As I have grown as a Christian, so has my attitude towards suffering matured. Not that I always move forward, but I have noticed a distinct trajectory in my understanding of and experience with suffering:
1. We think suffering just isn’t something Christians experience. Growing up in a sheltered environment and then coming to faith in a comfortable congregation, I didn’t yet have an experiential category for suffering, and theoretically, I would have told you that God keeps major crises from His children.
2. We can ask God to keep suffering away from us. As I heard of and empathized with other believers’ wilderness seasons, I looked to God to help those who were suffering and to keep suffering from me.
3. We can ask God to provide relief when we are suffering. As I went through my own wilderness seasons, I saw God as the One to whom I could cry out to, who had the power and the desire to pull me from my pit and to rescue me from my pain.
4. We can ask God to provide companionship when we are suffering. Many of my wilderness seasons lasted long enough that I had time to understand God as not just the One who provides relief amidst our suffering but also as the One who is with us amidst our suffering.
5. We can ask God to provide perspective when we are suffering. Fasting, which is a form of suffering, and suffering itself are two ways I have come to believe God grows in us a holy longing for future glory; that is to say, we remember that while God is with us here on a finite earth, His desire is one day to bring us into an eternal heaven.
6. We rejoice in suffering because we understand what it means to be worthy of suffering. Now we are beginning to see the role of suffering in and of itself, not for what it elicits from us but as a sign from God that we are on the right path. Not that we enjoy the pain itself – yet (see below).
7. We rejoice in suffering because it is itself a gift from God. Now we are beyond suffering as a means to receiving more enjoyable ends from God, and understanding that the suffering itself is an end, and not only so but a blessing from God.
Lest I be accused of being a masochist or endorsing masochism, let me explain. A professional event planner once told me that remaining calm amidst event-related snafus is like enjoying spicy foods. You can react violently to the hot sensation in your mouth and frantically douse yourself with liquids.
Or you can let your mouth experience the burn. After awhile, it adjusts to the spiciness and can tolerate it. More importantly, allowing your mouth to experience the burn allows you to experience all the flavors in and around the spiciness. And so it is, the event planner told me, with events.
And so it also is, I believe, with Christian suffering. We can douse ourselves with liquids and seek to numb the pain. Or we can allow ourselves to experience the pain, give ourselves space to adjust to it, and experience all the flavors God has for us in and around it.
The apostle Paul, an expert in Christian suffering if there ever was one, wrote from prison to the church in Philippi these words: “For to you it has been graciously given for Christ’s sake, not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer for His sake” (Philippians 1:29). Paul understood more deeply than most that God does indeed use suffering to give Christians many good gifts; but more importantly, He graciously gives us suffering as a gift in and of itself.
The apostle Paul felt the sting of Christian suffering, and instead of dousing himself with liquids to numb the pain, he allowed himself to experience it, and with it all the flavors that come with knowing God. What about us? Which of the first six numbers above will we get stuck on, rather than get to number seven and experience all the flavors God desires us to enjoy?
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