Don’t Downplay The Pain Of Suffering

Suffering. How can one small word hold so much complexity? It can elicit: fear, dread, anxiety, bitterness, anger, and panic. It can also stir up: courage, strength, growth, humility, and faith.

Suffering is so painfully complex that we struggle to find answers to it, yet it demands answers nonetheless. Which is why, I believe, we often grasp at any answer we can surmise to make sense of our pain.

God must want to teach me something.

Maybe I’m being disciplined for unconfessed sin.

It’s because my faith isn’t strong enough.

God must want to turn my pain into a ministry.

He’s allowing it so he can show his miraculous healing power.

It’s not wrong to consider how God might use our suffering. But one of our greatest temptations is so quickly trying to find a greater purpose for our pain that we downplay the reason we feel it in the first place. Suffering, in a sense, is a taste of death. It’s the sting of sin within us and around us. We do ourselves a disservice when we too quickly gloss over the pain. Until we acknowledge the true grief, we can’t truly appreciate how Jesus enters into it with us and brings redemption into the broken places of our lives.

Hard Things Can Become Holy Things

Although we desperately want to assign meaning to our suffering, John Andrew Bryant poignantly explains, “Suffering, by itself, does not have any meaning. It only ruins, it only takes away. It is only given meaning by Christ’s proximity to it.” By Christ “enduring, bearing, and overcoming” our suffering, Bryant explains, hard things can become holy things.

We do ourselves a disservice when we too quickly gloss over the pain.

My son hurting others during frequent fits of rage caused by a mental illness that he had no control over for more than a decade wasn’t somehow good. Times when evil men made me feel vulnerable, afraid, used, and abused in my past weren’t good. As I lay in my bed in physical agony over illnesses yet to be helped, robbing me of life beyond my bed, my anguish isn’t good. But these hard things can become holy things as Jesus enters that suffering with me, drawing me nearer to his presence, giving me his comfort and strength, and making me more like him.

And your suffering, too, is just that: suffering. The loss of your child, the terminal diagnosis, the broken marriage—they’re all places of unredeemable torment apart from our Savior’s resurrection power and presence. Our suffering isn’t good in and of itself. It’s a taste of death, and we should grieve it as such. In the place of honest agony, we’re able to experience the sacredness of Jesus’s nail-scarred hands entering that pain with us and, in a way that only he can, Jesus makes hard things holy things and evil things redeemed things through his blood.

Transformed by Presence, Not Pain

The point isn’t to come to a place of saying, “That awful thing is somehow now a good thing.” It’s to say, “Only by the redemptive power and presence of Jesus have I endured this place of death and been drawn more into the presence of his life.”

In a way that only he can, Jesus makes hard things holy things and evil things redeemed things through his blood.

So we grieve and acknowledge our suffering without cheapening the pain as if it’s something we should call good in and of itself. But we also don’t lose heart, because we’ll find strength, comfort, and reason to endure as Jesus enters it with us. We find life in him even within the depths of darkness.

It’s not the pain that transforms us. It’s Jesus’s presence in the pain. The truth Paul shared with the Corinthian church remains true for us:

Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. (2 Cor. 4:16–18)

In the darkest places, may we one day find we’re standing on holy ground, not because of the pain but because we’ve experienced Jesus’s transforming power in it.