The Varieties of Suffering
Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
The Princess Bride (1987)
Suffering is an important way to grow. People who have not suffered much are often shallow, unacquainted with both their weaknesses and strengths, naïve about human nature and life, and almost always fragile and unresilient. But we know that suffering does not deepen and enrich us automatically. Both images—of a furnace and of a gymnasium—reveal this. Fire in the furnaces can kill, and gymnasiums can severely injure. An old saying goes, “The same sun that melts wax hardens clay,” and so the same traumatic experience can ruin one person and make another person stronger and even happier. How can we be prepared to handle suffering in such a way that it leads to growth?
Diversities of Suffering
Among the other measures we have already addressed, it is critical to recognize the remarkable variety in the Bible’s teaching on pain and adversity. One man is suffering from drug addiction in prison because he attacked and maimed someone in a fit of rage. Another man’s whole life changes when he accidentally kills a seven-year-old boy who suddenly runs out into his car’s path. A young mother with three little children at home is dying of a brain tumor. A family with teenage children is devastated when their father commits suicide. Finally, there are the young parents who just gave birth to a severely impaired child. All of these people are suffering, but the causes and shapes of their pain and anguish are wildly divergent.
The Bible accordingly shows us the many kinds of suffering and points to just as great a range of possible responses. A one-size-fits-all prescription for handling suffering is bound to fail, because not only does suffering come in so many different forms but sufferers themselves come with so many different kinds of temperaments and spiritual conditions. The Bible forbids us to use a single template for handling pain and grief, but modern people tend to be more reductionist. We live in a technological society and we want simple “how to” formulations. Yet there is nothing less practical for sufferers than to think there is just one set of practical steps for “fixing” their situation.
In the early days of my pastoral ministry, I visited a woman going through a divorce. I lent her a book of sermons by a pastor that gave her an enormous boost. “That book saved my life!” she said to me. Confident that I had a great tool for pastoral care, a year later I gave the same book to another woman who was going through a divorce in what looked to me like the same circumstances. Her response was completely different—some of the volume confused her and some of it upset her. I learned not to assume that every sufferer needed the very same medicine.
Not long after I had gone through surgery and treatment for thyroid cancer, I met a woman who had breast cancer. “I’m a cancer survivor too,” she said to me, and proceeded to tell me how she had gotten through it. I was uncomfortable during the entire conversation. She considered me a fellow sufferer, and indeed we both had had the tremendous shock of hearing a doctor say, “You have a malignancy.” But I had not faced the radical surgery and permanent changes to my body that she had, nor did I face the same percentage likelihood of future reoccurrence. And as she related her experience I was struck not only by how different our sufferings had been but also by what different kinds of ideas and thoughts had comforted and strengthened each of us. I realized that many of the things that had gotten me through my cancer would not have been as relevant to her, and many of the ideas and help that fortified her were not effective for me.
So we will not be able to face our suffering well—or help others face it—unless we recognize the varieties of it. Let us look at four kinds of suffering that the Bible speaks of, each with its own cause and set of peculiar challenges.
Jonah, David, and the Suffering We Bring on Ourselves
One kind of suffering is directly caused by our own failures. A woman seeks to be successful in business by being ruthless and cruel throughout her career. But as time goes on, she finds herself with fewer and fewer friends and allies. When she makes a decision that leads to some losses for her company, she discovers that she has no support from her team. As a result she is summarily dismissed, and her reputation sustains great damage because many of her enemies gladly exaggerate her errors on the grapevine. Her career ruined, she slowly realizes it was due to her own hard-knuckled and foolish behavior. Here is another example. A married man has a very brief one-night stand on a business trip and is later found out. His marriage swiftly falls apart and he discovers himself permanently alienated from his children. Suffering accompanied with shame and guilt brings a unique kind of inner torment.
