To suffer humanizes us. It teaches compassion for one another and dependence on God. It is suffering that at once afflicts us and binds us together.
Earlier this year a lone gunman opened fire on moviegoers in Aurora, Colo. More recently, a man opened fire in a shopping mall in Oregon. Every time these things happen people ask things like, “Was God in the movie theater, the shopping mall, or in my suffering?” Recently, a terrible car accident occurred only several hundred feet from my house. It left a 28-year-old bride a widow and a 14-month-old without her daddy.
When the tragedy lives in Oregon, I can keep it at bay. When it moves onto my street, it moves into my heart. I find myself once again asking the question that has plagued me for years. Where is God in our pain? At the funeral of the man who died in the car accident, I listened to another pastor trying to shine the light of Christ in the darkness of life. On the news, I listened to agnostic sentiments from news people and a few encouraging accounts of survivors of God’s presence in the movie theater.
I have sought answers to this question for years. In the process, I have opened doors to more questions than answers. Here is what I know. The beauty of Christ radiates more brightly against the backdrop of suffering. The wounds of our savior are more beautiful, His worth more obvious, when observed through tears. God’s chief aim in creation is to highlight the worth and beauty of Christ. Suffering and pain does that by giving us the sublimely painful joy of cutting the legs off our pride. It pulls us to the core of our need for God. The garden of suffering produces the delight of reliance on God.
That’s very hard for us to do. It is exceedingly difficult because we want everything to make sense. Here we learn from a little girl whose suffering fills those around her with pain and faith. She has pain in her body that wars against her health, but her spirit is strong. Her love is undaunted. Her body is broken, her mind distressed, but her heart prospers. God’s love seeps unpretentiously into the cracks that are created by the quaking of her body. It runs like healing ointment, a soothing salve, in simplicity. In her pain, I see the suffering of Christ. In her smile, I see the hope that we are not without a Savior.
We don’t know what tomorrow will bring, so we should do more than simply live each day as if it were our last. Live each day like a child, as if it is your first. Live it with wonder and awe, swallow up all of the beauty that you can drink in because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring.
God is in all things. In our pain, He screams to us as through a megaphone. He bids us come to Him to find lasting salvation, eternal healing and hope. Bring your pain to Him who suffered on Golgotha’s cruel tree and knows our pain. God was in the movie theater, He was on my street, and He is in our pain calling us in the same direction as those who have traveled onward before us. He is calling us home.
About the Author:
Chris Surber is Pastor of Cypress Chapel Christian Church in Suffolk, VA. He is a religion Columnist for the Suffolk News Herald. He is the author of "Gomorrah Was Religious Too" (Energion Publishers) along with other books, and print and web publications.
Chris Surber – who has written 3 posts on Taber's Truths Christian Living Magazine.
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It seems like it really is the seeming randomness of suffering that makes so hard to deal with. When a child dies before a parent, when a baby dies, when an accident takes away a mother, when a gunman acts in ways barely comprehensible to most of us; we can’t make sense of it.
There is no easy answer to the questions but I find myself, having walked with so many people through suffering, finding great comfort in the biblical notion that God is supremely sovereign over all and in all. That notion can seem repulsive even to serious followers of the way of Jesus but when we see the divine hand of God redeeming the pain, highlighting the worth of Christ in the suffering we begin to see that beauty comes from ashes – that’s the way God works.
Suffering produces sorrow when its random but what if it has inherent meaning; intrinsic value as a means of God offering us a window through which to see His ultimate value and the ultimate ugliness of a love affair with this fallen, broken world.
I do live in Oregon not that far from this shooting, and it is something that is not understandable. This morning I thought of the ones who died, just like on Sept 11 they had no idea that on that day they would be never be going home. On that day when they woke up and had coffee and perhaps toast, talked to loved ones and headed off to the mall it would be their last moment on earth.
Hard to take in. Hard to believe. It could have been much worse his gun jammed which gave officers time to corner him, then he shot himself. It was a horrible senseless crime two people were killed and one is in the hospital. I pray for the officers involved and also for those who witnessed the shootings. Most of all I pray for the families who lost a loved one.