It seems of late that I’ve been shoulder to shoulder with an influx of great suffering amongst family and friends. Cancer is pervasive, death due to COVID continues to touch our circles, mental illness is on the rise, and some are grieving children who have walked away from the faith.
Many facing these struggles have been vulnerable with the pain, which I’m deeply grateful for.
But I’ve noticed repeatedly that some of these believers feel the need to offer caveats in their vulnerability: “I have to be honest; I do feel angry right now, even though I know that’s not right.” I watched one friend brush away tears after sharing some troubling news. She took a deep breath, forced a smile, and said, “It’ll be fine. It’ll be totally fine.” Another dear saint expressed her turbulent emotions after losing a loved one: “I feel guilty because I go back and forth between despair and trust.”
As a Christian community, we have not always done a good job allowing people to sit in the pain that inevitably comes from living in a broken world. It’s not always necessary to add an excuse or qualification in these moments. In fact, when Jesus says, “Come to me all ye who are weary and heavy laden” (Matt. 11:28), He does not lay out stipulations necessary before bringing our burdens to Him.
And when He tells us to cast our anxieties on Him because He cares (1 Peter 5:7), God is telling us to forcefully throw onto Jesus what brings angst in our life. God is strong enough to carry our burdens, sturdy enough to catch our most forceful and angry throw, and He does not need our explanations to love beyond understanding.
The Bible tells us how God works in and through suffering, but many have falsified these truths by adding to them or subtracting from them. Watch out for the false narratives that set wrong expectations for believers amid distress, and instead embrace the beautiful truths from Scripture that give us hope during suffering.
What Suffering as a Christian Does Not Mean
We Will Find Happiness in Suffering
This is a false narrative, and it’s one that causes guilt when believers feel distraught over turmoil, death, or illness. There is not one place in the Bible where the Lord promises happiness for those who follow Christ.
What the Bible does promise is joy (James 1). Joy can mean the same thing as happiness, but in the presence of suffering, it is quite different. I like to define Biblical joy as a settled satisfaction in Christ and in His Provisions. Believer in Jesus, you don’t need to plaster a smile in your pain to be loved or accepted. Jesus Himself wept when losing His friend, Lazarus. He wept.
Jesus showed passionate emotions, dignifying the tears of others who weep with grief in this life.
We Will Never Question God’s Plan
The Psalms are filled with impassioned questions regarding God’s ways. Psalm 13 is just one example: How Long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? And Job, who faced numerous afflictions, says to God, “Why have you made me your mark? Why have I become a burden to you? (7:20).
At times, being honest before our maker comes out in questions because the reality is, most of the suffering in this life is riddled with perplexity from our human perspective.
The Lord already knows your heart, so be honest with Him. We bring our questions to God because we can fully and completely trust in Him. We aren’t totally vulnerable with someone we don’t trust. After stating His many questions in Psalm 13, David affirms that He brings his troubled heart to God because he has “trusted in [God’s] steadfast love.”
All Will Work Out the Way We Hope and Pray it Will
This is false teaching, and it causes Christians to believe they have weak faith if a disease is not healed, or if a child longed for is not given. Faith, friends, does not control God.
He will do His will, and as my husband affirmed in a recent sermon, “Sometimes the hardship we are going through IS the answer to our prayers.”
That is not easy to accept, but it’s what the Bible tells us: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord” (Isaiah 55:8), and we wouldn’t want it any other way. God is purposeful with His plan, and we cannot conceive of that perfect sovereignty, nor should we pretend that we could do it better: “As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything” (Ecc. 11:5).
What Suffering as a Christian Does Mean
We Have the Promise that God is Always with Us
As a believer in Jesus, you will never be forsaken. Jesus was forsaken on the cross so that you will never be. Not even death will separate you from the great love of Jesus (Romans 3:38). We will have tribulation in this life, but He will never leave us in the midst of it.
In Christ, God is always with us: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me” (Psalm 23:4). God does not love suffering; He loves you. And that love is so pervasive and intense, and it’s closeness is evident in the embrace of a friend, in a meal provided by a loved one, and in the glimpses of God’s work in your heart even as you suffer.
We Have the Gift of a Community of Believers
The book of Galatians exhorts us to bear one another’s burdens (Gal. 6:2), and I know the beauty of a fellow believer’s willingness to share in my suffering. The relief that is felt when a friend carries some of the weight is incomparable, and has, at different points in my own story, been life changing.
God’s church is His gift to us. Share your burdens and experience the radical love of Jesus through the hands and feet of His people. Don’t stay away from this community because you feel stuck in the mud and mire. When your spirit feels the driest is when you need God’s church the most. Embrace the gift of His people in the face of suffering.
We Have the Hope That God is Sovereign Over All
Nothing in this life is “random,” and not one detail is without purpose. This is the promise of God. Colossians 1:16 and 17 remind us that “all things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.”
After praying for years that my father would be healed from cancer, dad left this earth and went into the presence of God. For me, pain persisted, and confusion settled. Years later, I read dad’s diary in which he wrote out a prayer one night during his treatment: if his death would grow his daughter’s relationship with Jesus, he was OK to be taken.
Without knowledge of that prayer, I grew closer to my Savior in the year following my dad’s death more than any other time in my life thus far.
Trust in these promises from God, and don’t buy into the false mantras. Because of these promises in seasons of suffering, we wake up by the grace of God, put one step in front of the other by His strength, and we weep in the ever-present love of Jesus who knows suffering, and who walks with us every step of the way.