This first kind of suffering is seen in the lives the biblical figures Jonah and David. Within the short book of Jonah, the prophet endured two very different but traumatic experiences. First, God sent a massive, life-threatening storm at sea. Later, when Jonah was enjoying the shade and beauty of a particular climbing vine, God sent a “worm” and an “east wind” to destroy the plant, which deeply discouraged him. Why? Jonah had refused God’s original call to go preach to the Assyrians of Nineveh. Later he was furious that God did not destroy them. Jonah was filled with a racist hatred of these people, and God was using adverse circumstances to show him the evil of his own heart. That is why everything went wrong for him. A storm almost drowned him. His mortal enemies escaped the noose. A hot east wind even destroyed his comfortable, shady dwelling. But God was trying to reveal something to Jonah—he was trying to wake him up.
Similarly, when King David’s life fell apart, there was also a specific sin that caused it. And God was sending a specific message through the suffering. David had violated the law of God by having an affair with Bathsheba, another man’s wife, and by arranging to have her husband killed. Then the new young son of David and Bathsheba became sick and died. And David realized that God was saying to him that he had to change his ways or lose his kingship and his life.
Was God “punishing” David and Jonah for their sins? Not exactly. Romans 8:1 says that there is “no condemnation” for a believer. That means, simply, that if Jesus has received our punishment and made payment for our sins, God can not then receive a second payment out of us as well. God does not exact “retribution” from a believer, because of Jesus and because, if he really punished us for our sins, we’d all have been dead long ago.319 But God often appoints some aspect of the brokenness of the world (caused by sin in general: Gen. 3; Rom 8:18ff) to come into our lives to wake us up and turn us to him. The severity of this depends on our heart’s need.
It is quite important to distinguish between a “David” experience of suffering and a “Job” type experience—namely, suffering not brought on directly by anything you’ve been doing. A Christian man who develops lymphoma should not think he is being punished for a sin, though he must not, on the other hand, miss this opportunity to put his roots down into God and discover a dimension of spiritual growth and wisdom he would never otherwise have had access to.
Now think through this illustration. Imagine that a man becomes engaged five times in a row, and each time he breaks up with his fiancée. Because each fiancée exhibits some personal flaw, he assigns the blame in every case to her faults. But actually, his own perfectionism and attitude of moral superiority are the main causes of the relationship failures. It is a huge blind spot for him. It may be, then, that one particularly brutal break-up might shake him to the core, and finally show him what he has been contributing to all this misery. His suffering and distress is a wake-up call to change something very particular in his life. Suffering could be the only way for such a man to be humbled and to wake up to his own shortcomings. The psalmist says, in Psalm 25: “Cleanse me from hidden faults.” In general, it is only troubles and difficulties that can reveal such things to us.
Paul, Jeremiah, and the Suffering of Betrayal
So there is suffering caused by bad behavior. But, then, there is the suffering caused by good and brave behavior. Such behavior may be the occasion of betrayal or attacks from others. In the Bible, most of St. Paul’s suffering was caused by this, as was the suffering of the prophet Jeremiah. Paul was constantly being beaten, imprisoned, or attacked by his own people as well as by Gentiles. At one place in his letters, Paul gives us a nonexhaustive list of what he has gone through as a messenger of God:
I have worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely, and been exposed to death again and again. Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was pelted with stones, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my fellow Jews, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false believers. I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches. Who is weak, and I do not feel weak? (2 Cor 11:23–29).
Jeremiah also was put in stocks and imprisoned for simply “speaking the truth to power” (Jer 20:1–6). In many parts of the world today, public criticism of the government or of the dominant religious or cultural institutions can get you beaten, imprisoned, or killed. In our culture, it is very possible to become the object of a political attack within your company or neighborhood if you are open about your commitment to an unpopular cause. But it is even more likely that this kind of betrayal happens simply through a personal relationship going sour. When someone perceives that they have been wronged by you, they may embark on a program of trying to hurt you or damage your reputation. Often someone you thought you knew well can turn on you and attack you because it furthers their career or interests. Personal betrayals are particularly horrific, and this sort of trial can tempt you to give in to debilitating anger and bitterness.
