Our Responsibility in Suffering
For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ …— that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.—Phil. 3:8-11
I had a bad feeling about this.
From the moment our daughter, Anah, marched into our room that morning of September 17, 2012, I had a sinking feeling that our lives would never be the same again.
It was Anah all right, but not the Anah I had fabricated with one photo and a handful of progress reports.
Instead of being excited, I started waking up each morning with a dread in my heart. After we returned home, it got worse.
As the reality of what her adoption would cost us began to sink in, I would try to escape by alternating between driving myself with anything to keep my hands busy or escaping through Netflix. Anything to keep from facing the reality that I am now the mother of a disabled child and my life would be wrapped around her needs.
To add insult to injury, I began to harden my heart towards God. The assumptions I believed created a web of lies—about God, about my situation, about me.
Because I was off track with God first, this impacted my relationships as well with my husband and children, my church family. I pushed others away—sometimes out of anger, but more often from shame and guilt. I never felt more alone.
Though I now know my assumptions were false and God has changed my perspective on my situation, it hasn’t lessened the burden. I also still am picking up the pieces of broken relationships due to my sinful responses.
So how can we keep moving forward when suffering persists or doesn’t go away? Better yet, how can we face the suffering in our lives, be it acute or chronic, due to our sin or another’s, in a way that keeps us close to God? How can we endure the pain without compounding it by adding a sinful response to it?
Understand suffering in light of Christ.
Though I think my understanding of Christ was orthodox, it was also small. A small Jesus is no help when we’re suffering.
One of the greatest blessings in the past ten years is growing in my understanding of Christ. As I have begun to learn about and reflect on God’s greater Story, I began to see that His goal for our salvation was the glory of the Father. It was not because He was lonely and could not imagine heaven without me there. His passion was to exalt Him, even if that required obeying the Father taking on our human frailty and suffering an unjust death.
If I stop to think about this, it’s actually pretty amazing, isn’t it?
Every suffering I encounter will never be as unjust, undeserved or brutal as Christ’s suffering for me. Any loss, any disappointment, any hostility, any humiliation, any unfairness—Christ has gone through it all, even to the point of losing His life.
Suffering was necessary to accomplish God’s purposes. And if it is true for Jesus, it is true for me too, for a servant is not greater than his master.
This is the curriculum every believer needs to expect in one form or another. We should not be surprised. It is the pathway to becoming true saints in Christ. Though it doesn’t take away the pain, it does put it into perspective.
Lament your suffering.
On one particularly difficult day shortly after the pandemic started, I just snapped.
After finally relenting and enrolling Anah in school, we enjoyed a couple of good years. Things were looking good. We were making progress.
And then the pandemic struck, not only bringing us back to square one, but sometimes it felt like we regressed. Finally, I could not bear the weight of it any longer.
Not only that, I was afraid of the setback this might mean in my relationship with God and with my family. Would those places where healing began be ripped open again?
I felt the rumblings of resentment stirring within me. And I didn’t want to go back there again. What do I do now?
God’s invitation was simple: learn to lament.
Though I have been a believer for many years, lament was new to me. In short, lamenting is being fully honest with God about how frustrated we are with our lives, with others, with is wrong in the world. It sounds a lot like grumbling, but it is directed to God.
Lament means God invites our complaints.
Though it felt weird and even a bit wrong, I also knew that the alternative did not lead to good. Grumbling without God results in bitterness and resentment while lamenting is an act of faith and obedience.
So I told Him how tired I was. I told Him how I feared Anah would regress. I wept at the loneliness of isolation so that I would not unwittingly pass the virus on to her.
What makes lamenting different from complaining is subtle. Neither of them really change our situation. I still had to deal with Anah at home.
But what changed is me. My lamenting allowed me to bring my burdens to Him, where He took the weight of bearing it alone and carried it with me. He protected me from the poison and toxins of resentment and bitterness.
Learn the lessons from suffering.
Though I had said that the Who is more important than the Why, God still does have purposes for our suffering. Sometimes those purposes are masked in the early seasons of our suffering so that we learn to press more deeply into Him instead of trying desperately to find a reason for it.
For me, I didn’t start seeing the purposes until after I learned to trust Him. Only then did I begin to start seeing why. I know He doesn’t have to show me, and I probably am only seeing just the tip of the iceberg as I realize how great and grand His purposes are.
Sometimes, like the Israelites, His purpose is to simply teach us more of who He is. They needed to know that their sustenance did not come from bread but from His Word (Deut. 8:3). I needed to learn that I am not God and King, but He is. He is in control; I am not.
