Chaplain Devo: Walking w/ Suffering
I walked a mile with Pleasure
She chatted all the way
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to sayI walked a mile with Sorrow
And ne’er a word said she
But, Oh the things I learned from her
When Sorrow walked with me.—Robert Hamilton
Photo credit: Adrian Swancar via Unsplash.com
Our AgG team has spent a lot of time lately discussing and praying through suffering.
Personal loss, chronically sick children, cancer, grief, and yet a resilient Hope we draw from our God who experiences these things first-hand.
Sorrow equates to suffering.
As humans, throughout history and across all cultures, we’ve always wrestled with suffering. Suffering is a universal experience.
Why, though?
There is ‘ordinary’ suffering that we intuitively know is coming and extraordinary suffering that blindsides us.
Photo credit: Zoe via Unsplash.com
There is suffering where we can (we think) connect the dots, and suffering that we can see no way to explain. We tend to construct theodicies to explain what seems to be a silent Sovereign.
Tim Keller writes that “In the secular view, suffering is never seen as a meaningful part of life but only as an interruption.” Keller concluded that this leads to attempting to manage and lessen the pain or to look for the cause and eliminate it.
Yet for people of faith, suffering can drive us out of ourselves and toward God and others.
Isaiah writes that “He carries our sorrows.”
Paul addresses God as the Father of mercy and source of all comfort. Our brethren are to enter into our sufferings with compassion, the willingness to be wounded by the suffering of others.
But as Hamilton wrote in the poem above, we can become more whole through our sufferings and reach a place pleasures could never take us.
In Henri Nouwen’s picture of communion, we (the bread) are taken, we are blessed, we are broken, then we are given out. Christ’s suffering on the cross is the ultimate picture of worthy suffering unto God, and we continue to take strange comfort in such a gruesome story.
Reflecting on the believer’s suffering (and possibly recalling Christ’s Passion) in one of his letters, the Apostle Peter gives a clue to worthy suffering:
“Therefore, let those also who suffer according to the will of God entrust their souls to a faithful Creator in doing what is right.” —1 Peter 4:19
So we commend our souls to God before suffering comes. We entrust that He can create out of suffering.