The Search For Something Good In Suffering

Exploring soul-making

I wrote in my last blog about the character of these writings, that they are something of a personal, pastoral theodicy.  That description comes from a conversation I had with my son Chad when I first decided to begin writing.  A number of individuals had encouraged me to write a book about my experience, not just as a  documentation of what happened when Covid invaded my life, but especially how I was dealing with it, reacting, moving forward with the remnants of the damage still very much present.  I could not wrap my head around a book or even how I would go about it.  I had sketched out some of the things such a book might contain, but it seemed like too much, too overwhelming.  That is when the idea of writing these blogs was birthed, and Chad introduced me to Substack as a way to publish them.  Even so, I wasn’t sure even how to describe what I was doing, what the nature of these writings might be, and that is when Chad said that I was writing a personal theodicy, a series of reflections on how to make sense of the nightmarish experience that had happened to me and my family.  Once I began, I added another description – not just a personal theodicy, how I have made sense of what has happened to us and where God is in all of that, but also a pastoral theodicy, a way of helping others as they grapple with whatever suffering, whatever pain or grief they have been called to shoulder.

Suffering comes in all forms. Some are pretty benign, superficial, forgotten before the day is over.  Others are malignant, coursing through our souls, leaving destruction in their wake.  Lewis Smedes brings all of this together in this definition:  To suffer is to put up with things you very much want not to put up with.  If you badly want to be rid of something and it will not go away, you are suffering.  It may be only a nuisance – a fly buzzing madly in circles, never landing anywhere in your bedroom, when you are wild for want of sleep.  It may be a guilt whose sting you feel until you die, the memory of having betrayed a spouse.  Suffering can be a physical pain, like a headache or bone cancer.  It can be mental anguish, like the desperate loneliness that sets in when a loved one dies or the ache we feel when our child goes off the deep end alone.  What marks any human experience as suffering, and what binds us together in a fraternity of suffering, is the powerful desire that our pain, our grief, our hurt go away, and we have no power to make it go. (Lewis Smedes, How Can It Be All Right When Everything Is All Wrong, p. 89)

As should be obvious from that definition, we often call all sorts of experiences suffering, though a better description might be nuisance, inconvenience, discomfort, irritation.  Of course, all of those things can build up and take a toll, but that is not what I want to talk about at this point.  I’m thinking about the big things that take place, the overwhelming, the nightmarish, those moments and experiences that are so painful that the physical, emotional, psychological pain may linger for the rest of our lives.  In a very real way we are changed forever, and our very faith may be shaken and even lost.  Such suffering raises the question:  What kind of good can come from that kind of suffering?  What use, what positive contribution can it make?

I have to be honest and say that some suffering seems to make no sense at all, and it doesn’t seem to bring about any good.  Elisabeth Elliot wrote a book entitled Suffering Is Never For Nothing.  I understand what she is insisting – that in God’s design, in God’s way of doing thing, nothing that happens is wasted in our lives.  But sometimes it is hard to see what good there is.

It was difficult to see the good when one day in my mid-thirties our family traveled to see my parents.  It had been several months, and I knew Dad was slipping a bit more, but who wouldn’t?  He had worked some 50-60 hours a week until he was seventy, and then worked another five years at about 40 hours a week.  When he came home, he just sat.  Always almost completely deaf, Dad could barely enter into a conversation.  The TV would be turned so loud that the neighbors could hear it, but Dad still had trouble hearing what was going on.  And so there he sat, grew weaker, seemed more disengaged.  I remember that trip, entering the house to a hug from my Mom, and there was Dad standing up, looking confused, asking what was going on.  When I went to hug him, he looked at me, mystified, and then spoke those words that I would hear each time I would visit him:  Who are you?

