What Do You Believe About Suffering?, Pt 2

This past week, I was speaking with another pastor about the kind of “volcanic suffering” that is life-altering. She said the Lord had recently spoken to her about this being a season of “Holy Disruptions”. I found it interesting that the words we were using to try and describe profound loss and grieving had some shared connotations. I was saying 'eruptions' and she was saying 'disruptions' and both of these words imply intense events that result in radical changes. In the last few months, both of our families have lost grandchildren shortly after they were born and we can confirm that the intense grief and suffering have brought radical changes to the landscape of our lives. We can also testify of the Lord’s goodness, kindness, comfort, and grace through these trials that have sustained us!

I can remember going through some really tough times as a young pastor that involved loss, pain, and suffering. I can also remember being embarrassed by what was happening! My unbalanced beliefs about suffering led me to think that if I had been walking in some higher level of obedience, faith, and authority that these bad things wouldn’t have happened to me or my family. I had named, claimed, bound, loosed, declared and believed with all my heart for a miracle and yet nothing changed and I was still suffering. I can even remember well-meaning, but misguided individuals who encouraged me to deny and ignore the realities of sickness and suffering so that I could “walk in faith.”

Watching this same mindset spread throughout communities of Believers was almost like living out a page from “The Emperor’s New Clothes” which illustrates how the truth can be ignored due to group-think, fear, vanity, conformity, and collective illusion. Popular opinion is not always based in Biblical truth. It was in these times that I learned that no matter how sincere I was, or how sincere the people making the claims were, we could be sincerely wrong.

Out or Through

I have seen genuine miracles and answered prayers that have delivered people OUT of painful and tragic situations. However, I have also watched many faith-filled, anointed Believers, who have had to navigate THROUGH sickness and profound suffering. These, seemingly, contradictory events forced me to correct my imbalanced beliefs about suffering. What the Bible and life has taught me is that sometimes God delivers us OUT and sometimes He takes us THROUGH!

Understanding and accepting this reality not only brings us face to face with what we believe about suffering, but it also brings us face to face with what we believe about God. To accept that God may take us through some tough times means that these tough times can also create opportunities for us to grow in faith and trust in His character and His Word. The tough times that most people want to avoid, including me, can transform our “head” knowledge about God into “heart” knowledge.

Such changes can reshape the landscape of our lives, healing areas of our hearts still wounded from the neglect and trauma of our past. I love the declaration of the three young men facing a fiery furnace in the book of Daniel, “The God we serve is able to deliver us, but even if He doesn’t we will not bow…!” History reports that these young men were somewhere between their early teens and young twenties. To this day, their words demonstrating their maturity and faith continue as a proclamation through the ages encouraging us to triumph in the face of loss and suffering!

Suffer Well

Some years ago, at a funeral for the wife of a prominent Christian leader, a Navy Seal Commander came over to the husband, shook his hand, and simply said “suffer well.” I was stunned by his comment! The simplicity, the boldness, and the truth of his statement hit me like a lightning bolt. I realized that in all my years of Biblical education and ministry since becoming a Christian as a young adult I had been taught how to avoid, escape, and rebuke suffering; I had never once been told or taught how to suffer well.

I grew up, like many others, in significant dysfunction and abuse. Yet, none of that suffering compared to watching one of my children navigate their own journey of suffering. Watching my child suffer felt unbearable. On one of the worst days of that season, I was sitting on the bathroom floor unable to get dressed. The idea of just buttoning my shirt felt impossible. While sitting there, my pastor called and told me that a very well-known prophet had asked how I was doing. He told the prophet that I was going through a very tough season. For a moment, I felt a flash of hope that maybe the prophet had a Word that would help me in that moment! My pastor went on to say that the prophet asked him if he thought I was going to make it through? I was crushed! I felt even lower than I did before the call which I would not have thought possible until that moment!

If you read part one of this blog, then you know I talked about spiritual forces that attempt to exploit our suffering filling our atmosphere with words of shame, condemnation, accusation, hopelessness, even accusing God of failing us. Suffice it to say, plenty of that was happening on that bathroom floor. After I hung up the phone, I said out loud,“even the prophets don’t know if I’m going to make it through this!” It was then I heard the Lord ask in a very quiet voice, “Do you want to make it through?” I felt so hopeless and overcome by the pain and suffering that I had forgotten that I still had the power of my choice. In seasons of volcanic eruptions when so many things are out of your control, it is easy to forget you can still choose in Who and in What you will believe.

I got up off that floor and I began to declare that I would live and not die and that I would see the salvation of the Lord for my family, and every other Biblical promise that I could remember. I sat down on the bathroom floor that day a victim, but I got up off the floor an overcomer. Even though we still had years to go before that particular season ended, I was never on that bathroom floor again, the decision had been made!

Choose Hope

YOU CAN CHOOSE TO SUFFER WELL! The ability to choose was given to us by divine right in the Garden of Eden. This free agency enables us to agree with the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, thereby, engaging faith! By faith we can choose to access hope which enables us to confidently align our beliefs with God’s future promises rather than our current circumstances. Significant suffering will expose any lingering, unbalanced, ideas about who God is and what His intentions are towards us, and it may also trigger old, family wounds which can leave us fearful and confused, plagued by feelings of betrayal, personal failure, shame, and blame. If you are going through, and you have unanswered questions, share those questions with the Lord trusting that in due season the answers will come. Now, that due season may be in heaven, but if we decide we can’t move forward without answers, we can get stuck in a cycle of suffering and victimization and prolong our suffering unnecessarily.

To be clear, I am not advocating for living in denial of or ignoring the explosions in your life. I am saying that engaging faith and hope while mourning or suffering can seem impossible or counterintuitive, and yet we are capable of doing both at the same time. The Bible tells us that Jesus endured the cross, while despising its shame, for the joy that was set before him. Choosing to hope in God and His future promises can activate hope even when we can’t yet feel it. The decision to hope creates an atmosphere for your feelings to heal, change, and catch up to your decision to hope. Sometimes, people who are suffering feel that asking them to make a decision to hope is cruel in light of the pain they feel. What they don’t realize is that making the decision to hope is not insensitive, it is the life preserver for a person in danger of drowning in sorrow, loss, and grief.

This is how relational trust is built, you have to go through some things. Even in our marriage vows we acknowledge this fact stating, for better and for worse. It’s in wonderful times and terrible times that we can learn, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that His plans for us are good not evil, and He wants us to go through life with expectant hope, confident that no weapon forged against us will prosper, and that ALL things are working for our good!

These are not just Biblical cliches, these are spiritual laws that are immutable (unchanging)! He is always for us and in our corner, and although weapons may be formed against us, they will not prosper or have their full intended outcome, and although ALL the things that happen to us are not good, the outcome of those things must work towards our good.

When suffering comes, pray for a miracle! And if it becomes clear that you will be going through — I hope you use your power of choice and choose to suffer well knowing that the process produces perseverance, hope, faith, and maturity. I can say with the utmost certainty that even the darkest seasons produce good fruit and you will be radically changed, if you so choose.