While the first kind of suffering requires that you learn repentance, this kind of suffering will entail that you wrestle with the issues of forgiveness. The temptation will be to become bitter and to hide your growing hardness and cruelty under the self-image of being a noble victim. Often confrontation and the pursuit of justice is indeed required, but it must be carried out without the spirit of vengefulness that will allow the experience to turn you into a worse person rather than a better one.
Mary, Martha, and the Suffering of Loss
While some suffering can overwhelm you with anger and resentment, there is another kind that can crush you with grief. Some have called this kind of suffering “universal” because it eventually comes to everyone, no matter your behavior, good or bad. It is grief and loss in the face of mortality, decay, and death. In the Bible we see this when Jesus comforts Mary and Martha, who have just lost their brother and are mourning for him.
Everyone comes to know this kind of suffering, yet even within this category there are almost endless variations. It is one thing to face the death of a spouse after fifty years of marriage, another to do so when young children are left behind. It is one thing to face your own imminent death from disease when you are eighty, another when you are thirty. It is one kind of grief to lose a relative that you had a good relationship with, another when there were unresolved issues and your grief is shot through with guilt and resentment. And then there are different modes of decay and death. There is the slow but sure decay of aging, and the swift deaths of automobile accidents, floods, and landslides.
Decay and death—losses of home and loved ones—are inevitable to all and so can be said to be a kind of universal suffering. There may be some issues around these losses that require self-examination and repentance, or confrontation and forgiveness. But mainly, when facing grief Christians must learn to direct their minds and hearts to the various forms of comfort and hope that their faith offers them. Paul directs a group of bereaved believers to not “grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope” (1 Thess 4:13) and “We do not lose heart. . . . For our light and momentary troubles are achieving an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen” (2 Cor 16–18).
Job and the Suffering of Mystery
Finally, there is a kind of suffering that is “none of the above” though it may overlap with one or more of the others. This is the mysterious, unlooked for, and horrendous suffering that people most often call “senseless.” It can be argued that it is this kind of suffering that the Bible pays particular attention to. In Psalm 44 the authors, “the Sons of Korah,” look at a devastated country and ask God:
All this has come upon us, though we have not forgotten you, and we have not been false to your covenant. Our heart has not turned back nor have our steps departed from your way; yet you have broken us in the place of jackals and covered us with the shadow of death. . . . Why do your hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? (Ps 44:17–19, 24).
Such cries fill the pages of the Psalms, as well as those of prophets such as Habakkuk and Jeremiah. And then there is Job. The Bible relates the stories of David, Paul, Mary, and Martha—all persons who suffered grievously. But the Bible gives greater focused attention to the suffering of Job than to all of these others. The other kinds of affliction have causes easy to identify—moral failure, persecution and betrayal, and the inevitability of death. And in each case, the entailed emotions of guilt, anger, and grief are difficult to handle, yet straightforward. But then there is truly “Job-type” suffering. Job’s sufferings were extraordinary. All of his children were killed at once. All of his wealth was wiped out in an instant. These are not the more universally experienced sorrows of human life, nor were they caused by Job’s moral lapses or by persecution and betrayal. When people experience horrendous, unusually severe suffering, it leaves the sufferer not so much filled with guilt, or resentment toward others, or pure grief—but with anger toward life and God himself.
When Job’s life fell apart, at first he looked for a specific sin for which he was being chastised. Or, at least, he sought a clear lesson from God that he was supposed to be learning. In short, he wanted to know what there was in his life that had caused all this. Job’s friends also looked for sins and things for Job to work on. But there was no one thing in his life that God was after. In fact, that was the point of Job’s suffering. He was being led to the place where he would obey God simply for the sake of who God is, not in order to receive something or to get something done.
