Learning to Walk
We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one can make for us, which no one can spare us.
Marcel Proust296
What about Our Glory?
We must not waste our sorrows, and according to the Bible, one set of purposes and uses for suffering has to do with the glory of God. Suffering reveals, communicates, and imparts God’s glory as nothing else does. God’s glory of course is perfect and therefore it cannot be increased. But it can, as the psalmists so often say, be “magnified.” If God is treated as God during suffering, then suffering can reveal and present him in all his greatness.
But Paul says that suffering also prepares a glory for us. “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Cor 4:17). And so we ask, How does suffering benefit us? Before we can answer that question, we must consider what the Bible teaches us about the whole issue of what today is called self-improvement. There is a principle at the heart of the Christian life that is expressed by two famous sayings of Jesus Christ:
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” (Matt 5:6).
“Whoever finds their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for my sake will find it” (Matt 10:39).
In the first Jesus is saying, “Happy is the one who seeks not happiness but righteousness.” Happiness is a by-product of wanting something more than happiness—to be rightly related to God and our neighbor. If you seek God as the nonnegotiable good of your life, you will get happiness thrown in. If, however, you aim mainly at personal happiness, you will get neither. The same principle is conveyed in the second saying. If you are willing to lose your life for his sake—if you are willing to set aside personal safety, comfort, and satisfaction in order to obey and follow Jesus—then in the end you will find yourself. You will discover who you really are in Christ and finally come to be at peace. If instead you try to achieve personal comfort and satisfaction without centering your life on God in Christ, you will find that you are left with a fatal lack of self-knowledge and inner emptiness.
This could not be more contradictory to our Western culture of expressive individualism. And it applies directly to how Christians face suffering. As we have seen, we should trust God because he is God and not our personal assistant or life coach. We should trust him because it is his due, he is worthy of it, not because it will get us something. If we love and obey God for his own sake, not ours, it begins to turn us into something strong and great and wise. If we don’t seek to find ourselves but to find God, we will eventually find both God and ourselves. “Aim at heaven and you get earth ‘thrown in’—aim [only] at earth and you get neither.”297
How does Jesus’ principle work? Seeing and embracing God as he truly is makes us wise, for it gets us in touch with reality. Just as turning the lights on in a dark room enables you to walk without bumping into things, seeing the justice, greatness, sovereignty, wisdom, and love of God prevents you from stumbling through life in bitterness, pride, anxiety, and discouragement. If, then, we seek not our own benefit but God’s glory, it will lead paradoxically to a development of our own glory, that is, of our character, humility, hope, love, joy, and peace.
Suffering, as we will see, can lead to personal growth, training, and transformation, but we must never see it as primarily a way to improve ourselves. That view could lead us to a form of masochism, an enjoyment of ache, because we only feel virtuous when we are in pain. Even without such perspective, suffering tends to make you self-absorbed. If it is seen as mainly about you and your own growth, it will strangle you truly. Instead, we must look at suffering—whatever the proximate causes—as primarily a way to know God better, as an opening for serving, resembling, and drawing near to him as never before.
It is only if we make God’s glory primary in suffering that it will achieve our own. And yet sorrows and difficulties can do just that. We are called not to waste our sorrows but to grow through them into grace and glory.
Productive Suffering
Within the Western secular view of things, suffering is seen as an interruption of the freedom to live as makes you happiest. The circumstances that cause suffering and the negative emotions that go with it must be removed or minimized and managed. Psychologist James Davies knows he will get resistance when he talks instead of “productive suffering.” Like Richard Shweder, he points to the many anthropological studies that show how non-Western cultures believe “suffering helps us apprehend new portions of reality.”298 In his book The Importance of Suffering, he critiques what he believes is the majority position among Western therapists, namely that suffering should be treated by helping the patient remove or manage the negative feelings that adversity brings. He writes, however, “It is a clinical mistake to interpret a patient who suffers from ‘low self-esteem’ or a ‘sense of incompetence’ or ‘feelings of worthlessness’ as simply suffering from . . . ‘distorted thinking patterns’ or ‘thinking errors.’”299
Then how should suffering be approached? Davies goes on to make a radical suggestion. What if your negative thoughts about yourself are actually right? “The feeling of being ‘cowardly,’” he writes, “may be less a symptom of ‘faulty thinking’ than an accurate appraisal of part of us that is cowardly. This makes the distress that accompanies our self-appraisal not only a perfectly natural response to encountering our cowardice, but also a necessary prerequisite for changing it.”300 So suffering can lead us to see a significant lack of courage in our character.
