The Suffering of God
It seems to me quite disastrous that the idea should have got about that Christianity is an other-worldly, unreal, idealistic kind of religion that suggests that if we are good we shall be happy. . . . On the contrary, it is fiercely and even harshly realistic, insisting that . . . there are certain eternal achievements that make even happiness look like trash.
—Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos?
God is sovereign over suffering and yet, in teaching unique to the Christian faith among the major religions, God also made himself vulnerable and subject to suffering. The other side of the sovereignty of God is the suffering of God himself. As Ronald Rittgers said, holding both of these together—as paradoxical as they seem at first—is crucial to grasping the unique Christian understanding of suffering. In earlier chapters, we have already learned that “the main reason that Christians insist that God can be trusted in the midst of suffering is that . . . God himself has firsthand experience of suffering.”233
We can’t overemphasize the importance of this. Rittgers and Peter Berger both identify this truth as the counterweight and the complement to the teaching that God is sovereign and uses suffering as part of his often inscrutable purposes. Yes, he is Lord of history, but he is also the vulnerable one who entered that history and became subject to its darkest forces. Yes, God often seems to be absent, but Jesus himself experienced the searing pain of that absence when he cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Yes, God is king, but is a king who came to earth and went not to a throne but to a cross. Yes, God is glorious, but there is no greater glory than this—that he laid his glory and power aside and became weak and mortal.
Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (Phil 2:6–8 ESV).
How did the sovereign God become the suffering God? The suffering of God is indicated already in the Hebrew Scriptures, long before the coming of Jesus into the world.
The Old Testament shows us a God who so deliberately sets his heart upon us that our condition affects him. In the book of Jeremiah, God speaks of Israel as “Ephraim” and says, “Is not Ephraim, my dear son, the child in whom I delight? Though I often speak against him, I still remember him. Therefore my heart yearns for him; I have great compassion for him” (Jer 31:20). In a famous outburst in Hosea 11, God cries, “How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? . . . My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused. I will not carry out my fierce anger, nor will I turn and devastate Ephraim again” (Hosea 11:8–9). Another striking example of this same theme is Genesis 6:5–6: “The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become. . . . The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain” (NIV-1984). Old Testament scholar Derek Kidner says that these are “the boldest terms, counterpoised elsewhere [in the Bible] if need be, but not weakened.”234
Kidner means that these passages of the Bible must be put alongside those that talk of God’s omnipotence, sovereignty, holiness, absolute self-sufficiency, infinity, and eternal nature. As biblical theologian Alec Motyer puts it: “The living God [is] a self-maintaining, self-sufficient reality that does not need to draw vitality from outside.”235 Put another way, God depends on no one and nothing, but everything depends on him. God does not need our love and worship. He needs nothing to complete himself, as we do. We must not look at these passages that talk of God’s emotions and grief without seeing what the rest of the Bible says; otherwise we might come up with a God as “halting . . . ever-changing, in process of growth” or needing our love.236
But we must not go to the other extreme either. Theologians sometimes have spoken of the “impassibility of God;” namely that God could not be capable of emotions, of either joy and pleasure or pain and grief.237 But this goes beyond the language and teaching of the Scripture. We must not play down the poignancy of what is said in passages like Hosea 11 and Genesis 6. “The word grieved,” Kidner writes about Genesis 6:6, “is akin to the ‘sorrow’ and ‘pain’ [inflicted on human beings for their sin] in Genesis 3:16, 17: already God suffers on man’s account.”238
We all know how heart involvement leads to suffering. The more you love someone, the more that person’s grief and pain becomes yours. And so even in the first chapters of Genesis, we see God is suffering because of our suffering, because of the misery of the world. Here we have no abstract deity, no “divine principle,” no “rational structure behind the universe.” This is not merely the “spark of divine life in every living thing.” This is a transcendent but personal God who loves us so much that his heart is filled with pain over us. That would be remarkable enough. But then there is Jesus himself.
