When Life Goes East — pt 1: Introduction

By Alisha Wiseman


In 2020, right in the thick of Covid, my then 4-year-old daughter Isla caught a glimpse of just how broken the world can be.

One morning, she discovered a lifeless sparrow under our trampoline—most likely a casualty of our cat’s playful but fatal curiosity. Every sign pointed to the bird being well and truly gone. But Isla wasn’t ready to accept that. She gathered a shoebox, lined it with toilet paper, and gently laid the bird inside, asking again, “Can we help it?”

We told her no—but still, she tried. She prayed for the bird, offered it medicine, and kept it warm through the night, even reasoning that if Jesus could come back to life, maybe this bird could too. She even kept it in her room, holding on to hope. By morning, the smell made it unmistakable—there would be no revival.

Rob, my husband, had the beautiful idea to hold a funeral. Our two girls placed flowers on the small grave after Rob led his very first funeral.


For Isla, this was her first realisation that sometimes, no matter how much you hope, or pray, life doesn’t go the way you want. And honestly—it’s not just four-year-olds who feel that ache.

For you, it may not be a dead sparrow. It’s the phone call that starts with, “There’s something I need to tell you…” and your stomach drops. It’s the doctor’s diagnosis you didn’t expect. The suffocating loneliness when yet another friend gets engaged. It’s a marriage that feels impossible to revive. Another month, another single line on the pregnancy test. The gnawing anxiety that won’t let up. We lift our eyes beyond our own lives, and brokenness is everywhere: war, abuse, injustice, children diagnosed with mental health struggles at younger and younger ages.

Something in us knows—instinctively—this isn’t how it’s meant to be. The world feels fractured, like a song sung out of tune.

Life East of Eden

The Bible names this reality: life East of Eden.

This is where our new series title comes from—When Life Goes East. It’s a play on the phrase “when life goes south,” because in Scripture, heading east is the journey into exile. It’s the movement away from Eden, away from the fullness of God’s shalom.

This series here on The Zine is about what happens when our hopes collide with the hard edge of a broken world—not just how to survive it, but how to discover hope and redemption within it.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Lish, this is a bit heavy.” But I promise, we’re not here to be dramatic for drama’s sake, nor are we here to sugarcoat anything. As Westley from The Princess Bride said: “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

And Jesus wasn’t selling anything either. In John 16:33 He said: “In this world you will have trouble.”

There’s no escape clause for suffering. Storms will come. As Tyler Staton puts it: “It’s always looming, always nipping at our heels. Occasionally, it wrestles us to the ground. Some of us never get up. Even those who do, walk with a limp.”

How we handle suffering doesn’t just shape our personal lives—it shapes our faith, our communities, even our theology.

Some of us find God most deeply in suffering. Others, despite deep faith, find that suffering raises almost unbearable questions: “If God is good, why didn’t He stop this?”

Too often, these questions go unanswered. And if the pain lingers, if the miracle doesn’t come, the slow drift begins—first from church, then sometimes from God Himself. Rarely is it a theological crisis. Most often, it’s unaddressed pain.

And honestly, churches haven’t always been good at holding space for this. We know how to celebrate mountaintop moments, answered prayers, miraculous healings. But we’re often at a loss when someone’s suffering doesn’t have a neat, redemptive bow.

The Bible, though, is scattered with stories of lament, grief, and loss. We encounter Jesus not just as King of Kings, but as the Suffering Servant.


What Story Are We In?

Before we get deep into this series, we need to ask: what story are we living in? Because how we understand suffering depends on the story we believe we’re a part of.

Nietzsche said: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

And Alasdair MacIntyre echoes: “I can only answer the question, ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question of, ‘What story or stories do I find myself a part of?’”

If we don’t know the story of God, we’ll settle for our culture’s story: life is short, protect yourself, maximise your happiness. But that story can’t hold your grief. It has no answer for the funeral, the redundancy, the diagnosis.

Jesus offers us a bigger story. A story that’s strong enough to hold our suffering—and redeem it. Pete Hughes often says: “The story you live in is the story you live out.”

So let’s trace the story of God through four movements:
Shalom. Fall. Redemption. End Promise.


1. Shalom

The Bible opens with Shalom—God’s intended design. God creates, calling everything good, and finally very good. Heaven and earth overlap, no grief, no pain, no striving—just delight.

Shalom means more than peace—it’s wholeness, everything in right relationship: God and humanity, people with each other, humanity and creation. And in this, God gives us freedom—the freedom to choose love.

But with that freedom came risk. And that leads to the next movement.


2. Fall

By Genesis 3, the good story fractures. Adam and Eve believe the deceiver’s lie that God can’t be trusted. They reach for autonomy, and with that, brokenness floods in.

All of creation groans under the weight of this rupture. Humanity is exiled east of Eden, away from paradise, into struggle.

When we ask, “Why is the world so broken?” the answer is not God—it’s sin. Sin is the sickness beneath every symptom: death, grief, violence, anxiety.

And how does God feel about it? Genesis 6 says, “His heart was deeply troubled.”

God grieves our pain even more than we do. He doesn’t ignore it—He acts.


3. Redemption

The moment we stepped east, God began His rescue. And at the centre stands Jesus.

Jesus didn’t avoid suffering—He entered it. He chose poverty, rejection, crucifixion. As Luke writes, “Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter His glory?”

Suffering wasn’t a detour—it was the road.

And still today, healing comes in many forms. Sometimes pain is removed—but more often, pain is redeemed. Redemption isn’t suffering erased, but suffering transformed. Henri Nouwen says, “To heal does not primarily mean to take pains away, but to reveal that our pains are part of a greater pain…our experience is part of the great experience of Jesus.”

We don’t have to glamorise pain. Suffering just hurts. But in Jesus, suffering isn’t wasted. Our wounds can meet His—and in that shared space, His character forms in us.

As Philip Yancey, who lives with Parkinson’s, reflected: “Pain redeemed impresses me more than pain removed.”

That’s the invitation: not to avoid suffering, but to let Jesus meet us there and shape us.

And yet—even redemption isn’t the end of the story.


4. End Promise

Revelation 21 paints the end of the story: “God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain…”

The story doesn’t end east of Eden. It ends in renewal. The old order will pass away. All things made new.

Jesus' unpopular promise—“In this world you will have trouble”—finishes with:

“But take heart, I have overcome the world.”

It’s a present and future reality: He is overcoming, and one day, He will overcome completely.

This is the story we live in. A story big enough to explain why things go wrong, and strong enough to redeem it.

What’s ahead

As we journey through this series, we’ll explore:

  • Relationship Breakdown

  • Anxiety

  • Disappointment

  • Hitting the Wall

Each will be paired with practices of hope—because the story of God isn’t just something to believe, it’s something to live.

Jesus is with us—not just in the still waters, but deep in the valley. And though life may go east, it doesn’t end there.

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When Life Goes East — pt 2: Facing Relational Breakdown

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Gratis: In their words