Or suffering may also show us a streak of selfishness. Davies points out studies that show “low self-esteem” is far from a universal problem. He points to the research of psychologists demonstrating that many people, instead of being plagued with low self-esteem, “are so infected with self-love that they are unable to love others . . . [and] cannot see beyond the horizon of their own needs and concerns. They are therefore unable to put themselves to one side and empathize with the needs and pains of others—their reality is best so all should adapt to it.”301
With an even more countercultural impulse, Davies claims that people who have been through depression can become wiser and more realistic about life than those who have not. He presents a number of studies that show that people who have never been depressed tend to overestimate the amount of control they have over their lives. While severely depressed people are debilitated, in general an experience of depression can give you a more accurate appraisal of your own limitations and how much influence you can have over your circumstances. Quoting one of the researchers, Dr. Paul Keedwell, he writes:
The prevailing view is . . . that the depressed person tends to distort reality in a negative way. . . . [But recent research has] turned this received wisdom on its head, providing evidence that it is not the depressive who distorts reality but the so-called healthy population. . . . Even if depression does distort reality in a negative way . . . the fact remains that it removes the positive self-biases that are seen in the non-depressed. . . . With recovery [from depression], and with the lifting of the mood, a new kind of truth could emerge.302
Davies, Jonathan Haidt, and others who argue for the benefits of adversity, are quick to point out that suffering does not automatically improve your life. Haidt speaks of two basic ways to cope with it—what he calls “active coping and reappraisal” and “avoidance coping and denial.”303 The latter strategy can lead to disaster, for it includes “working to blunt one’s emotional reactions by denying or avoiding the events, or by drinking, drugs, and other distractions.” The former strategy can lead to real gains, as it combines doing the hard inner work of learning and growing with seeking to change the painful external circumstances. Put another way, Haidt and Davies distinguish steadily walking through suffering from standing still, lying down, or just running away from it.
The stakes are high here. Suffering will either leave you a much better person or a much worse one than you were before. Haidt explains that those who work harder to manage their pain than to confront and learn from their suffering can become bitter and hopeless. Concluding that the world is completely unjust, that life is totally uncontrollable, and that things usually work out for the worst, “they weave this lesson into their life story where it contaminates the narrative.”304 So the wrong strategy will usually mean that one’s character becomes weaker and less integrated while the right approach to suffering can lead to remarkable growth. Trials and troubles in life, which are inevitable, will either make you or break you. But either way, you will not remain the same.
How God Uses Suffering
The Bible explains and confirms the findings of psychologists such as Haidt and Davies. In a host of New Testament passages—Hebrews 12:1–17; Romans 8:18–30; 2 Corinthians 1:3–12, and 4:7–5:5, 11:24–12:10, as well as nearly all of 1 Peter—the Bible teaches us that God uses suffering to remove our weaknesses and build us up.
First, suffering transforms our attitude toward ourselves. It humbles us and removes unrealistic self-regard and pride. It shows us how fragile we are. As Davies points out, average people in Western society have extremely unrealistic ideas of how much control they have over how their lives go. Suffering removes the blinders. It does not so much make us helpless and out of control as it shows us we have always been vulnerable and dependent on God. Suffering merely helps us wake up to that fact and live in accordance with it.
Suffering also leads us to examine ourselves and see weaknesses, because it brings out the worst in us. Our weak faith, sharp tongues, laziness, insensitivity to people, worry, bitter spirit, and other weaknesses in character will become evident to us (and others) in hard times. Some of us are too abrasive, critical, and ungenerous. Some are impulsive and impatient. Others are argumentative, stubborn, and poor listeners. Many people have a great need to control every situation. Some are simply too fragile and self-pitying when discomfited over anything. Suffering will throw these inner flaws into relief during times of stress in a way that enables us to get out of denial and to begin working on them.