The Suffering of God the Son
The gospels show us Jesus experiencing the ordinary pressures, difficulties, and pains of normal human life. He experienced weariness and thirst (John 4:6), distress, grief, and being “troubled in heart” (Mark 3:5; John 11:35; 12:27). His suffering was such that throughout his life he offered up prayers “with loud cries and tears” (Heb 5:7; cf. Luke 22:44). He knew what it was like to be completely misunderstood by his best friends and rejected by his family and hometown (John 7:3–5; Matt 13:57; Mark 3:21). He was also tempted and assaulted by the devil (Matt 4:2ff). And amazingly, we are told that Jesus “learned” from what he suffered (Heb 5:8). Don Carson concludes, “The God on whom we rely knows what suffering is all about, not merely in the way that God knows everything, but by experience.”239
But at the end of his life we come to the Passion, literally the sufferings of Jesus. He was abandoned, denied, and betrayed by all the people he had poured his life into, and on the cross he was forsaken even by his father (Matt 27:46). This final experience, ultimately unfathomable to us, means infinite, cosmic agony beyond the knowledge of any of us on earth. For the ultimate suffering is the loss of love, and this was the loss of an eternal, perfect love. There is nothing more difficult than the disruption and loss of family relationships, but here we see that “God knows what it is like to suffer, not just because he sees it in far greater clarity than we, but because he has personally suffered in the most severe way possible . . . the agony of loss by death, the separation from a beloved . . . [and] the disruption of his own family (the Trinity) by the immensity of his own wrath against sin.”240 That is, in order to satisfy justice, in order to punish sin so that in love he could forgive and receive us, God had to bear the penalty for sin within himself. God the Son took the punishment we deserved, including being cut off from the Father. And so God took into his own self, his own heart, an infinite agony—out of love for us.
The early-nineteenth-century Scottish preacher Robert Murray M’Cheyne stretches to give us a sense of what he called “the infinity of Christ’s sufferings” on the cross. As he reflects on Jesus’ cry that God had forsaken him, M’Cheyne writes:
He was without any comforts of God—no feeling that God loved him—no feeling that God pitied him—no feeling that God supported him. God was his sun before—now that sun became all darkness. . . . He was without God—he was as if he had no God. All that God had been to him before was taken from him now. He was Godless—deprived of his God. He had the feeling of the condemned, when the Judge says, “Depart from me, ye cursed . . . who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power.” He felt that God said the same to him. I feel like a little child casting a stone into some deep ravine in the mountain side, and listening to hear its fall—but listening all in vain. . . .
Ah! This is the hell that Christ suffered. The ocean of Christ’s sufferings is unfathomable. . . . He was forsaken in the [place] of sinners. If you close with him, as your surety, you will never be forsaken. . . . “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” [The answer?] For me—for me. The ocean of Christ’s sufferings is unfathomable.241
And yet we are not finished with what the Bible tells us about God’s suffering. In Acts 9 we have the account of the conversion of St. Paul. As a zealous Pharisee, Saul (later Paul) had been persecuting Christians. When Jesus appears to him on the road to Damascus, he asks him, “Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4). Here we see that Jesus so identifies with his people that he shares in their suffering. When they are hurt or in grief, so is he.
Sometimes the New Testament puts it the other way around and speaks about Christians sharing in Christ’s sufferings. Peter encourages his readers that when they go through the fiery trials—the furnace—Jesus is not merely spiritually present with them, “you share in Christ’s sufferings” (1 Pet 4:13; cf. Col 1:24). Peter is saying that we and he suffer together. Now, it is quite clear in the Bible that Jesus’ sufferings achieved our redemption completely, and we can contribute nothing to his saving work. That is why, when Jesus died, he said that his work was “finished”—the debt was fully paid (John 19:30). As we saw Luther argue so forcefully—our suffering does not earn or merit any salvation. Nevertheless, we can have the remarkable comfort of knowing that because we are connected by Christ through the Spirit, because we are in union with him, part of his Body, that we have “fellowship” with Jesus in his sufferings (Phil 3:10).