Another purpose for suffering is to mold us more into the likeness of Christ. There are areas of life that are immature and need growing up or impure and need cleansing.
For me, I began to see how little compassion I had in my heart as well as how prideful I was when I compared myself to Anah and viewed her as inferior because of her disability. Seeing the truth of my sin is a severe mercy, but has solidified my confidence in His love like me like nothing else.
One last lesson God gives through suffering is the best of all: The smaller we get in our suffering, the greater He becomes, and with it, we experience His resurrection power in a new way.
I never quite understood Paul’s words in Phil. 3:10-11. I want the power, but I didn’t want the fellowship of His sufferings. But if I want to know the power of His resurrection, it means also entering into suffering as well. It is in this lowest pit that we come to understand Him in a way we never have before.
Even if we never see a reason why, make sure we learn the lesson of Who. And take this opportunity to learn to lean in faith and trust on Him alone. Over the years, I have marveled at how He has used this same trial with Anah to teach my husband and me different lessons. Same suffering, tailor-made instruction.
Endure suffering in the resurrection power of Christ.
Suffering is an interesting thing. Christ entered our sufferings so He can identify with us. We enter our sufferings so we can identify with Him.
If we desire to know Christ more fully, be sure that some kind of suffering will be a part of that path. Like war veterans who have been through danger and hardship in battle, there is a bond we build with Christ that gives us power and hope like we’ve never experienced before.
In fact, suffering is the gateway to resurrection power.
It’s no mistake that Jesus tells us that the way to follow Him is not by trying to emulate His life but by following Him in death. The pictures in Mark 8:34-35 are not one of His victory—yet—but the one of crucifixion: denying self, picking up our crosses, that we may lose our lives with Him. It may not mean literal death but a death nonetheless—to self, sin, doubt, independence, and self-reliance.
This is a daily death. If we say no to it or try to escape it, we will miss out on the power of the resurrection for that kind of power comes through suffering.
Joni Eareckson Tada, in her book, When God Weeps says,
“To believe in God in the midst of suffering is to empty myself; and to empty myself is to increase the capacity…for God. The greatest good suffering can do for me is to increase my capacity for God.”
When seen through the cross, suffering becomes the pathway to life that is blessed. This gives us the power to not only face our hardships with grace but to honor Him in the midst of them.
If you wonder how you show your love for Christ, this is the way.
Remember His love for you. Then keep your eyes on Him, letting that love compel you to run that race with endurance (2 Cor. 5:14; Heb. 12:1). Let His love draw you into a relationship with you that empowers you. As we die to ourselves, we are cleansed, purified, and raised to new power and life (2 Tim. 2:11-12).
Love well in the midst of suffering.
Finally, let us remember that our suffering is not only God’s curriculum to help us grow in our faith, it is His particular way of training us to love. Resurrection power is meant to be exercised to live in a way we could not otherwise.
When I am going through suffering, this does not give me license to do whatever I wish. It does not justify grumpiness, selfishness, or complaining. Loving well requires the resurrection power I just mentioned. It is not easy to keep persevering, for suffering can wear us down.
But with His power, we are able to keep persevering in loving those who continually reject you, forgiving someone who disappoints you, serving the one who needs you 24/7. It also helps us to resist the temptation to self-pity, prideful comparison, or relying on our own wisdom.
When we know God through Christ, when we understand more deeply our suffering Savior, and as we desire to become more like Him, we are granted comfort, not only to love well but to comfort those who are also afflicted with that same comfort (2 Cor. 1:3-5). We’ll look at this a little more in the next post.
Conclusion
Suffering well is a sign of faith and maturity. This doesn’t mean we cannot seek to try to relieve the hardship, for Jesus did come to heal the sick and relieve them of their pains.
But just as He did not heal all, not all our pains here on earth will end. Some may not end till death.
However, they will all end one day. I will not be taking care of Anah forever. These days will end.
But until that day, I can learn the lessons God wants to teach me about suffering—the lessons about who He is, resisting temptation, how to frame my sufferings in the light of eternal hope, the comfort of lament, how to trust and obey, rest, confess, sing in the darkness, running the long race and fighting the good fight, thanking Him in and for all things. Suffering becomes the means to all these graces in Christ, if we are willing to learn them.
I have a choice in how I suffer. As Dale Johnson puts it, “We may not be responsible for that event happening to us, but we are responsible to respond.”
So how will you make the most of your season of suffering? May we make the most of our seasons of suffering so that we bring glory to God, grow in faith, and become blessings to others who also suffer.