I was the baby of the family, and my siblings would always insist I was the most loved.  But Dad forgot me – at first he remembered my sister who was ten years older, and the twins, older still, and even my eldest brother who had died years before of brain cancer.  But me – he would shake his head and say, “I missed something there.”  That was difficult, being forgotten by your father for the next eight years he lived.  But even more difficult is what my Mom went through – in the weeks and months before Dad had to be placed in a nursing home, Dad began to forget Mom.  Sixty-two years they had shared married life together, from the time they were eighteen.  But now Dad would get afraid, he wanted to see his mother, and he had no idea who this woman was who was keeping him from her.  Mom was heartbroken – I would talk to her on the phone, and she would weep.  That grew even worse when Dad was placed in the nursing home and Mom was left home alone, living in emotional and physical pain, living only about a year until cancer took her life.

It is easy to say suffering is never for nothing, but sometimes that is hard to see.  The good in such grief, pain, heartache, and monstrous moments of life can be impossible to find.

And yet even life experiences say suffering can be a good, a help in our lives.  I grew up hearing the old adage, “No pain, no gain.”  And with that in mind, we built callouses on our hands and muscles on our arms.  We studied subjects we hated and then, in many cases, came to love.  We discovered that even the most loving relationships had their moments of pain, but often the shared pain grew love even deeper.  And even when it comes to our faith, we would sing one of the less popular verses of Amazing Grace – “Through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come; ‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, And grace will lead me home.”  No pain, no gain.

The Bible insists that is true.  Jesus said tough times would come into our lives, John 16:33, “These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace.  In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.”  Difficult times are going to come, troubles and trials and even unspeakable things – and Jesus expects us to be of good cheer?  At peace with it all?  Take courage? Yes, He does, as challenging as that may be.

Paul’s letter to the Philippians is one of the letters I turn to as I seek to make sense of those trying times of life, and Paul says something rather disturbing, Philippians 1:29, “For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for him.”  To suffer?  A gift of grace?  I agree with Philip Yancey when he writes that this is the gift nobody wants!  Eugene Peterson in The Message translates this, “There’s far more to this life than trusting in Christ.  There is also suffering for him.  And the suffering is as much a gift as the trusting.”

Suffering.  A gift.  Sometimes I think it is, or at least can be.  Paul proves that as he writes his letter of joy from the jailhouse that we call Philippians.  His circumstances would have been dire.  Chained to guards at times, locked up in a dungeon, lying on a dirt floor, dependent on friends for food, and facing certain death – Romans didn’t typically jail you for later release, this was the holding area awaiting death.  And yet Paul says it is a gift, and it has been for us, right?  Every letter Paul writes has as a background some sort of pain and suffering.  Take a look at his list in 2 Corinthians 4:7-12, culminating in the words “So then, death is at work in us.”  Yes indeed!  More details are given in 2 Corinthians 11:23-29, including such things as being beaten, left for dead, shipwrecked, in danger from those who wanted to take his life – on and on.  I wonder at times what toll that must have taken on Paul’s body.  Broken bones healed erratically, deep scars in his back, early arthritis setting in.  Every day must have been a pain, and yet, there is Paul, continuing on, able to preach about a faith that matters because he is a living example of what faith can enable you to go through. 

But it was more than that.  In 2 Corinthians 12 Paul talks about a thorn in the flesh.  At first he calls it a messenger from Satan, meant to torment him. He even begged God to take it away, pull out the thorn, heal the wound.  But instead it stayed, and a still small voice was heard in Paul’s soul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”  No one really knows what the thorn was, though there are lots of theories.  I think the lifelong pain from all the ungodly physical abuse he experienced as a follower of Jesus ranks up at the top.  Over in Galatians there is another intriguing clue – he writes in Galatians 4:13 that it was because of an illness that he first preached to them, and he says in verse 15 that they would have torn out their eyes and given them to him if that would have helped.  As he closes the letter he says in Galatians 6:11, “See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand.”  Could an eye problem have been his thorn in the flesh?  In an time when there were no glasses for the dimming of vision caused by age, no lens replacement for cataracts or treatment for eye disease, such suffering would indeed be a thorn in the flesh, especially for a writer and preacher. 

