Four ways a Christian should look at suffering
Canva.com
Opinion
“Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something,” is a famous line from the movie The Princess Bride. If suffering is unavoidable, how can Christians suffer with greater purpose and strength? Here are four ways.
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If God suffers for us, suffering acquires meaning
At the heart of the Christian faith lies God’s encounter with evil and suffering. On the cross, Jesus didn’t ignore human sinfulness, but chose to confront it face-to-face to such an extent that Christian redemption is built upon a great tragedy.
Francis Spufford put it this way, “Yeshua’s story has its happy ending because of its tragic one: happiness after tragedy, on top of it, through it, achievable only by going to the very end of the tragic road.”
If God suffers for us, suffering acquires meaning and dignity. We can suffer in redemptive ways, using our wounds to bring healing to others and using our deaths to spread seeds of resurrection.
God uses adversity to mature us
During my Master of Studies in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford, I worked on a movie screenplay. And when I explained to my tutor the plot I was planning to write, his response struck me.
He said, “If you go this route, life will be too easy for your protagonist. He won’t be challenged enough – and it won’t be an interesting story. Make him suffer. Give him his worst nightmare. Take away what he wants and give him what he doesn’t want but needs. In that way, he will grow. And it will be an interesting story.”
Maybe you want comfort and security, but these will spoil you if you never experience serious difficulty.
My tutor was right. A movie with modest objectives and few obstacles ends quickly because the protagonist easily achieves what he wants. A good story forces you to think, “How will the protagonist overcome that obstacle?” Then he faces even more setbacks until he changes, matures and triumphs at the very end.
Why am I telling this personal anecdote here? Because that’s what the Author of the story of our lives also does. He wants us to mature, so He often doesn’t give us what we want and instead gives us what we don’t like but actually need.
Perhaps you desire fame and success, but the things that will genuinely make you a great person may be years of anonymity and failure. Maybe you want comfort and security, but these will spoil you if you never experience serious difficulty.
God doesn’t have a few tweaks in mind, nor is He content with mediocre, self-centred children. He wants to transform ordinary people into extraordinary followers of Jesus. God’s programme is open-heart surgery and rebirth! And for that, suffering is essential.
Your wounds can become a source of healing for others
If God used the greatest tragedy in history, the death of His Son, to save the world, He can also do something similar with our tragedies and use our pain for good. Novelist George MacDonald wrote, “The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.”
Don’t waste your pain, illness, loneliness, or having a difficult person in your life. Learn all you can from these experiences. There are lessons only suffering can teach.
One of these Christlike lessons is using our wounds for the healing of others, as Jesus did. In Isaiah’s famous words, “He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on Him, and by His wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5).
There are tragedies for which we have no ready answers, but we have what we really need.
Redemptive suffering comforts and heals others. “For a deep understanding of our own pain makes it possible for us to convert our weakness into strength and to offer our own experiences as a source of healing to those who are often lost in the darkness of their misunderstood suffering,” wrote Henri Nouwen in The Wounded Healer.
More than explanations, we have a God who meets us in our pain
Often, we come to understand the purpose of suffering over time. Does this mean that we will understand the meaning of everything that happens to us? No. Some events just seem meaningless tragedies: a tsunami that kills millions or a newborn that dies shortly after her birth.
There are tragedies for which we have no ready answers, but we have what we really need. Because when we experience heartbreak, we don’t want answers; we want others with us. We want people who hold our hands and cry together. And that is precisely what a suffering God provides: He hears our cries and sees our tears. He consoles us. He suffers with us.
These four truths revolutionise how Christians face adversity, helping us not to “grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13).
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