Perhaps the best way to understand this is to put it in the following way. Dan McCartney writes: “Christ learned humanhood from his suffering (Heb 5:8). [And therefore] we learn Christhood from our suffering.”242 Just as Jesus assumed human likeness through suffering (Heb 2:18; 4:14–15), so we can grow into Christ’s likeness through it, if we face it in faith and patience. “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor 4:16–17).
When believers in Jesus suffer, he is quite literally with us in our furnace of trouble, in some way actually feeling the flames too.
The Suffering Sovereign
These two truths must be held together as they are in the Bible—both true, not contradicting but rather complementing the other. As Don Carson and Dan McCartney point out, one error is to fall into the belief that God is not capable of emotions or suffering. This gives us a God more like a Platonic ideal than the God of the Bible. It also may undermine the historic Christian belief that Jesus was fully God while emptied of his glory and living a human life. God learned suffering by experience. On the other hand, there are an increasing number of theologians who are so glad to emphasize the suffering of God that they lose the idea of divine sovereignty, depicting God as one who is not all-powerful and not able to stop suffering in the world.243 Ronald Rittgers writes: “The idea that God has a causal relationship to adversity and misfortune is rejected by many contemporary theologians. The notion of God as co-sufferer is welcomed, but the idea of God as agent of suffering is shunned.”244
But, Rittgers adds, “the God who has no causal relationship to suffering is no God at all, certainly not the God of the Bible . . . who is both suffering and sovereign. Both beliefs were (and are) essential to the traditional Christian assertion that suffering ultimately has some meaning.”245 That is absolutely right. If God is out of control of history, then suffering is not part of any plan; it is random and senseless. This would be the secular view of things that Richard Shweder sketches. On the other hand, if God has not suffered, then how can we trust him?
In other words, it is because God is all-powerful and sovereign that his suffering is so astonishing. If God were somehow limited or out of control, his suffering would not be so radically voluntary—and therefore not so fully motivated by love. That is why the sight of God’s agony on the cross is so profoundly moving and consoling. Albert Camus writes: “In that Christ has suffered, and had suffered voluntarily, suffering was no longer unjust. . . . If everything, without exception, in heaven and earth is doomed to pain and suffering, then a strange form of happiness is possible.246 Elsewhere Camus observes: “[Christ] the god-man suffers too, with patience. Evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to him since he suffers and dies. . . . The divinity ostensibly abandoned its traditional privilege, and lived through to the end, despair included, the agony of death.”247
Peter Berger says that Camus, an “insightful critic” of Christianity, nevertheless understands the “immense religious potency” of this answer to the problem of suffering.248 If God is no exception—if even he has suffered—then we cannot say he doesn’t understand, or that his sovereignty over suffering is being exercised in a cruel and unfeeling way, or that he is a cold king who lets things happens without caring about what we are going through. As Camus argues, the cross makes it impossible to say such facile things. Since even he has not kept himself immune from our pain, we can trust him.
That leads to many rich and powerful practical implications. Because suffering is both just and unjust, we can cry out and pour out our grief, yet without the toxic additive of bitterness. Because God is both sovereign and suffering, we know our suffering always has meaning even though we cannot see it. We can trust him without understanding it all. When one of my sons was around eight years old, he began to exert his will and resist his parents’ directions. One time I told him to do something and he said, “Dad, I’ll obey you and do this—but only if first you explain to me why I should do it.” I responded something like this: “If you obey me only because it makes sense to you, then that’s not obedience, it’s just agreement. The problem is that you are too young to understand most of the reasons why I want you do to this. Do it because you are eight and I’m thirty-eight—because you are a child and I’m an adult and your father.”
We can easily see why children need to trust their parents even when they do not understand them. How much more, then, should we trust God even though we do not understand him. It is not just that the differential in wisdom between him and us is infinitely greater than the difference between a child and a parent. It is not just that he is sovereign and all-powerful. We should also trust him because he earned our trust on the cross. So we can trust him even when he hasn’t shown us yet the reason why. He is good for it.
The Final Defeat of Evil
The book of Revelation is a dizzying text, and touches on many subjects. But I have always profited from meditating on how it addresses suffering and evil.