Second, suffering will profoundly change our relationship to the good things in our lives. We will see that some things have become too important to us. When we are devastated by a career reversal, there is real loss and grief. But we may also come to see that the magnitude of our suffering is due to the excessive weight we put on our job status or other achievements for our own self-worth. The reversal can be a unique opportunity to invest more of our hope and meaning in God and family and others. This effectively fortifies us against being too cast down by future reversals. It also brings us new sources of joy we were not tapping before.
Third, and most of all, suffering can strengthen our relationship to God as nothing else can. C. S. Lewis’s famous dictum is true, that in prosperity God whispers to us but in adversity he shouts to us. Suffering is indeed a test of our connection to God. It can certainly tempt us to be so angry at God and at life that we have no desire to pray. Yet it also has the resources to greatly deepen our divine friendship. It starts with analysis. When times are good, how do you know if you love God or just love the things he is giving you or doing for you? You don’t, really. In times of health and prosperity, it is easy to think you have a loving relationship to God. You pray and do your religious duties since it is comforting and seems to be paying off. But it is only in suffering that we can hear God “shouting” a set of questions at us: “Were things all right between us as long as I waited on you hand and foot? Did you get into this relationship for me to serve you or for you to serve me? Were you loving me before, or only loving the things I was giving you?” Suffering reveals the impurities or perhaps the falseness of our faith in God. In a sense, it is only in suffering that faith and trust in God can be known to be in God, and therefore it is only in suffering that our love relationship with God can become more and more genuine.
Suffering drives us toward God to pray as we never would otherwise. At first this experience of prayer is usually dry and painful. But if we are not daunted and we cling to him, we will often find greater depths of experience and, yes, of divine love and joy than we thought possible. As pastor John Newton wrote to a grieving woman, “Above all, keep close to the throne of grace [in prayer]. If we seem to get no good by attempting to draw near him, we may be sure we shall get none by keeping away from him.”305
Finally, suffering is almost a prerequisite if we are going to be of much use to other people, especially when they go through their own trials. Adversity makes us far more compassionate than we would have been otherwise. Before, when we saw others in grief, we may have secretly wondered what all the blubbering was about, why people can’t just suck it up and go on. Then it comes to us—and ever after, we understand. When we have suffered, we become more tenderhearted and able to help others in suffering. Suffering creates wisdom in people, if they handle it and it doesn’t make them hard. It gives us a range of insights that are useful to many other people we meet. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort (2 Cor 1:3–7).
See the dynamics at work here. Paul’s sufferings drive him into God and his unfathomable comforts. We have been looking at many of those in this volume—deeper views of God’s glory, a heart-changing appreciation of Christ’s suffering, new experiences of his love and joy, self-knowledge and growth, insights into life and human nature. What does Paul do with those insights? He shares them with others in affliction, who then through their suffering find the deeper comforts too. The implication is that these sufferers in turn become comforters to others—and on and on it goes. The church becomes a community of profound consolation, a place where you get enormous support for suffering and where people find themselves growing, through their troubles, into the persons God wants them to become.
Christian author George MacDonald put it like this:
The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.306
God’s Gymnasium
We have mentioned the biblical metaphor of suffering as a refiner’s furnace, and we will return to that image later. A less well known but similar biblical image is suffering as a “gymnasium.”307 Like 1 Peter, the book of Hebrews was written to a group of Christians facing many trials and afflictions. In Hebrews 12, the author says that such an experience is “painful,” but “later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who are being trained by it.” And the Greek word for “trained” is gymnazdo, from which we get our word gymnasium. The word literally meant to be “stripped naked”—to “exercise naked, to train.” It meant to undergo a regimen of exercises deliberately aimed at strengthening weak parts of the body and further enhancing the strong ones.
Think of what happens in a gym. First, you have to strip out of your ordinary clothes. Why? Ordinary clothing would prevent us from doing the more strenuous physical moves. But there is another reason. The gym exposes deficiencies in our bodies’ strength and stamina—and appearance. You can wear all kinds of daytime clothes that hide or minimize aspects of your body that you would like to be less visible to the eye. But in the gym, you cannot hide them. There you and your coach (and unfortunately everyone around you) can see where you bulge where you shouldn’t. It’s an incentive to get to work.
