Rethink Your Thinking on Suffering

Picture: White Ribbons

Pain: we take pills to ease it, hold prayer meetings to heal it, develop strategies to avoid it and do research to remedy it. We think up philosophies to explain it and theologies to understand God’s role in it. We may even doubt the existence of God because of it. But there is one take on pain that us moderns rarely consider:

That suffering could be part of God’s good purposes for our lives.

I’ve been thinking about this lately, having revisited some of the classic spiritual authors of yesteryear. In them I find an approach to suffering that surpasses my own superficial approach. I stub my toe and wonder why God has forsaken me. But they welcome pain as God’s shaping force for ours and others’ good.

‘How Sweet it is to Suffer with God!’

Take the 17th century monk Brother Lawrence, for example. Lame in one leg and acquainted with illness, the simple, experiential devotional life of this humble monastery cook became an inspiration to many. In The Practise of the Presence of God Brother Lawrence’s advice to an ailing friend includes this:

I do not pray that you may be delivered from your pains, but I pray God earnestly that He would give you strength and patience to bear them as long as he pleases…

I wish you could convince yourself that God is often (in some sense) nearer to us, and more effectually present with us, in sickness than in health…

He often sends diseases of the body to cure those of the soul…

I have been often near expiring, but I never was so much satisfied as then. Accordingly, I did not pray for any relief, but I prayed for strength to suffer with courage, humility and love. Ah, how sweet it is to suffer with God!

Brother Lawrence discovered a strength that could re-cast pain as something good. ‘Such prayers,’ he admitted, ‘are a little hard to nature, but most acceptable to God and sweet to those who love Him… I beseech you; comfort yourself with Him, who is the only Physician for our maladies.’

‘The Heart is Stretched Through Suffering’

It is telling that Thomas Kelly’s spiritual classic [amazon_link id=”0060643617″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]A Testament of Devotion[/amazon_link] was written after a season of illness and emotional exhaustion. A once driven philosopher, after his suffering he could write:

There is a lusty, adolescent way of thought among us which oversimplifies the question of suffering. It merely says, ‘Let us remove it’.

Some suffering, Kelly goes on to say, can be removed. But much of it can’t. And so we must face it squarely:

For if you will accept as normal life only what you can understand, then you will try only to expel the… inevitable suffering which is a part of normal life, and never come to terms with it or fit your soul to the collar and bear the burden of your suffering which must be borne by you, or enter into the divine education and drastic discipline of sorrow, or rise radiant in the sacrament of pain.

What is this ‘divine education’ or ‘sacrament’ that pain offers? ‘The heart is stretched through suffering, and enlarged,‘ he says. Our hearts are enlarged to feel the world’s need, to be burdened by it, and to respond to it as God (who is burdened by such suffering too) directs.

‘God’s Best Tool’

Or let me give a contemporary example.

In 1967 a diving accident left Joni Earekson Tada a quadriplegic. She subsequently went on a quest for healing—visiting faith healers, being anointed by oil, confessing her sins and following every scriptural injunction for a miracle. ‘I was calling my friends on the telephone and explaining to them that the next time they saw me they’d see me on my feet,’ she told me in an interview, published in Open House Volume 1. ‘I really was way out there on a limb with my confidence that Christ would heal me.

But he didn’t. And as a result, one of the most remarkable ministries to the disabled in history was born. Joni’s words have the spirit of yesteryear’s saints:

Christians sometimes want to erase suffering out of the dictionary. If you read the Bible you will see that it is often God’s best tool to make us more like Jesus. The choice is simply ours to yield to it and to allow him to use that suffering rather than complaining, avoiding it, escaping it, divorcing it—we’ve got all kinds of solutions for suffering except to embrace it as God’s will for our life. But when we do, what a difference his grace makes.

Embracing, Rather than Fighting, Suffering

I believe in divine healing. (In Unseen Footprints I tell the story of a man I know who was miraculously healed of AIDS.) I believe God is leading us to a future where there will be no more suffering or pain, and I believe we are to pray for ourselves and others when sick. Clearly, pain and suffering was never part of God’s original plan for us.

But I also believe that my approach to suffering today is often shaped more by my therapeutic culture than by the upside-down logic of God’s ways. Silly really. Because when I look back at my own life I can see that my greatest growth in character and empathy for others, and my greatest discoveries about the nature of God, have come after a season of significant pain.

Pain can lead us to God.

Painful wilderness experiences can make us more like Jesus.

So, will we embrace suffering as God’s best tool to change us, let Him enlarge our hearts through it, and pray like Brother Lawrence that God’s sweet purposes would be accomplished in our seasons of suffering?

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Question: What do you believe about God and suffering? Tell me now.