four
From the Dust

God enters into our suffering to blaze a redemption path out. But it still hurts. Suffering always hurts.

Sometimes suffering hurts like the word nonviable ricocheting with violence around the inside of an examination room, or the eruption of wailing that comes after.

Sometimes suffering hurts like applying lipstick and waterproof mascara before walking up the steps to a baby shower so you can fake-smile your way through “guess the baby food” with other grown women, eating puréed peas from tiny jars like it’s no big deal.

Sometimes suffering hurts like crying through the worship set at church or packing up the baby clothes you had so carefully washed and folded.

Sometimes suffering hurts like celebrating someone else’s miracle while resisting the urge to covet it as your own.

Sometimes suffering hurts loudly: sobbing and snotting in the back of a Target parking lot. And sometimes suffering hurts silently: heavy, empty arms and phantom kicks under the cover of nighttime.

Sometimes suffering hurts like aborted dreams—you weren’t just expecting a baby, you were expecting forever.

The world is not yet as it should be.

He Sees. He Hears.

In Genesis 16 we see the messy story of two women caught in the crossfire of infertility and grief. Sarai, married to Abram (whom we’ll later know as Sarah and Abraham), is unable to have a child. As was common practice during the time of the patriarchs, Sarai gave her servant Hagar to Abram in order that he may have a child and heir through her. When Hagar got pregnant, she became smug, spurring Sarai to burn with jealousy and lash out in abuse.

Hagar fled, finding herself alone, despised, and desperate. We can only imagine what she must have felt as she huddled in the dirt: What had she done to deserve this maltreatment? Wasn’t this whole situation grossly out of her control? Was she not justified after being forced to make her womb available for someone else’s husband?

This thing—this baby—she thought to be a blessing now felt like a curse as her life lay in shambles.

Then an angel of God breaks through her anguish, delivering a promise: God has seen her heartache and will make her son into a great nation. “You are to name him Ishmael (which means ‘God hears’), for the LORD has heard your cry of distress,” the angel says, encouraging her to return to her master (Gen. 16:11).

“You are the God who sees me,” Hagar cries out in response (v. 13). The descriptive word for God Hagar uses here in the Hebrew is El Roi, meaning the God Who Sees.1

Is it an accident that the only time we see El Roi—the God Who Sees—used as a name for God in the entire Bible is here, in the middle of this slave woman’s disaster? Infertility, jealousy, abuse, rage, unbelief, confusion, alienation, despair. At the bottom of this cesspool of awful circumstances beyond her control, Hagar is reassured that God sees her.

And isn’t that what we all want? To know God sees us and doesn’t look away from our pain or turn his back when our life is coming apart at the seams? To know he notices the injustice and the agony? To know he’s listening when we cry out in misery, in lament?

In a few short lines we see God’s reassurance that he sees and he hears. It’s a display of profound presence for the moment, and a promise pregnant with hope for the future.

This same God—El Roi—is the one who meets us in our grief too. Hagar’s problems aren’t magically diffused through this encounter. In fact, she’s sent straight back into them. But she goes fueled with hope—a reimagined vision for the future.

Can you perceive it, friends—this hope? Do you dare believe God is present in your pain, holding something hopeful for your future too?

Christian lament always comes laced with the hope that although things are not as they should be, they will be.

We collapse in the dust,

lying face down in the dirt.

Rise up! Help us!

Ransom us because of your unfailing love.

(Ps. 44:25–26)

Even there in the dust, God is present. He sees. He hears. And he will not leave us in the wilderness to die.

But forget all that—

it is nothing compared to what I am going to do.

For I am about to do something new.

See, I have already begun! Do you not see it?

I will make a pathway through the wilderness.

I will create rivers in the dry wasteland. (Isa. 43:18–19)

The Incarnation Is God’s Answer to Suffering

“Who can take away suffering without entering it?” Henri Nouwen asks.2

In the Gospel of John we learn that there was a time when all was dark. But before that: Christ Jesus. Everything that now exists does so by his word. Where we see light, it’s because of him. He is light and life itself, and in him there is no darkness.3

Eugene Peterson says that Jesus “became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.”4 This wasn’t just an intervention to fix something broken and be on his way to solve the next cosmic problem. This was incarnation—full immersion into our earthly reality. Jesus moved in. He was reborn into human form so he could make our home his—humanity and divinity, born right into the middle of our suffering.

