Suffering-Intro

Gregg’s Reflection

The first half of my life was relatively free of suffering. Our parents, who endured the depression and the War, provided for us in ways they had never experienced in their young lives.

Even when I came to faith, I did not sign on to suffer. I don’t really remember being taught a theology of suffering. Somehow, ‘Take up your cross and follow Me’ did not sink into my hard head.

I was discipled by my father and our culture to fight, to compete, to win. As an Enneagram 8, failure was not an option. Suffering was not on my radar screen. I thought I was separate from the suffering of those around me, from the suffering of the world.

When we sold the business and I left the business world, that illusion came crashing down. Looking back, I can see that for me to be useful to God, humility was a prerequisite. But, I sure didn’t know the cost of humility.

As I sought to pursue my calling, I encountered business failure, the threat of bankruptcy, but the worst of all was the failure of a church leadership project I had started and pushed for five years. I had so invested my identity in ‘doing something great for God,’ that I nearly destroyed my health.

Hitting the wall, I had to delay knee surgery while my heart was checked out. My irregular gait threw out my back and I spent a month in bed. During that time, I knew there was a lesson for me, so I endured and prayed. Reading Job, I realized I had been having trouble letting God be God. I was intent on being the savior.

Failing publicly, and letting go of my project was the dawning of humility in my life. I began to learn this lesson:

Suffering endured in faith helps us realize that God allows it because it inculcates great good into our lives through the transforming effect it has on a character. We become more compassionate, tolerant, and humble. We come to the place where we can see life realistically and hopefully at the same time. We discover the abiding, caring presence of the God who holds each and everyone of us in the hollow of his hand during our own experiences of suffering. 

Renovare Bible notes on “The People of God in Travail,” p. 720, Old Testament 

My spiritual director, Mark Ritchie, would help me discern the learning from the pain in my journey. “What have you learned from this experience? Was the learning worth the pain endured?” And, each time I say yes. I find I don’t learn without some pain. Out of my greatest wound came my calling. There is honey in the rock. Find the rest of the Suffering Post here.

Journaling Prompt

How has suffering shaped you? How has your pain turned into passion to help others enduring that suffering? In what ways have your wounds shaped your calling?

Scripture

All humans born of women have a short life, and it is full of suffering.

Job 14:1

God speaks through our distress, when we think He is silent. God opens the ear through adversity. Maybe there are messages we simply have not heard. Can we hear God in Adversity?

Renovare Bible Notes on Job 36:15, Old Testament  p. 758

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and saves the crushed in spirit. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord rescues them from them all.

Psalm 34:18-19

We boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us because God’s Spirit has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given. 

Romans 5:36

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, not things to come, not powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:35-39

We have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. So, we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away; Our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.

2 Corinthians 4:7-10, 16-17

Our times of suffering become spiritually significant when they are induced by faithful discipleship and when we see them as opportunities to rely on the power of God.

RENOVARE Bible notes on 2 Timothy 18

Ancient Writings

The Christian way is to embrace our wounds, not to become embittered victims. The wounds in Jesus’ hands, feet and side are still carried in the resurrected body. I think we carry our wounds until the end; they do not fully go away but keep us humble, patient and more willing to trust. Wounds become our daily offering to God, and they develop in us compassion towards the weaknesses of others. “Our wounds become our honor,” 

Julian of Norwich. Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation, p.135

Modern Writings

All wounds flower. We only need to investigate, by looking straight into the wound. Only interior silence can look deeply into a wound. What silence finds is also silent. -Let us stand still, then, in the interval of our wounding, til the silence turns golden and love is a moment eternally overflowing.

R.S. Thomas, Evening

The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt. 

Thomas Merton, Seven Storey Mountain

In solitude, we come to know the Spirit who has already been given to us. The pains and struggles we encounter in our solitude thus become the way to hope, because our hope is not based on something that will happen after our sufferings are over, but on the real presence of God’s healing Spirit in the midst of these sufferings. The discipline of solitude allows us gradually to come in touch with this hopeful presence of God in our lives, and allows us also to taste even now the beginnings of the joy and peace that belong to the new heaven and the new earth. 

Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 6/9/20

Your whole life is filled with losses, endless losses. And every time there are losses there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression, and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper. The question is not how to avoid loss and make it not happen, but how to choose it as a passage, as an exodus to greater life and freedom. 

Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 11/9/20

God is patient in calling us slowly to ever greater wisdom. Usually God does this by making our self-constructed world fall apart. Our personal salvation project must always show itself to be almost totally wrong; in fact, the refusal to allow this falling apart is what creates legalism in religion.

The pain of things falling apart is what we call suffering, and it is one of God’s means to show us that life is always bigger than we imagine it to be. Faith is what sustains us during this suffering, and allows us to discover that we can survive only by relying on a much greater source. God is always drawing us closer, and most of the time we do not even know it is happening. 

Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation, p. 61