And so this metaphor tells us that when life is going along just fine, the flaws in our character can be masked and hidden from others and from ourselves. But when troubles and difficulties hit, we are suddenly in “God’s gymnasium”—we are exposed. Our inner anxieties, our hair-trigger temper, our unrealistic regard of our own talents, our tendency to lie or shade the truth, our lack of self-discipline—all of these things come out. Perhaps the trouble was brought on by the presence of these negative qualities. Or maybe the new situation demands a certain response, and it reveals the absence of the positive qualities we need. Either way, the gymnasium shows you who you really are, inescapably.
But then what do you do? A good coach puts you through exercises, and what are they? They are ways to cause stress or put pressure on various parts of your body. Bicep curls with weights put pressure on the biceps. Forearm curls do the same. Running does many things, including taxing the respiratory and circulatory systems. A good coach will not put too much pressure on your body. To lift too much or run too much would cause your body to break down. But if, on the other hand, you exercise too little—if you put no pressure on your body and simply go through life doing ordinary life tasks—your body will also break down and age faster. What you need is exactly the right amount of pressure and just the right amount of discomfort and pain.
The biblical author is right when he says that suffering is painful “at the time” but later yields a harvest. That is exactly how exercise works. When you are actually doing your bicep curls, your arms feel as if they are getting weaker and weaker. But later they will come back stronger for the experience. In the gym, you feel you are getting weaker, and you may leave barely able to walk up the steps. And yet the experience of weakness, if your coach has been skillful, will lead to increasing strength.
Obviously, an unskillful coach could do us a lot of harm—but we have the perfect coach, the Great Coach. “No trial has overtaken you that is not common to mankind. And God is faithful. He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can endure” (1 Cor 10:13). This means that everything that happens to us in life has both a limit and a purpose. There’s a limit. We must not say when things come upon us, “He’s trying to crush me!” Remember how weak, exhausted, and spent you expect to feel in the gym. But there is also a purpose. “All things work together for good to them that love God” (Rom 8:28). We must not say, “I could run my life a lot better than this.”
None of this is meant to see suffering as a game, as if God is up in heaven playing with us. We must set this teaching alongside everything else we have seen about evil as a disruption, as the enemy of God. He is the God who is grieved when we are grieved.
In all their affliction he was afflicted,
and the angel of his presence saved them;
in his love and in his pity he redeemed them;
he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old (Isa 63:9 ESV).
As our divine coach is guiding us through life with this balance, we should respond with the same careful moderation. The Hebrews writer says earlier in the chapter that we should neither “despise” the Lord’s discipline nor “faint” under it (Heb 5). This means we should neither be stoics who just grit our teeth and refuse to see the suffering as God’s training, nor should we become “faint,” by giving up, despairing, and walking away from God. We must neither lie down nor run away, but rather we must move forward through the exercises. And we must remember God’s own suffering. Indeed, Hebrews 12 begins with a call to “fix your eyes on Jesus . . . who endured the cross . . . its shame . . . who endured such opposition . . . so that you will not grow weary and lose heart” (Heb 12:2–3).
It is looking to Jesus that enables you to function in God’s gymnasium. It takes away self-pity, as we consider what he endured for us without complaining. If he endured infinite suffering and loss for us, we should be able to endure finite grief and loss, knowing that God is working behind the hateful evil to bring out some good in our lives. If we keep our eyes “fixed” on Jesus, we will come through the pain and experience with the deeper peace that can be the result.
The common themes that tie together the metaphors of the furnace and the gymnasium are striking. Both are places of danger. Wrong responses could bring disaster. But right responses can bring beauty and strength. They must not—and, really, cannot—be avoided, nor should we panic when we find ourselves within their confines. Instead we look to the one who has passed through the ultimate furnace and race course when he went to the cross, and who now stands and walks beside us in our suffering.
Preparing the Mind for Suffering
So suffering does not automatically or naturally lead to growth and good outcomes. It must be handled properly or faced patiently and faithfully. But what does that mean? It is time to begin laying out exactly how we are to walk through pain and suffering. We have to be prepared in our mind and heart before suffering strikes so that we are not surprised by suffering. And when suffering does strike, we have to be sensitive to the varieties of suffering so that we do not apply the specific strategies in a wooden, one-size-fits-all way.
How do we prepare?