It was, and is, a miracle.

God’s answer to our human condition was to become a part of it.5

We didn’t recognize him though. And to prove we didn’t recognize him, we kept right on confusing the source of our darkness with the source of our light. (We’re still doing it today—blaming our good God for works of evil.) We couldn’t, and can’t, see clearly through our own lofty opinions about what a Messiah should look like.

But rather than coming with the law to correct us, Jesus showed us what Love looks like instead.6

The incarnation demonstrates two important things about how God relates to us in our suffering: He is present with us in it and he is moved with compassion to alleviate it.

Empathy means to stand with someone in their pain, to bear witness, to hold space, to adopt their frame of reference, or—to use the well-known cliché—to put yourself in their shoes. It’s the ministry of presence, embodiment, identification, solidarity. It’s the willingness to weep with the brokenhearted.

When Jesus met Mary and Martha after the death of their brother, Lazarus, their agony moved him to tears. John 11:35 lays it out with poignant simplicity:

“Jesus wept.”

This word for “wept,” dakruó, is used only once in the entire Bible to describe the quiet tears that fell that day.7

Imagine that—tears shed, a demonstration of empathy, emotion, and pain—juxtaposed next to Jesus, whose name means Yahweh is salvation.8 Let this sink deep: The God of our salvation also sheds tears over our pain. He is power and presence, the lion and the lamb.9 His ability to encompass it all is staggering.

When Mary and others were weeping, a different word is used, klaió, which means audible grief, weeping aloud, and weeping fueled by mourning.10 Though Jesus didn’t mourn the death of Lazarus (because he knew resurrection was coming), he was moved to tears by the pain of his friends.

Jesus enters our lament and weeps for our pain. He bears witness to our suffering. He sees us crumpled at his feet, hears our wailing, and draws near.11

When you started to bleed, when you repeated those words “no heartbeat” to your husband, when you were wheeled into the operating theater, when you looked your three-year-old in the eye and told him the baby was dead, when you cried yourself to sleep, Jesus was there. He wept.

The LORD is close to the brokenhearted. (Ps. 34:18)

God’s presence brings comfort, but, miraculously, this “withness” in our suffering also moves him to act.

Out of the Darkness

“What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?”12

When Valerie Kaur offered this poetic metaphor at an interfaith gathering, my heart leapt at the possibility. I couldn’t help but see Jesus—whose creative power brings life out of death—between the lines of her prayer.

Like you, I have experienced a great darkness. My miscarriages exposed me to a depth of sorrow that, at times, felt like a tomb. Dark, closed, suffocating—holding within its walls an invitation to hopelessness.

But what if instead of looking at our brokenness as a tomb we see it as a womb—a place of formation and preparation for new life—even there in the suffering? What if suffering creates a cavern within us that makes room for God to form something new? What if it can enlarge our soul to make space for something bigger? What if death must precede a resurrection?

I realize this metaphor might be painful for you and me, but it’s here among this darkness that the possibility for something new rests. Our bodies may have turned a womb into a tomb, but God turns death inside out. He makes our tomb into a womb—a place of resurrection, formation, and preparation for new life.

God did not lead you into this present suffering, but he has promised he’ll stay with you there. He’s promised to mend every broken thing. This is the hope of resurrection.

The incarnation shows us his presence, but it also answers our cry for deliverance.

Jesus: Man of Suffering, Man of Compassion

Throughout the Gospels, we see how Jesus was “moved with compassion” by the lament of those laboring under pain. Compassion comes from a Latin word meaning “co-suffering,” or “to suffer with,” and carries with it a sense of movement to alleviate.13

We see this compassion—this “suffering with”—moving Jesus to miraculous action all through his public ministry.

Jesus suffered with us (was “moved with compassion”) when we were hungry, and so he fed us.14 He suffered with us when we were blind, and so he made us see.15 He suffered with us when we didn’t know where to turn for help, and so became our help.16 He suffered with us when we were oppressed by evil spirits, and so delivered us.17 Through storytelling he taught us about “suffering with” during the long wait to welcome back those who had abandoned us.18 He taught us to suffer with those facing the consequences of sin and to use our power to extend mercy and forgiveness, even though they hadn’t earned it.19

The Greek word for compassion used in these passages, splagchnizomai, is sometimes also translated as “to show pity” or “to extend mercy.”20 While we may think of pity as having negative connotations (i.e., “self-pity” or “pity party”), we see in the Gospels that whenever Jesus is described as having compassion or pity, it always moved him to alleviate suffering. It was a form of love in action—a foreshadowing, even, of what he was to do on the cross.