Whatever the thorn was, Paul says in the end it was grace.  A gift that made him rely more on God than he ever had before, a weakness that made room for God’s power.  Did such peace with his circumstances happen immediately?  No, not at all.  When he says in 2 Corinthians 12:8 that he prayed three times for the removal of the thorn, was he being literal – I prayed three prayers in faith – or  was he using a common idiom of the day – I prayed over and over and over?  (See Amos 1 and the repeated use of the phrase, “For three times and for four” to see such an idiom).  Regardless, it was not easy, and never is, especially when the suffering, the pain, the nightmarish experience of life is overwhelming and ongoing.  And so Paul says one more thing I want to bring to your attention, Philippians 4:12, “I have learned the secret of being content” – emphasis on the word “learned.”  Though some things in life can be learned in a jiffy, watching a YouTube video or a brief explanation you googled, many things takes years and a lifetime.  I think of my own academic experience and degrees, almost a dozen years of training to “learn” how to be a better pastor, not to mention all my years of ministry and the continued studies I am engaged in to this very moment.  It takes time to learn how to live with grief, loss, never-ending pain, unexpected realities, questions about the future. 

I am still trying to learn.

I’m not at the point James is when he admonishes us in James 1:2, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know” – you know what?  “The testing of your faith develops perseverance.”  It strengthens and equips you for the long haul.  It enables you to do things and be things that you never were before.  Yes, that takes time.  But you have to make a decision, change your way of thinking on a daily basis if you want to find joy in the midst of trials.

When Covid attacked my body three years ago this month, it destroyed all that it could.  I don’t remember most of that year, even after I came home from the hospital and attempted once again to be a pastor.  It took a long time for my brain to wake up fully (some may question whether it is now!), and it has been a journey of ups and downs dealing with the destruction.  I am grateful that I have retained some kidney function that the vast majority of end stage renal failure patients lack, an ability to get rid of fluid and some toxins naturally.  But it is still there, every day, the dialysis machine near my bed, and the daily morning routine of stripping off my shirt and changing the bandage around the dialysis connection placed in my body.  I am covered with scars – the trach scar, remnants of other tubes used in dialysis, a scar from the feeding tube I had (my granddaughter Mia calls that my second bellybutton), barely visible marks from my collapsed lungs, seven scars from surgery.  At times I look at all of this and feel a weight – it speaks of so much loss, a changed lifestyle, a body that still feels foreign to me at times, a chronic condition that will eventually lead to my death. 

But I am learning.  Recently I read the comments Thomas Long made about Jesus’s parable of the wedding banquet in Matthew 22.  He said it was a parable of “massive grace.”   Massive – that seems to describe what has thrust me into the season of life I am in now, and if I am not mindful I can treat it this way.  This is massive, it isn’t just a cold or an inconvenience or a fly buzzing around – no, what happened to me is massive, just the same as many of you experience in this season of your life.  Massive loss, massive grief, massive sorrow, massive fear.  And yet, taking the cue from James and Paul and many others, I am beginning to look at all of this in my life as massive grace.  I lived when most who were as sick as I was died, by the grace of God and the prayers of people.  I seldom preach now, but I can write, reflecting on how to make our way through those overwhelming moments in life with faith still intact.  At this point Substack tells me that I have 119 subscribers and that, in a typical week, close to 250 people read my blog each time I publish one.  In addition, I have had a number of you who have written me to say that you read what I write more than one time, returning again to glean a bit more help, and that you share what I write with others.  I want you to know, that is massive grace as far as I am concerned!  It is a privilege to me and, hopefully, a ministry to you. 

Something exceptionally good has come out of suffering.

*My subtitle is “Exploring Soul-making,” a description used by the writer John Keats.  His comment was that life is not just a valley of tears, but “a vale of Soul-making,” suggesting that God and life itself shapes us.  (From Keats letter to his sister and brother in April 1819, as quoted by S. Paul Schilling in God And Human Anguish, p. 146)

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