Job’s suffering, then, was not a chastisement or a lesson aimed at changing a particular flaw in Job’s life. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t a powerful vehicle both for Job’s personal growth and for God’s glory. Job had looked in vain for a specific “lesson,” but the lesson was really a revelation about the whole tenor of his life, and his need to base it fully, with all his heart, on God. However, it was a long, long journey from the beginning to the end of the book of Job, where Job began to see this. And when this kind of mysterious, inexplicable suffering comes upon us, our journey is also a long one. It certainly may entail repentance, forgiveness, and fixing our eyes on our hopes. But Job-type suffering requires a process of honest prayer and crying, the hard work of deliberate trust in God, and what St. Augustine called a re-ordering of our loves.
Diversities of Temperament
The diversity of suffering does not consist only in external factors, however, but also in the internal—the different personalities and temperaments of those experiencing the adversity.
One of the best efforts to break down the experience of suffering into its different facets is Simone Weil’s classic essay “The Love of God and Affliction.”320 The French philosopher and activist calls the inner pain caused by suffering malheur. There is no exact English synonym for this French word. It includes a sense of doom and hopelessness. The closest English word is perhaps affliction. Affliction, Weil writes “is an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death. . . . A kind of horror submerges the whole soul.”321 Weil distinguishes between suffering, the external circumstances in the world, and affliction, which is the internal experience of pain and sorrow. Weil then seeks to outline what she considers the various aspects of this experience.
Weil observes that one of the marks of affliction is isolation.322 A barrier goes up between us and even our closest friends. One reason is that you the sufferer suddenly sense a new gulf between yourself and almost anyone who has not experienced what you are going through. People who, you once felt, shared a common experience with you no longer do. Andrew Solomon, in his study of parents who bear children who are deaf, autistic, schizophrenic, or otherwise disabled, argues that they experience a shift in identity.323 This in some ways is true of anyone in severe adversity. Severe suffering turns you into a different person and some of the people that you once felt affinity for no longer look the same to you. But isolation is also caused by friends who simply stay away. Why do we so often avoid a person in affliction?324 It may be as simple as the feeling of incompetence—we don’t know what to say or do. It may also be the sheer fear of being drawn into and drowning in the sufferer’s pain. Others stay away because, like Job’s friends, we need to believe that the afflicted person somehow brought this on or wasn’t wise enough to avoid it. That way we can assure ourselves that it could never happen to us. The afflicted person challenges us to admit what we would rather deny—that such severe difficulty can come upon anyone, anytime.
A second aspect of affliction we can call implosion. Intense physical pain makes you unavoidably self-absorbed. You cannot think about anyone else or anything else—there is just the hurt and the need to have it stop. In the same way, inner pain can virtually suck us down into ourselves, so that we can hardly notice what is happening in anyone around us. In The Lord of the Rings the effect of the One, ruling ring was to magnify the ego. So when Samwise puts on the ring, “All things around him were not dark but vague; while he himself was there in a grey hazy world, alone, like a small black solid rock.”325 Suffering can do that too; it can make you and your needs the only solid, real thing, and all other concerns vague, hazy, and unimportant. This self-absorption can make you unable to give, receive, or feel love. There is a numbness, a fixation on what is happening to you. You may be unable to “get out of yourself” and think of, serve, or love others, or even feel loved by others. Beneath all of this, Weil says, is a loss of any sense of God. “Affliction makes God appear to be absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell. . . . During this absence there is nothing to love.”326 We may know intellectually that someone loves us, or even believe that God loves us, but it doesn’t seem real to our hearts.
A third mark of affliction is a sense of doom, of hopelessness, and of condemnation. This comes in part from a hard-to-define, barely conscious shame. “Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron it stamps the soul to its very depth with the scorn, the disgust, even the self-hatred and sense of guilt and defilement that crime logically should produce but actually does not.”327 In other words, while we should feel guilty when we do wrong, we usually don’t. It is not until great suffering comes upon us that we feel we are perhaps being punished and so we look around and begin to admit the wrongdoing in our lives. And it is not hard to find. Even though the things we have done wrong may not have any direct connection to the affliction, the affliction makes us keenly aware of our flaws and our fragility. This sense of condemnation is even persistent in Western cultures, in which all efforts are made to see sufferers as victims and not responsible for it in any way.