Preparation, if it is to be effective, should happen before we are actually experiencing the searing pain. As we have seen already in this book, most of the central truths and themes of biblical theology can serve as very powerful comforts and resources to sufferers. But the more deeply you know and grasp those teachings before the adversity comes, the more comfort they will be. Once you are in a crisis, there is no time to sit down to give substantive study and attention to parts of the Bible. As a working pastor for nearly four decades, I have often sat beside people who were going through terrible troubles and silently wished they had taken the time to learn more about their faith before the tidal wave of trouble had engulfed them. As we have seen, the main “reasons of the heart” that help us endure suffering are the foundational doctrines of the faith—creation and fall, atonement and resurrection. These are profound and rich truths we need to grasp before we suffer, or we will be unprepared for it. And many of these lessons are very difficult to learn “on the job” when we are in the midst of adversity.
A great deal of preparation for suffering is simple but crucial. It means developing a deep enough knowledge of the Bible and a strong and vital enough prayer life that you will neither be surprised by nor overthrown by affliction. Theologian Michael Horton writes:
Understanding who God is, who we are, and God’s ways in creation, providence, and redemption—at least as much as Scripture reveals to us—is to the trials of life what preparing for the LSAT is to the practice of law. Theology is the most serious business. Preparing for this exam is not just a head game. . . . It’s a matter of life and death. . . . It’s about living, and dying, well.308
By the term theology, Horton means more than mere data. The Bible speaks of the Word of God as a living power (Rom 1:16; Heb 4:12), as a supernatural seed that brings slow but steady transformation from within (1 Pet 1:23), as something that unfolds and enlightens as we believe, digest, practice, and store it in our hearts (Ps 119:11, 130), and as something that should “dwell richly” in us (Col 3:16).
One of the simplest theological truths is often missed. “Dear friends,” writes St. Peter, “do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ” (1 Pet 4:12–13). Some people have the naïve view that because they are fairly savvy people, or self-disciplined, or morally decent, or good Christians—that really, really bad things simply can’t happen to them. That is nothing but bad theology. And so many people’s misery and distress in suffering is doubled and trebled, coming not from the trouble itself but from the shock that they are suffering at all.
Surprise can be dealt with if we do some theological reflection. We may have an unexamined feeling that God will not let really bad things happen to good people. But Jesus Christ himself disproves that. If God allowed a perfect man to suffer terribly (but for an ultimate good), why should we think that something like that could never happen to us? We won’t ever suffer as badly as Jesus did, because none of us will ever be used to accomplish salvation. But something like that could happen on a much smaller scale to us. And, as we have seen, Romans 8:19–23 and Genesis 3:16–18 show us that the world is filled with disease, death, and natural disasters because of sin in general. It is the curse on the human race. We are all subject to it—because we are all human beings.
Other theological points can also help us here. Because of God’s infinite majesty and wisdom, we expect to not understand all his ways. It wouldn’t make sense that everything he does would make sense. How could an infinite, beginningless being always manage our lives in a way that makes sense to us? We don’t even understand other human beings fully, so how could we expect to understand everything God does? Because of our sin and his holiness, the life we have even with its adversities is better than we deserve. If we ever asked God to be completely fair and just and he complied, we would all be instantly destroyed.
In this—and in many other ways—growth in biblical knowledge and maturity in theological reflection is irreplaceable preparation for the onset of darkness and trouble.
Preparing the Heart for Suffering
But, as we have shown, suffering is not just an intellectual issue—“Why is there so much evil and suffering in life?”—but a personal problem—“How will I get through this?” This second question is in a different universe from the first. And therefore, we must prepare not only the mind for suffering but also the heart, and that means developing a consistent, vibrant, theologically deep yet existentially rich prayer life.
Philosopher Simone Weil writes that a soul in affliction finds it difficult to love anything. It must therefore almost force itself to keep loving God and others “or at least wanting to love, though it may only be with an infinitesimal part of itself.” If, during affliction, “the soul stops loving it falls, even in this life, into something almost equivalent to hell.”309 So when suffering comes in, God, love, and hope seem unreal. But if they were already abstract and unreal to you to begin with, then there is almost no way to do what Weil urges. Suffering will be like a river that sweeps us into despair. However, if our understanding and experience of God’s love was strong to begin with, they can serve as anchors that keep us from being sucked into the whirlpool.
