.

Outside the hospital, I have encountered the same deep uprooting in the counselling room. People come carrying the invisible fractures of their lives—the parent who worries for a struggling child, the professional who has lost a job and with it a sense of worth, the spouse whose marriage is quietly falling apart. Each story may begin with a different circumstance, but beneath them all lies the same trembling of the ground: when what we have trusted as stable—relationships, work, health, family—begins to shake, we experience suffering. It is in those moments that people often say, “I don’t know who I am anymore,” or “I feel like the ground beneath me has disappeared.”

Suffering challenges assumptions

A diagnosis of illness, a broken body, or a tragic phone call can dismantle what once felt solid. Security, predictability, and belonging—the unseen roots that make us feel at home in the world—are shaken. Life’s sudden crises arrive like unwelcome intruders, shaking the ground beneath our certainties, and uprooting us from the foundations we once believed would never give way.

Suffering is never merely emotional; it is existential. It not only brings pain—it disrupts meaning. When suffering enters, the world that once felt coherent begins to unravel. The ground that once held our identity, relationships, and sense of purpose starts to shift and crumble. In its wake, we realize that what we called security is an illusion, that our sense of being at home in the world is far more fragile than we dared to admit.

The philosopher Simone Weil described suffering as “an uprooting of life,” a state in which one is “no longer at home.” To suffer is to lose one’s coordinates—to be torn away from the ground that once held meaning, rhythm, and purpose.[i] Eric Cassel similarly noted that suffering threatens a person’s sense of agency and personhood.[ii] In the instability of crisis and uncertainty, the human heart trembles because it can no longer find rest in what once gave assurance. As Weil observed, suffering “chains down our thoughts,” and “uproots us.”

Suffering exposes foundations

Suffering is not simply a wound to the heart, but an uprooting of the self. Moments of crisis strip away our belief that life is within our control or predictable. What once felt like home now feels foreign; what once gave meaning now lies in fragments. In that disorientation, we begin to sense how provisional our foundations have always been and how deeply we long for a ground that cannot be shaken.

Indeed, suffering exposes the ground upon which we truly stand. It reveals whether our confidence rests on changing circumstances, or on the unchanging character of God. In life, we root ourselves in what feels secure—health, success, relationships, or even our own strength. Yet these securities, however good, are temporary soils. When loss, illness, or betrayal comes, they wither like shallow roots in a drought. We discover then that our sense of stability was never as solid as we imagined

Suffering facilitates faith

And yet, Scripture invites us to a different kind of rootedness. The Apostle Paul prays that we might be “rooted and grounded in love” (Ephesians 3:17). Here, the ground is no longer the shifting soil of circumstance, or the fragile structures of our own making, but the steadfast love of God revealed in Christ. This love is not an idea or emotion. It is a living foundation. It holds when everything else gives way. To be rooted in God’s love is to discover that even when life feels uprooted, we are never truly without ground. Our security does not rest in health, success, or stability, but in the faithfulness of the One who holds all things together.

In my years of accompanying people through suffering, I have witnessed this paradox of grace: it is often in times of pain and uncertainty—not in seasons of security—that faith takes root most deeply. When all else falls away, people no longer cling to what can be taken away, but to the One who never lets go.
St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) writes in his Confessions, “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”[iii] Augustine gives voice to one of the deepest truths of the human condition—that our restlessness is a sign of our longing for God. We chase success, relationships, and recognition, believing that they will make us feel secure, rooted, and grounded. Yet the ache within us remains. His words remind us that the soul’s hunger cannot be satisfied by what is passing. True rest, like true rootedness, is found only when the heart returns to its source, the steadfast love of God.

To be rooted and grounded in love is not to escape suffering, but to find in it the deeper ground of God’s faithfulness. Pain awakens us to the truth that our stability cannot rest on changing circumstances, achievements, or even our own strength. We are invited instead to root ourselves in what endures: the unchanging love and promise of God.

Even the uprooted soul can take root in that soil again and live. From this ground grows hope, not the fragile hope that depends on what happens to us, but the enduring hope that flows from the eternal heart of God. When all other soils erode, His love remains, and in that love, our restless hearts find their home at last.