A fourth aspect of affliction is usually anger. Depending on the cause and context, the anger may be more or less directed at various objects. There might be anger at oneself, or deep bitterness against people who have wronged you or let you down, or specific anger at God, or general anger against the injustice and emptiness of life.
Weil adds a final toxic effect of affliction that often occurs. It is temptation—the temptation toward complicity. Suffering can “little by little, turn the soul into its accomplice, by injecting a poison of inertia into it.” We become complicit with the affliction, comfortable with our discomfort, content with our discontent. “This complicity impedes all the efforts he might make to improve his lot; it goes so far as to prevent him from seeking a way of deliverance, sometimes even . . . from wishing for deliverance.”328 It can make you feel noble, and the self-pity can be sweet and addicting. Or affliction can become a great excuse for all sorts of behavior or patterns of life you could not otherwise justify. Or perhaps, at some subconscious level, you may feel you need to pay for your sins, and the suffering is the way to do it.
As a pastor and a sufferer, I find Simone Weil’s analysis of affliction to be incisive. It also explains how infinitely complex and variegated a condition affliction can be. These factors—isolation, self-implosion and numbness, anger, condemnation and shame, and the temptation to embrace suffering—are like elements in a chemical compound. It could be argued that they are nearly all present to some degree in any affliction, depending not only on the causal circumstances but on our individual temperaments. People of different personalities, genders, and cultures process emotions differently. They also have different internal values and commitments. A father, for example, may love his children deeply but identify personally more with his career. His wife may be quite dedicated to her vocation but identify her worth more closely with how her children are faring. And so, if there is a career reversal, the husband may be more “overthrown” and despondent, while if one of their children gets seriously injured, the mother may be more disconsolate than the father. Same trouble, different responses, because there is a different identity structure within the heart.
And so these elements that Weil names may exist in very different proportions and maintain sharply different, complex interrelationships to one another within each case.
Diversities of Pathways
Every affliction, then, is virtually unique. And it means that every sufferer will need to find a somewhat different path through it. When John Feinberg discovered his family’s dire physical condition, it cast him into a time of darkness. He recounts that friends came by to see him and tried to give him thoughts and ideas that would help him get through the difficult time. Most were reflections on theological truths. To recount his experience, he gives us two lists.
One list was of things that were said that he admitted with his mind were basically true—yet were irritating or downright discouraging to him at the time. Job’s friends say many things about God that are true in the abstract. They say, “In the end all evil will be judged” and “God is pleased with the righteous” and “God is not unjust or unfair” and “We can’t understand God’s ways—they are beyond our puny minds.” Yes—all true statements. And yet Job calls them “miserable comforters” (Job 16:2), and in the end, God condemns the friends for how they respond to Job. Why? They gave true statements but applied these truths inappropriately. Biblical scholar Don Carson writes about Job’s friends:
There is a way of using theology and theological arguments that wounds rather than heals. This is not the fault of theology and theological arguments; it is the fault of the “miserable comforter” who fastens on an inappropriate fragment of truth, or whose timing is off, or whose attitude is condescending, or whose application is insensitive, or whose true theology is couched in such culture-laden clichés that they grate rather than comfort.329
Feinberg mentions some of the “miserable comforts” he received. Some friends said that God often uses one problem to spare us from some other problems we’ll never see. He knew that could be true in the abstract, but it only made him feel worse. What possible problem could be worse than seeing his wife die by inches over the years? Another person said, “Well, everyone is going to die from something. You just know in advance what it is in your wife’s case.” Feinberg replied, very sensibly, that while this is true, most people would not want to know this information. Other people opened up about some very terrible things that had happened to them in order to say “I understand how you feel.” Feinberg responded, “What helps is not knowing you feel like I do but knowing that you care!”330