Christian compassion is more than a feeling; it’s the beginning of a movement to right what’s been wrong. The root of the word also means “from the bowel,” which denotes the source as coming from deep within the human heart. In all of these examples Jesus was moved deeply to enter into our suffering and birth a miracle there.

His Promise in Our Suffering

When we read these stories of Jesus today, do we forget that this man among our pages is God himself—this God who suffers with us and is moved to alleviate our suffering? Jesus was—and is—the full representation of the Father.21 He’s the clearest picture we have of God, but sometimes we still forget.

Sometimes we see him and think he’s the “nice guy” who’s covering for a God we can’t understand. We claim “God’s ways are higher than our ways”22 and accuse him of causing or allowing us to suffer, despite the incarnation that shows us the exact opposite is true: God himself was born into our mess so he could turn it upside down.

He didn’t make the mess. He didn’t “allow” the mess. He overturned it and redeemed it.

Suffering can be the exact thing that brings you into deeper communion with Christ because that’s how redemption works: It uses the foolish to confound the wise. It turns ashes into beauty. It makes dead things come alive. It lights up the dark with his light. It brings about good from what was started by evil.

This is our promise for suffering: In our deepest anguish, he is there, present. And at the bottom of our sorrow, he is working to make all things new. We may not see the resolution of this promise in the ways or time frame we’d like, but that doesn’t negate his redemption plan: resurrection, new life, no more tears, the hope of heaven.

Don’t ever think you’ve been abandoned in your pain. Don’t ever think he will allow it to be wasted. Don’t ever think your tomb can’t be reworked and transformed to birth life. Don’t ever think your lament is in vain. Don’t ever think hope is dead.

He is present, weeping with you. He is active, shaping history toward ultimate redemption. Resurrection doesn’t render death as inconsequential; it means that death doesn’t have the final word.

Our Astonishing Hope

Friend, the Bible is full of astonishing hope for you and me as we suffer under the burden of our heartbreak and loss.

Paul tells us that nothing, not even our suffering, can separate us from God’s love.23 We are loved, completely. And held, strongly.

Jesus tells us we can have peace in our suffering.24 He will overcome every hint of sorrow and death. His promises aren’t empty.

James tells us suffering is an opportunity for growth and that help is available to us as we need it.25 Our infinitely creative God will never stop creating life from dust—no suffering is wasted. This, too, can become our blessing and even a pathway to joy.

Peter tells us we’ll be restored after our suffering26 and Paul tells us that what’s ahead defies our wildest imagination.27 Suffering is not the end of our story.

God didn’t take your baby, and he didn’t specifically “allow” your baby to die either. Death entered the world through the free will of humankind. Life entered, again, through Jesus Christ.

Be assured, friend, that even your most awful sorrow is not beyond his redemptive reach. He can, does, and will draw near to you in your suffering; he can, does, and will bring meaning to it. He’ll release his grace to the exact measure you need and will use every means possible to redeem your broken heart.28 This is his promise.

When you go through deep waters,

I will be with you.

When you go through rivers of difficulty,

you will not drown.

When you walk through the fire of oppression,

you will not be burned up;

the flames will not consume you. (Isa. 43:2)

Suffering may weaken you, but let it also awaken you as you open your heart to hope, possibility, and presence. May you find yourself in his love and let your belovedness inform your response to suffering.

During the next section we’ll spend several chapters looking at the nature of grief, how to cope with and grow through your grief, and how to relate to others during your grieving journey. As we do so, take this assurance with you: God is present in our suffering, and grief doesn’t have to become our undoing. You are not alone, and your story isn’t over.

Part II
Invitation

Journal Prompt: Read through the Gospel of John chapter 1 slowly, several times, prayerfully letting the story and ideas sink into your mind and spirit. As you read it three or four times, you may begin to notice a verse or two “pop out” at you. Focus in on those few lines. Chew on them, savor them. What is God trying to say to you about his presence in your brokenness? Have you felt like God has seen and heard you in your distress? Write out why or why not. Ask God to help you imagine where he was when you first learned of your miscarriage and write it down. (Imagination is a gift from God—allow him to use it for his purposes!) Ask God to show you where he is now. Write out what you see, feel, sense, or imagine.