In chapter 6, the author John has a vision of “the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained” (Rev 6:9). These are people who had been unjustly put to death for their faith. They cry out for justice, asking God, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth . . . ?” (Rev 6:10). This is an agonized cry that has echoed down the years throughout the books of the Bible. “How long, Lord, will you look on? Rescue me from their ravages” (Ps 35:17). “Where is the God of justice?” (Mal 2:17). “Why do you tolerate the treacherous? Why are you silent while the wicked swallow up the righteous?” (Hab 1:13).
But theologian Louis Berkhof writes: “The Bible teaches us to look forward to a final judgment as the decisive answer of God to all such questions, as the solution of all such problems, and as the removal of all the apparent discrepancies of the present.” Berkhof then lists passages such as Matthew 25:31–46, John 5:27–29, Romans 2:5–11, and Revelation 20:11–15, which speak of the “great white throne” and all people who ever lived, “great and small,” standing before the throne with the “books opened” and every person judged with justice. “These passages,” says Berkhof, “do not refer to a process, but to a very definite event at the end of time.”249
However, the Bible does not merely tell us that evil is punished, as important as that is. In our world, sometimes evildoers are caught and brought to justice, but while we can punish evil, we cannot undo evil. Imprisoning or executing murderers, for example, cannot bring back the dead they killed or repair the lives they have ruined. But the book of Revelation promises much more than a Judgment Day. Berkhof tells us that Judgment Day is “accompanied by . . . the coming of Jesus Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the renewal of heaven and earth.”250
In Revelation 5, John has a vision of God sitting on a throne with a sealed scroll in his hand. Many scholars have agreed that this scroll is “the meaning and purpose of history, the great plan of God for all time.” It is sealed with seven seals, and John begins to weep because it appears to him that no one has the ability to open the scroll, that is, “to interpret and carry out the plan of God.”251 But then he hears others tell him not to weep, for “a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain” (Rev 5:6), stands forth and opens the scroll seal after seal. And why is he able to share the throne and open the scroll? It is because of his redemptive suffering. The song goes:
You are worthy to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
because you were slain,
and with your blood you purchased for God
persons from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God,
and they will reign on the earth (Rev 5:9–10).
Over the next few chapters, the seals are opened and great judgments are carried out, exercises in immense power. Inexorably, we move toward Judgment Day and the renewal of all things. And now we see what at first looks simply like an irony. The New Testament shows us that virtually every kind of evil was thrown at Jesus at the end of his life. He was abandoned, betrayed, and denied by friends. He was handed over by a fickle mob. He was given a sham trial and was tortured and killed, a victim of injustice. On display was the whole range of sin and malevolence—cowardice, lies, vested interests, nationalism and racism, corrupt religious and political institutions, and behind it all the power of Satan himself (John 13:27). Christopher Wright sums it up: “The cross was the worst that human [and non-human] evil and rebellion against God could do.”252
But look how it backfired. Who is opening the seals on the scroll and carrying out judgments against the forces of darkness? A wounded lamb! That is hardly a figure we would associate with strength and power, and that is the whole point. The Bible says that at the very moment Jesus was dying on the cross, he was “disarming the powers . . . triumphing over them by the cross” (Col 2:15). Through his death, he absorbed the curse for human disobedience (Gal 3:10–14) and so defeated sin and death and the evil forces behind them. For those who are “in Christ Jesus . . . there is no condemnation” (Rom 8:1)—death has no more ultimate claim on us. And so it is a wounded lamb who now is able not simply to judge wrongdoing but actually to undo the damage that evil has wreaked on the creation.