Perhaps the most typical and unhelpful “help” he received was a set of nodding statements that “we know all things are for the best and we have to trust God.” John Feinberg was a professor of systematic theology in a graduate school. He already believed that. He had written whole treatises on that. But the more he heard this from people, the more guilt he felt. He wasn’t being allowed to lament or wail or cry out like David in the Psalms or Job. He was being implicitly told that if he was not already experiencing peace in his heart, knowing the wisdom and goodness of God, he was a spiritually immature man.331
It is important to see that the list of “Things That Didn’t Help” consisted of real truths—applied poorly. They either were expressed unskillfully or were offered at the wrong time, in an “unseasonable” manner. When he turned to a list of “Things That Helped” and began to heal, we see a set of truths applied in the right order, in the right way. One of his friends one day was talking to Feinberg about an idea that made him feel so guilty—about “rejoicing in his sufferings.” The friend pointed out that it didn’t mean he was rejoicing for the sufferings—that would be masochistic. “You have to learn to live with this, but you don’t have to like it,” he said. The point was that Feinberg would have to learn to rejoice more in God and his love, but the evil was evil and would always be painful.332 A “penny dropped” for him in that conversation. Other help came from his father, who comforted him by pointing out that he shouldn’t expect to feel God’s grace and strength now for the whole ordeal ahead. He was petrified that he would have to face the death of one or more of his immediate family and that it would be more than he could bear. But, his father said, he was not facing it now, and so he shouldn’t expect to feel strong enough now for something that had not yet happened. “God never promised to give you tomorrow’s grace for today. He only promised today’s grace for today, and that’s all you need” (Matt 6:34). Another penny dropped.
After some of these small but important rays of light broke through, Feinberg began to sense God’s love and presence again in a growing way. And he began to go back to the things he already knew—about where evil and suffering came from, and the wisdom and sovereignty of God, and the sacrificial suffering of Jesus on the cross for him. Bit by bit he reappropriated each truth, thinking it through from his new perspective and applying it to his heart and to the world as he now knew them. And it began to light things up for him in a fresh way.
Feinberg’s story is helpful for anyone. But for me as a pastor, the two lists were quite striking. I recognized some things on his “discouraging” list were things that I had seen help suffering people greatly, and some items on his “encouraging” list were ideas that I had seen irritate and anger them. This reveals the remarkable diversity of suffering.
As the years went on, I came to realize that most books on and for sufferers, though usually speaking universally (e.g., “When you go through suffering, you should think this”) were in reality singling out a particular kind of affliction or person to address. Some people in suffering are tempted toward self-pity and pride, toward feeling like a noble martyr. They need gentle opposition. Others are tempted toward shame and self-hatred. They need assurance.
Some books on suffering take the direct approach, telling you to “make use” of your sorrow, to learn from it. And indeed, some need to use such times to make obvious, needed changes in their lives. For example, a man who has put too much emphasis on having and spending lots of money, when he faces the trauma of a major business failure, needs to confront himself about his greed and his internal identification of net worth with self-worth. It is also right to talk about God’s sovereign plan for our lives, how he uses pain and difficulty to get our attention, and how he brings good things out of the bad circumstances. But what about the young parents who have just lost their five-year-old daughter, who was run over by a car? Should the first things you say to them be “God’s trying to get your attention. Be sure to learn from this! What changes should you be making?” The parents, with warranted vehemence, would say, “What kind of God would sacrifice an innocent little girl to teach us ‘spiritual lessons’!?”333
We should not overlook the importance of grasping truths in the right order. So it is important to know that nothing that happens, not even the most horrendous events, are outside God’s wise purposes and control, and that he promises to overrule and weave even the worst circumstances into a plan for ultimate good. This important teaching might be important to bring soon to the attention of a person who has had a business failure through his own greed. But it should not be the first thing to say to bereaved parents of a dead infant, even if ultimately, in order to be healed, they need to circle around and use it on their hearts.
