“God had one Son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering” said St. Augustine. We live in a world that is constantly trying to insulate us from pain and suffering. Nobody loves to suffer, but none of us will be exempted from suffering based on our liking or disliking of suffering. A lot of thought was given to human suffering from many people in the past from several different perspectives. It is definitely very helpful to read about human suffering from different perspective, but I personally believe that none of these scholarly answers will help us much when we are personally going through sufferings.
Understanding human suffering is a very complex subject but I believe that human sinfulness and selfishness are the root causes for most sufferings. Though suffering often casts dark shadows on our daily life blinding us from the big picture of life and eternity, there is a bright side of suffering that many of us tend to overlook, the purifying quality of suffering. I do not think we will ever fully understand the mystery of human suffering, but what we can do is to stop the wrong notions of suffering from crippling our present life.
Nobody loves to suffer, but none of us will be exempted from suffering based on our liking or disliking of suffering.
Henri Nouwen reminds us of the relationship between our suffering and growth in his words “We fail to see the place of suffering in the broader scheme of things. We fail to see that suffering is an inevitable dimension of life. Because we have lost perspective, we fail to see that unless one is willing to accept suffering properly, he or she is really refusing to continue in the quest for maturity. To refuse suffering is to refuse personal growth.”
We fail to see the place of suffering in the broader scheme of things. We fail to see that suffering is an inevitable dimension of life…To refuse suffering is to refuse personal growth.
Elisabeth Elliot says “Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering…. The love of God did not protect His own Son…. He will not necessarily protect us – not from anything it takes to make us like His Son., A lot of hammering and chiseling and purifying by fire will have to go into the process.” It is very obvious that suffering has a bright side to it; it brings us to a place in life where it is easy for God to work in and through us. John Piper says “We do not choose suffering simply because we are told to, but because the one who tells us to describes it as the path to everlasting joy.”
Suffering by itself does not make us all holy or saints, in fact many people become very bitter towards life because they fail to see the big picture of life. Oswald Chambers makes this insightful comment in his book “My Utmost for His Highest? “We all know people who have been made much meaner and more irritable and more intolerable to live with by suffering: it is not right to say that all suffering perfects. It only perfects one type of person…… the one who accepts the call of God in Christ Jesus.” In other words while suffering does shatter some people, it also has the potential to strengthen those who focus on God’s big picture.
The Bible says this about Jesus Christ “Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered, and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (Heb 5:8,9). If the Son of God could learn something from suffering, how much more can we learn from sufferings? The next time you feel like you deserve a pity party because you are in a pit of sufferings, remember that you are not alone. Joseph, David, Daniel, Job, Paul and many others in the Bible were in pits that made no sense to them at that point, but each of these men eventually graduated from the school of suffering. Suffering can never be easy and it will never make much sense to us anyway, but if we stop questioning God’s sovereignty and goodness, soon we will be able to see the bright side of the dark cloud.
While suffering does shatter some people, it also has the potential to strengthen those who focus on God’s big picture
– – Author: Rev. Francis Burgula – –