This is not just an irony—this is the ultimate strategy for the defeat of evil. Without the suffering of Jesus, evil wins. It results in the destruction of the entire human race. It is only Jesus’ suffering that makes it possible to end suffering—to judge and renew the world—without having to destroy us. Theologian Henri Blocher says that here we come to “the threshold of the secret and hidden wisdom,” the deepest look we have into the mystery of how the cross of Jesus answers the problem of evil.253
Blocher, in his book Evil and the Cross, argues that if evil were purely “local”—“an imperfection in every finite being”—Christ could have simply come to teach people a different way. If evil were, on the other hand, only some entity—some external force in the universe—then “it would have been sufficient to deploy a superior force against it.”254 But evil is neither simply the result of flawed individuals nor merely of a single powerful being like the devil. It stems from both as well as from the effects of a corrupted created order. And ultimately we can’t see all the roots and sources of evil—it is a mystery.
But we can see this—at the cross, evil is “turned back on itself.” Or, as John Calvin expressed it, on the cross, destruction was destroyed, “torment tormented, damnation damned . . . death dead, mortality made immortal.”255 Blocher writes:
At the cross evil is conquered as evil. . . . Evil is conquered as evil because God turns it back upon itself. He makes the supreme crime, the murder of the only righteous person, the very operation that abolishes sin. The manoeuvre is utterly unprecedented. No more complete victory could be imagined. . . . God entraps the deceiver in his own wiles. Evil, like a judoist, [tries to] take advantage of the power of the good, which it perverts; the Lord, like a supreme champion, replies by using the very grip of the opponent.256
This is certainly the ultimate defeat of evil, for this strategy used evil’s own weight and force against it as, Blocher says, in judo. He goes on: “This . . . sin of sins, the murder of the Son . . . provides the opportunity for love to be carried to its very peak, for there is no greater love than to give one’s life for one’s friends (John 15:13).” Evil is defeated because God uses it to bring about its very opposite—courage, faithfulness, selfless sacrifice, forgiveness. But there’s more. The cross doesn’t simply provide an inspiring example of love. “The requirement of [justice] . . . that evil be punished by death . . . permits our Brother and Head to intervene in love and take over the debt in place of the guilty party. . . . At the cross, evil is conquered by the ultimate degree of love in the fulfillment of justice.”257 Blocher concludes by rightly claiming that this Christian answer to evil is both more optimistic and more pessimistic than the alternatives—at once:
We have no other position than at the foot of the cross. After we have been there we are given the answer of the wisdom of God, which incenses the advocates of optimistic theodicies or of tragic philosophies. God’s answer is evil turned back upon itself, conquered by the ultimate degree of love in the fulfillment of justice. This answer consoles us and summons us. It allows us to wait for the coming of the crucified conqueror. He will wipe away the tears from every face, soon.258
So, while Christianity never claims to be able to offer a full explanation of all God’s reasons behind every instance of evil and suffering—it does have a final answer to it. That answer will be given at the end of history and all who hear it and see its fulfillment will find it completely satisfying, infinitely sufficient. Dostoevsky expressed this as well as anyone ever has when he wrote:
I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.259
No More Tears
Henri Blocher is right to look to both the past and the future here. The cross secured the defeat of evil in the past, on Calvary, but now it also guarantees a final experience of that defeat in the future, in the renewal of all things, when every tear will be wiped away. In the vision of St. John, even before the opening of the seals, it is said:
never again will they thirst.
The sun will not beat down on them,
nor any scorching heat.
For the Lamb at the center of the throne
will be their shepherd;
he will lead them to springs of living water.
And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes (Rev 7:16–17).
The climax of the book of Revelation depicts the “new heaven and new earth” (Rev 21:1). There will “no longer be any curse” (Rev 22:3)—the curse that fell on creation at the Fall is lifted. And as a result, “he will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev 21:4). This is poetic language of course, but the message is clear. There will be no more evil, suffering, sin, or pain. The suffering of Jesus has ended suffering.
As we observed before, the Bible teaches that the future is not an immaterial “paradise” but a new heaven and a new earth. Matthew 19:28 and Acts 3:21 speak of the “regeneration” or “restoration of all things.” Peter says that we look for the day in which we will have a new heaven and new earth (2 Pet 3:13), and Paul teaches that the creation will gloriously be liberated from its bondage to decay and death (Rom 8:19–22).
