Suffering. How can one small word hold so much complexity?
Even beyond the complexity of what the circumstances entail, whether or not you believe there’s a God, and whether you believe he’s good and sovereign, will completely change the way you interpret the word.
Even in the Christian community, the way each interprets the pain, sorrows, agony, and losses of this world will vary greatly. And those who have suffered little will often have a far different perspective than those who have suffered much. It’s a word that can elicit everything from fear, dread, control, anxiety, bitterness, anger, panic, and detachment, to courage, strength, growth, beauty, humility, and dependence.
It’s a dichotomy if there ever was one.
And yet, despite the fact that suffering is so painfully complex that we struggle to find answers to it, it demands answers nonetheless. Which is why, I believe, we often scrape the bottom of the barrel for any answer we can surmise to make sense of our pain.
“God must be wanting to teach me something.”
“Maybe I’m being punished for unconfessed sin.”
“It was because my faith wasn’t strong enough.”
“God must want to turn my pain into a ministry.”
“He’s allowing it so he can show his miraculous power of healing.”
“This life is just a random string of events that no one can control or prevent anyway.”
“What you put out in the universe is what you get back. Should have worked harder, done better, and given more.”
We’re desperate for answers because it’s pure agony to sit in the ash heap with absolutely no sense of purpose or reason for our pain.
And so, in our attempts to find comfort, we as Christians often grasp for a verse that feels sufficient to bandaid in the moment. We comfort ourselves with some promise that we bend to fit our current desire for relief. We quickly spiritualize it to at least plaster over the broken pieces as the jagged edges pierce our soul.
But eventually, the agony bleeds through the verse bandaged over the gaping hole. The promise we bent to our will begins to taunt us that maybe God isn’t as faithful as we once believed. And the spiritualized words plastered over the brokennes begin to feel like someone yelling down to us in the pit that “things will get better one day” as they walk on their merry way, all while we’re trapped in a pit so deep and dark that the light taunts rather than helps.
No, suffering isn’t so easily answered. True, agonizing, “gnaw your teeth”, “lay you bare” suffering is not so easily answered. And I believe we do ourselves a disservice when we try to.
Suffering itself isn’t good.
Here’s one of our greatest temptations in suffering: to so quickly try to spiritualize our anguish that we downplay the reason we feel it in the first place. And dare I say, we assume God’s goodness and sovereignty must mean he expects us to see the pain as good too – because after all, he allowed it, didn’t he?
And in part, there’s a sliver of truth to that. God is sovereign. He is good. He could have stopped it but he didn’t. And he promises to use all things for the good of those who love him and those called according to his purposes (Romans 8:28).
But is that the same thing as pain and tragedy being good? Is that the same thing as suffering always having a happy ending in a worldly sense?
No. Because suffering, at the core, stems from the curse and effects of sin. And sin – and the ripple effects of it – are never good. Although our own sin isn’t always (and often isn’t) what causes the suffering, it’s still our reality because this perfect world was corrupted by the sting of sin and death. We agonize in these bodies because they are decaying before our eyes. We weep at the loss of those we love because even in the hope of life beyond death, death still feels like death to those still living.
Suffering, in a sense, is a taste of death. It’s the tangible touch of the sting of sin within us and around us. And I believe we do ourselves a disservice when we gloss over this too quickly. Because until we acknowledge the true agony and grief of pain, we can’t truly appreciate how Jesus enters into it with us and brings redemption into the broken places of our life – even if the scars remain.
Or, as John Andrew Bryant so poignantly said,
“Suffering, by itself, does not have any meaning. It only ruins, it only takes away. It is only given meaning by Christ’s proximity to it. And He only gives meaning to it by enduring, bearing, and overcoming it. There are things so secret and painful and awful that only Christ can make them holy. Only Christ can make hard things holy things. The horrible and the unmentionable will only be made holy by Christ’s proximity to the horrible and the unmentionable. A mystery taken in His body that does not give us an answer but only the mystery of faith. A faith born through hearing, led in prayer, established by offering.”
A Quiet Mind to Suffer With
My son hurting me and those around him during frequent fits of rage caused by a mental illness that he had no control over for more than a decade was not meaningful and somehow good. It was at the hand of the devil himself, wielding his power over my son’s weakened mind. It’s heartbreaking and twisted to bring evil from the helpless innocence of a child. And God wept with me at the sight of my tears, just as he wept at the sight of my son’s tears when he came to the realization of what he had done in his uncontrolled state. Nothing can make that holy except for the nail-scarred hands of Jesus entering that room with me and wielding the enemy’s power to one day draw my son into salvation and me nearer to the life of Christ.
Evil men who have made me feel vulnerable, afraid, used, and abused in my past were not moments God said, “This will be good for me to teach her.” I believe God was angered and grieved as a loving Father would be over his beloved daughter being hurt at the hands of wickedness. And I believe he put boundaries to those moments, which the enemy would have pushed beyond if enabled.
And as I lay in my bed in physical agony over illnesses yet to be helped, robbing me of life beyond my bed, I believe he weeps with me, even as he allows the curse of this world to ravage my body because I’m not exempt from the pain of this groaning world simply because I’m his child.
And your suffering, my friend, is just that: suffering. The loss of your child is a place of unredeemable torment apart from our Savior’s resurrection power and presence entering it with you. The physical agony that keeps you from living the life you long to live is not something “good” wrapped up in a package of pain. It’s an agony and grief that only the holy presence of God himself can bring life out of. And that pastor who spiritually led you before being exposed as a sheep in wolf’s clothing must be like a knife in God’s heart as it is in yours. And his wrath won’t be restrained forever.
Your and my suffering is not good in and of itself. It’s the taste of death in this fallen world. And we should grieve it as so.
But it’s in that very place of honest agony that we are enabled to experience the sacredness of Jesus’ nail-scarred hands entering that place of pain with us and, somehow, in a way that only he can – making hard things holy things, and evil things redeemed through his blood.
The point isn’t to come to a place of saying, “That awful thing is somehow now a good thing.”
The point is to come to a place of saying, “Only by the redemptive power of Jesus have I endured this place of death, and only by the power and presence of Jesus has he drawn me more into the presence of his life despite and through this death and decay.”
Death will be swallowed up by life.
Friends, even as I write this, I feel the limitations to my words. There are places so dark and agonizing that appear to have no sense of purpose or comfort within themselves. But somehow, with Jesus, they can also become places that are profoundly sacred as we experience the nearness of his comfort and his redemptive death-defeating power to transform hard places into holy ones.
And so we grieve and must acknowledge what feels like death, without cheapening the pain as if it’s something we should be thankful for in and of itself. But we also don’t lose heart because we will find strength, comfort, and reason to endure as Jesus enters it with us – and we find life in him, even within the depths of darkness. It’s not the pain that transforms us. It’s the presence of Jesus within the pain that transforms.
Because the truth remains – “Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction (which feels like the death it is) is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:16-18).
In the darkest places, may we one day come to find that we are standing on holy ground – not because of the pain itself, but because we’ve experienced the transforming power of Jesus within it.
Home is around the corner,
Sarah
To read more of Sarah’s writings, you can purchase a copy of He Gives More Grace: 30 Reflections for the Ups and Downs of Motherhood, Hope When It Hurts: 30 Biblical Reflections to help you grasp God’s purpose in your suffering), Tears and Tossings (short evangelistic resource on how God carries our sorrows), or Together Through the Storms (for married couples navigating the trials of life).
Set Apart 