We have seen that, when it comes to suffering, there are diversities of shape, temperaments, and pathways. There are multiple truths that the Bible teaches about suffering, and these different truths need to be applied in a different order depending on circumstance, stage, and temperament. But there is also a diversity of expression of those truths and ideas. When my wife, Kathy, has had her darkest periods, she finds that other than the Bible, nothing can speak to her heart better than the pastoral letters of eighteenth-century ex–slave trader and hymn writer John Newton. His prose is stately and somewhat archaic, and many people in pain would not be able to read hundreds of pages of his letters, as Kathy has, with deep satisfaction. For example, the principle “God is in control” can sound cold or even threatening. But when Kathy or I come across John Newton’s aphorism “Everything is needful that he sends; nothing can be needful that he withholds”—we are both challenged and comforted. Often the expression that helps us in dark times is a particular poem, or story, or quote, or Bible verse, or song or argument, or hymn. A line or two becomes “radioactive” and we meditate on it and find it brings illumination, comfort, assurance, and healing, shrinking the tumors of anger and despair.
“When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me” (Ps 23:4). As it turns out, there is more than one path in that valley. And the Lord, the perfect Guide, will help you find the best way through.
Life Story: Surrender Does Not Mean Defeat
by Gloria
Most of my life has been without tumultuous events. Growing up in a Christian family, I learned my first prayer from my maternal grandmother. By God’s grace, I was called to Christ at age sixteen, and I was baptized the same year. I have been blessed with a fine education, a consistent career, opportunities to travel the world, and good health.
At age sixty-seven, I planned to retire in August 2013. My goal was to enjoy many spiritual activities that I couldn’t while working. However, my retirement plans did not include the lung cancer found in a CT scan. Further tests confirmed tumors in both lungs, and metastases in my brain and lymph nodes. My final diagnosis is gene mutation lung cancer for nonsmokers. I was scheduled for chemotherapy with no expectation of cure or eradication.
Where has God been during this dark episode? First, He was with me in the chance detection of cancer, since I had no symptoms. Second, He has strengthened my faith in His plans for me without fear. Lung cancer is a silent invader. It attacks without warning through physical damage, but also in the fear of an unexpected shortening of life. But Jesus, the Healing Shepherd, has granted me a quiet peace through His gracious love.
Throughout, I have clung to the prayer my grandmother taught me: “Thank you, Heavenly Father, for food and drink, for peace and joy. Thy will be done.” I had no need to ask “why me?” and “why now?” I prayed not for the miracle of healing but to keep my faith in Jesus as sovereign Lord. I also submitted to His power not only to grant miraculous recovery from illness, but as the Son of God to give life—eternal life. I knew that Jesus would carry me through the valleys I was about to enter.
Since the initial chemotherapy led to a total shrinkage of brain tumors early on, I began to yearn for the same result in my lungs. But after nine months of additional treatment, there is no sign of shrinkage in the tumors in my lungs. Containment is now the strategy. Waiting for the results of a CT scan every three months will become my new normal.
However, instead of seeing the tumor stability as good news, I began to feel defeated and blamed myself for not requesting a more aggressive treatment. I became discouraged and could not feel Jesus’ peace in my daily quiet time. What I experienced was not physical pain but misery in the soul, which was totally self-inflicted. But, once again, God reached out to me with an invitation from Proverbs 3:5: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not unto your own understanding.” That trust in Jesus required a further total and absolute surrender to His will on a continual basis. Because of God’s profound mercy, I began to see my submission in terms of a greater participation with Christ in His suffering on the cross and His absolute submission of self to the Most High. I continue to pray for God’s grace to accept and guide my surrendering.
Now I have found freedom in anchoring my days and nights with Jesus’ spirit. To live one day at a time without fretting over tomorrow frees me and soothes my suffering. With renewed trust in Jesus comes renewed love, hope, and faith. My focus turns from my pain to His love. I have discovered a new treasure—the gift of pain is the gift of God Himself. In the end, He alone is truly my delight and comfort. I have learned the meaning of Psalm 119:71: “It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees.”
Psalm 27:4 will now guide my journey till the end. “One thing I ask of my Lord, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the House of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord, and to seek Him in His temple.”