If the mind is well prepared, the coming of adversity will not be a complete shock. But when suffering first hits you, the gap between what you know with the mind and what you can use out of your store of knowledge in your heart can be surprisingly large. When troubles come, you will need God’s help to find the particular insights, consoling thoughts, and wisdom you will need to get you through. Some of these you may have already known intellectually, but God will have to make them real and relevant in a new way. Others you will not have seen before and will have to learn. But that is how you survive. If you are going to get through it all, you will need God being with you, helping you pick your way through by learning, grasping, and cherishing many ideas and truths that become powerful and consoling to you.
Here is a story of someone who was startled by the gap between his mind and his heart. Alvin Plantinga wrote:
In the presence of his own suffering or that of someone near him [the believer in God] may find it difficult to maintain what he takes to be the proper attitude toward God. Faced with great personal suffering or misfortune, he may be tempted to rebel against God, to shake his fist in God’s face, or even to give up belief in God altogether. But this is a problem of a different dimension. Such a problem calls, not for philosophical enlightenment, but for pastoral care.310
John S. Feinberg was a theological student when he first read Plantinga’s statement, but he did not fully understand it. Feinberg wrote, “I thought that as long as one had intellectual answers that explained why God allowed evil in the world . . . the sufferer would be satisfied.”311 He sometimes saw Christians who had experienced a tragedy struggling with their relationship with God, and, he admits, he was impatient with them. But later, after he had become a teacher of theology at the graduate level, he learned that his wife had Huntington’s chorea, a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that leads not only to the loss of all voluntary bodily movement but to memory loss, depression, and various forms of dementia including hallucinations and paranoia. He was told also that, since the disease is genetically transmitted, each of his children had a 50-50 chance of getting the disease, though symptoms do not show up until age thirty at the earliest.312
After a time of denial, it sunk in. “In one fell stroke, we learned that my whole family was under this cloud of doom.”313 With his mind, he knew the sound theological response to this situation:
Anyway, who was I, the creature, to contest the Creator? As Paul says (Rom 9:19–21), the creature has no right to haul the Creator into the courtroom of human moral judgments and put him on trial as though he has done something wrong. God has total power and authority over me. I felt God had somehow misled me, even tricked me.314
It is striking how the last sentence follows on immediately from the previous sentence, without so much as a nevertheless or a yet. Feinberg knew the biblically and theologically sound response to his situation—that God has the right to do what he wants. He recited it, but then he admits that even as he knew with this mind that God could do no wrong, he felt in his heart that God had grievously wronged him. Ironically, he had written his master’s thesis on the book of Job, and his doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago focused on the problem of evil. “I had all these intellectual answers, but none of them made any difference in how I felt.”315
Here was a man who with his intellect had worked out biblically based, rational answers to the problem of suffering, and he had done so at a high, scholarly level. Yet when suffering actually came into his life, he experienced such hopelessness that he wasn’t able to function. He knew all sorts of biblical truths about evil and suffering, but now that he was in the actual furnace, they did not help him. He did not know how to existentially access them. He was filled with anger. And along with this came a sense of abandonment and the absence of God.
Did this mean that these biblical themes and reasonings were wrong, or simply useless? No. Feinberg relates how, eventually, he was able to regain his equilibrium only through revisiting many of the truths he had known in the abstract but that he had never connected to lived experience, or to the actual affections and functions of his heart. In other words, he found that biblical and theological reasoning can and does become important to the sufferer, but only after a great deal of hard inner heart work. But he concluded, “Many of those [biblical] answers won’t help with a particular problem, and . . . others that do won’t help at all stages in the sufferer’s experience.”316 Theologian Don Carson explains this important insight well:
There are millions of ordinary Christians who . . . do not feel there is a problem [of suffering]. They have theological answers that satisfy them: suffering is the result of sin; free will means that God has to leave people to make their own mistakes; heaven and hell will set the record straight. . . . And then something takes place in their own life that jolts them to the cores. . . . That is not to say, however, that the set of beliefs is irrelevant. It is to say that . . . the Christian, to find comfort in them, must learn how to use them.317
The Bible says a great deal about suffering, but it is one thing to have these things stored in the “warehouse of the mind.”318 It is quite another to know how to apply them to your own heart, life, and experience in such a way that they produce wisdom, endurance, joy, self-knowledge, courage, and humility. It is one thing to believe in God but it is quite another thing to trust God. It is one thing to have an intellectual explanation for why God allows suffering; it is another thing to actually find a path through suffering so that, instead of becoming more bitter, cynical, despondent, and broken, you become more wise, grounded, humble, strong, and even content.
