It hurts

Questions about suffering are, perhaps, some of the hardest ones a Christian can encounter. Why am I suffering?" "If God really loves me, why does He let me go through this?" "Why me" and "What did I do to deserve this?" There are plenty more questions like this, but you get the idea. Tough questions about a tough subject. Sometimes, the answers aren't what we want to hear and, sometimes, the answers aren't readily apparent and we have to wait for them. Which can make a hard situation even harder. In those cases, we have to rely on friends, family and prayer to get us through. I've done some reading on this subject and come away with a new understanding of suffering. I'll try and relate it here.

I think first we need to see where suffering comes from. A lot of it comes about from our own actions. We have our own will and generally exercise it instead of working in accordance with God's will. When crap we do splashes back on us, I think most people can deal with it. It's not fun, but we realize we did it to ourselves and reluctantly take our medicine. Then, there's the stuff that happens to us because someone else decided to screw up. This is a lot harder to deal with. But, knowing the source, we can usually take steps to mitigate the problem. If not in the present situation, at least in the future. It's when something so seemingly random happens to us that hits the hardest. Two years ago, at the age of 46, I was diagnosed with colon cancer. I was in pretty good shape at the time, ate well and exercised. Colon cancer in someone below the age of 50 is extremely rare, yet I got it. The initial stage of treatment (surgery and recovery) wasn't exactly fun, but I made it through pretty well. The adjunctive chemo therapy (what they give you to make sure they got it all) was another story. I've never felt so miserable in my entire life. You've heard people say they'd have to get better to die? I actually felt that way. There were days when I said to God "If you can't fix this, then take me now. I can't stand it". I wondered more than once why I was going through this. No great answer came to me through the Divine Megaphone. No amazing epiphanies or angels coming down and blessing me. Well, maybe there were angels, they just didn't play harps and have halos. I gained the strength to make it through from the love of my family and friends. Especially from my father. A few years earlier, he'd been diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma and had his own bouts of chemotherapy, so he knew what I was going through. Somtimes, just his presence was enough. He's not exactly what you'd call tender, but he was there and just what I needed. At the time, I felt my pleas went unanswered and I struggled greatly with why I was even in that predicament. I realized later that my prayers were heard and answered and, as for why? Well, sometimes sh-t just happens. A couple of my pastor friends say it comes from the broken world we live in. I like my answer better. Shorter and more to the point.

As I read, I saw suffering equated with love. The philosopher, Nicholas Wolterstorff said in his book Lament for a Son, "God is love. That is why he suffers. To love our suffering world is to suffer...The one who does not see God's suffering does not see his love. So, suffering is down at the centre of things, deep down where the meaning is. Suffering is the meaning of our world. For love is meaning. And love suffers. The tears of God are the meaning of history." Some point to the existence of suffering as evidence of an uncaring God. I like the words of William Temple, former Archbishop of Canterbury, "There cannot be a God of love," people say, "because if there was, and he looked upon the world, his heart would break." The church points to the Cross and says, "It did break" I already knew these things, of course. But, it's powerful to see them in writing.

One of the new ideas I found in my reading was that suffering is an integral part of our lives. Without it, what would life be like? The British author, Malcolm Muggeridge answer the question this way, "If it were possible to eliminate affliction from our earthly existence by means of some drug or other medical mumbo-jumbo, the results would not be to make life delectable, but to make it too banal and trivial to be endurable." I also believe that suffering is the greatest builder of our character. The Apostle Paul said in Romans 5:3-5 "And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us." I also like what Rob Bell says on the subject "How many people, if you ask them to talk about defining moments in their lives, mention really hard things? People rarely say, ‘Well, I went on vacation…’ These moments in our lives that are the most traumatic, that we would do anything to avoid, end up in retrospect being the moments that shape us." So, maybe suffering isn't that bad. Is it?