Suffering. How can one small word hold so much complexity? It can elicit fear, dread, anxiety, bitterness, anger, and panic. It can also stir up courage, strength, growth, humility, and faith.
Suffering is so painfully complex that we struggle to find answers to it, yet it demands answers nonetheless. Which is why, I believe, we often grasp at any answer we can surmise to make sense of our pain.
God must want to teach me something.
Maybe I’m being disciplined for unconfessed sin.
It’s because my faith isn’t strong enough.
God must want to turn my pain into a ministry.
He’s allowing it so he can show his miraculous healing power.
It’s not wrong to consider how God might use our suffering. But one of our greatest temptations is so quickly trying to find a greater purpose for our pain that we downplay the reason we feel it in the first place. Suffering, in a sense, is a taste of death. It’s the sting of sin within us and around us. We do ourselves a disservice when we too quickly gloss over the pain. Until we acknowledge the true grief, we can’t truly appreciate how Jesus enters into it with us and brings redemption into the broken places of our lives.
Hard Things Can Become Holy Things
Although we desperately want to assign meaning to our suffering, John Andrew Bryant poignantly explains, “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.” By Christ “enduring, bearing, and overcoming” our suffering, Bryant explains, hard things can become holy things.
My son hurting others during frequent fits of rage caused by neurodivergence that he had no control over for more than a decade wasn’t somehow good. Times when evil men made me feel vulnerable, afraid, used, and abused in my past weren’t situations to discover a “silver lining”. As I continue to battle years of a debilitating physical illness, robbing me of the life I long to live, my anguish and pain is reason enough to let the tears of sadness fall. But these hard things can become holy things as Jesus enters that suffering with me, drawing me nearer to his presence, giving me his comfort and strength, and making me more like him.
And your suffering, too, is just that: suffering. The loss of your child, the terminal diagnosis, the unfair treatment, the broken marriage, and the loved one’s mental or physical decline—they’re all places of unredeemable heartache apart from our Savior’s resurrection power and presence. Our suffering isn’t good in and of itself. It’s a taste of death, and we should grieve it as such. In this place of honest dealings, we’re able to experience the sacredness of Jesus’s nail-scarred hands entering that pain with us and, in a way that only he can, Jesus makes hard things holy things and evil things redeemed things through his blood.
Transformed by Presence, Not Pain
The point isn’t to come to a place of saying, “That awful thing is somehow now a good thing.” It’s to say, “Only by the redemptive power and presence of Jesus have I endured this place of death and been drawn more into the presence of Jesus’ life.”
So we grieve and acknowledge our suffering without cheapening the pain as if it’s something we should call good in and of itself. But we also don’t lose heart, because we’ll find strength, comfort, and reason to endure as Jesus enters it with us. We find life in him even within the depths of darkness.
It’s not the pain that transforms us. It’s Jesus’s presence in the pain. The truth Paul shared with the Corinthian church remains true for us:
Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction 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 find we’re standing on holy ground, not because of the pain but because we’ve experienced Jesus’s transforming power in it.
- Do you quickly look for answers or a purpose for pain when suffering comes in your life or the lives of others? Why do you think?
- Do you believe God gives us permission to lament and grieve what pain has stolen? I encourage you to read through the Psalms if you aren’t sure.
- What’s one circumstance that you can bring honestly to the Lord, acknowledging the questions, fears, grief, anger, concerns, etc that it has stirred in you? It’s not until you’re honest about reality that you can truly apply the balm of God’s truth to those unsettling places.
- In what ways have you experienced loss and sorrow that seemed pointless at the time, but you can now see how God met you there with his presence and comfort?
This week, I encourage you to meditate on Matthew 5:4 and Psalm 55:22. These verses remind us that we don’t need to rush to spiritualizing our burdens, suffering, and sorrows. Instead, we can be honest about the pain they bring as we cry out to the Lord. We grieve them because he grieves them. But in faith, as we bring our pain to him in search of his comfort, he promises to sustain us, and in time, his presence will breathe redemption into pain that would otherwise be pointless.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Matthew 5:4
“Cast your burden on the Lord,
and he will sustain you;
he will never allow the righteous to be shaken.” Psalm 55:22
Home is around the corner,
Sarah Walton
Stay up-to-date and subscribe to future devotionals at Sarah’s Substack publication, Deep Well of Hope, HERE. (This is a sample of that publication that will not continue being shared on this page.
To read more of Sarah’s writings, you can pick up 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). Lastly, you can now order Sarah’s Pilgrim’s Progress inspired children’s book based on the account of the Prodigal Son, titled “The Long Road Home” (Crossway).
Set Apart 