It is this new world that John saw in his vision in Revelation 21 and 22. Here ultimately, Christianity holds out a hope unlike any other. The secular view sees no future good of any kind, and other religions believe in an eternity or heaven that is a consolation for the losses and pain of this life and all the joys that might have been. But as we have said, Christianity offers not merely a consolation but a restoration—not just of the life we had but of the life we always wanted but never achieved. And because the joy will be even greater for all that evil, this means the final defeat of all those forces that would have destroyed the purpose of God in creation, namely, to live with his people in glory and delight forever.
by Andi
I dropped to my knees when I got to the side of my bed. It was time to end the day, but I couldn’t yet. The ring had to come off. It was time.
That afternoon, a judge had declared my divorce final. Though the demise of our marriage had appeared inevitable for a while, I hadn’t stopped wearing my wedding ring, a symbol of my confidence that no matter how hopeless things looked, God could turn them around in an instant. But now here I was, thirty years later, kneeling alone by the side of my bed. I sobbed, but it wasn’t the sorrow. I dissolved as these images were eclipsed by an overwhelming awareness of God’s faithfulness to me through it all. Never had I felt abandoned by him. Confused by his allowing life to be excruciatingly hard for so long when I knew he could restore? Yes. On the verge of complete mental, emotional, and physical collapse at times? Yes. Like I had lost my bearings spiritually? Yes.
In fact, one night it all came to a head and I experienced a true spiritual crisis. Where was this God I had been counting on? Was he real? If he was, did he care? I was in no shape to compose an articulate prayer. There was a lot of sobbing and groaning. When I could form words, I cried out, “I could never watch someone I love suffer like this and not stop it! You say you love me, but I can’t square that with what I see happening. This feels cruel. I’ve got to know you are who you say you are or I cannot go on.” I didn’t need to know his reasons . . . I needed Him.
The next morning, wise words from a trusted friend came to me: “Andi, you need to force-feed yourself the Scriptures. Through them the Holy Spirit can speak to places in your heart where human words just can’t reach.”
I needed to be touched that deeply, so the next morning I opened my Bible. My eyes fell on these words in Psalms: “You, O God, are strong, and you, O Lord, are loving.” They came like smelling salts to my fainting heart, silencing torturous fear and doubt. My heart was infused with a deep assurance that He loved me and was very near. I was immediately steadied. It didn’t matter anymore that I couldn’t square this with what I saw unfolding in my life.
Kneeling by my bed that night, my heart broke, unable to contain my gratitude for God’s persistent love through a mess that should have driven him away. . . . Instead he came closer than ever.
As I slipped the ring off, a prayer poured from my heart. “Now I want to give you the devotion I thought I would be giving to an earthly husband. You alone are worthy of my whole heart’s trust, and it’s yours for the rest of my life.”
How could a vow of such loving trust pour from a heart that had just lost so much . . . and be made to the One who had been my only hope? The only explanation is that while so much was dying, something was coming to life.
I had been changed by the experience of this unstoppable love constantly moving toward me when I was coming to him with nothing to offer but weakness, confusion, and need. I cannot adequately explain what happened. I just know that, in the end, this prayer was the only possible response.
As I got up off my knees and climbed into bed, I thought, I should get myself a new ring to remind me of this vow I’ve made to the Lord tonight.
The next morning, I met with a group of women with whom I had been meeting weekly for prayer. We never talked a lot about what we were going to pray for, we just prayed.
During the time of silence with which we always began, I noticed one of them coming over and kneeling in front of my chair. She took a ring off her finger, held it out to me, and said, “I feel like the Lord wants you to have this ring. He wants you to know that you are his beloved, and he is betrothing himself to you for the rest of your life. He will be your protector and provider. He will never leave you or forsake you. He will be with you forever.” The ring she handed me was much more beautiful and valuable than any ring I would have gotten myself. I had mentioned nothing about getting a new ring.
I can’t tell you how many times, in the years since, a glance at that ring calmed my fear, filled my loneliness, and comforted me in grief.
I wanted a ring to remind me of my commitment to the Lord. Instead, I ended up with one that will forever remind me of his commitment to me.