So we must not ignore either the mind or the heart. By itself mere intellectual reasoning will fall short of what we require for life in this world, and it is cruel to shower a person currently in pain with theological arguments about how God is not responsible for evil and why his wisdom is beyond searching out. As one of the biblical proverbs says, “Like one who takes away a garment on a cold day, or like vinegar poured on a wound, is one who sings songs to a heavy heart” (Prov 25:20 NIV).
And yet—the theoretical and the practical are intertwined. The experience of suffering automatically raises more philosophical questions in the mind. “Why? What kind of God would allow this?” So using the intellect to make some sense out of suffering is important, but it must be accompanied not merely with knowing about God, but with knowing God.
Life Story: The Sweetness of Life with God
by Mark and Martha
MARTHA: As my husband, Mark, sits in his wheelchair unable to move anything but his eyes, and that being increasingly difficult, we are approaching the ten-year point in our journey.
It began with a small muscle twitch when Mark was forty-eight years old, and within a month, our doctor diagnosed the cause as the terminal illness ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. We had been married twenty-five years and had four children. We had always been an active family, so Mark’s quick physical demise was devastating.
When Mark got sick, I fell into a black hole of despair. I didn’t know how I was going to live through the pain of the coming days. I asked all my friends to pray that the fear of tomorrow would not rob me of the joy of today, because I was struggling. I wondered, “Who am I if I am not Mark’s wife?”
Today, I understand the idolatry in that statement and why the despair was so deep. I had identified most deeply with Mark as my husband and provider. In my eyes, I had put him before God. How I moved out of despair is a mystery. I had no awareness of being “called forth,” yet I experienced a sense of resurrection. During those early days, Mark and I quoted every verse we could think of about God’s care. We attempted to find ways to beat into our hearts the love and faithfulness of God. We planted our feet in the truth we understood even though everything in our lives seemed otherwise.
MARK (writing at a computer that captures eye movements): I played sports in my younger years, and I always hated sitting on the bench. One day just after my diagnosis, I cried out to God that I thought I was being pulled out of the game when I still had something to offer. His response was, “You have been on the sidelines for some time; you are just now going in the game.” Hanging on to the truth that God is doing much that I can’t see and that in His economy it is worth the suffering, but it is also a daily exercise of faith.
The “Body of Christ” moved into our lives in very tangible ways. Friends helped with meals, gave gift cards, did yard work, planned birthday parties for our kids, came and were just present. Even ten years into the journey, we still have many people reaching out to us with support and strength and love.
MARTHA: There were so many things at the beginning that I didn’t think I could live through emotionally. One of those was picking a place to bury Mark. My daughters and I went one day to find a place. There was a tenderness between us and even laughter. I sensed God saying to me, “I’m here. In all those places you don’t think you will be able to face, I will be there.” It was a day of significance in sensing His presence with me, not just that day but for everything that lay ahead.
MARK: I have found that singing hymns and African-American spirituals in my head, because I have not been able to speak for the last eight years, has been helpful. Many hymns are about suffering and speak deeply to my need for a sense of his presence with me in the midst of my pain. These hymns are treasures that modern Christian music doesn’t even approach, some of the best reminders that this world and its troubles is not our true home. Recently, I have been diagnosed with a terminal liver disease. Sometimes I say that I am unfairly suffering, but the only one who went through suffering unfairly was Jesus. His separation from the father on the cross is far beyond anything I could ever experience. How can I complain when he went through that cosmic pain for me? I remember Tim Keller relating the story of a man who was terminally ill and who told him that the sweetness of his life with God as a result of his illness he wouldn’t trade for more years. I have found that to be true in my life as well.
MARTHA: We have found meaning, purpose, joy, growth, and wholeness in our loss. How much I would have missed if I had opted out of this season. God has had so much to give me in the midst of it. I see how intense sorrow and intense sweetness are mingled together. The depth and richness of life has come in suffering. How much I have learned and how much sweeter Jesus is to me now.