With all due respect to the genius of one of our founding fathers, he is wrong.
Jesus makes it clear that if we are to follow Him, we will encounter pain. This world is broken and we are linked to this destruction with an unbreakable bond. But He also makes it clear that pain and suffering are a gift, a pathway to connecting with others that would be impossible without that experience. “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statues” - Psalm 119:71.
Hang on, we're just getting started . . .
If you are still with me, thank you. It probably means that your life is also marked by seasons of pain, and suffering, which can sometimes blind us to everything else in our world. It is not always obvious that pain, and only pain, results in a special gift that can only be achieved through our brokenness. But there are conditions to the promise of this gift and the first (and maybe the most important) is to acknowledge the truth about your reality, "You are a broken person. I am a broken person, and all the people we know or know about are broken. Our brokenness is so visible and tangible, so concrete and specific, that it is often difficult to believe that there is much to think, speak or write about other than our brokenness." - Henri Nouwen
Henri continues to write about this state of brokenness,
"Have you ever really pondered that fact that all of the leaders and prophets of Israel, who were clearly chosen and blessed, all lived very broken lives. Do we dare to think that we will escape that same fate? . . . Our brokenness is truly ours. Nobody else’s. Our brokenness is as unique as our chosenness and our blessedness. The way we are broken is as much an expression of our individuality as the way we are taken and blessed.”
In conclusion he writes, “One thing is becoming clear to me: God became flesh for us to show us that the way to come in touch with God's love is the human way, in which the limited and partial affection that people can give offers access to the unlimited and complete love that God has poured into the human heart. God's love cannot be found outside this human affection, even when that human affection is tainted by the brokenness of our time. Our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that comes from the compassion that surrounds it.”
Honestly, this truth was not something that I used to believe. But life will humble us all and the struggles, challenges, and pain over the past few years has been as debilitating as anything I could have ever imagined. My attempts, and looking back they are quite obvious, to avoid pain simply delayed the inevitable. Because God desired the best for not only me, but for those He desired for me to do life with, He allowed an convergence of pain that was needed to bring me to my knees.
Quoting again from Henri Nouwen, "Our sufferings and pain are not simply bothersome interruptions of our lives. Rather, they touch us in our uniqueness, in our most intimate individuality. The way I am broken tells you something unique about me."
For much of my life I chose not to reveal my inner world. I diligently worked toward achieving my goals and was known by family and friends as the person they could call to help fix issues, never asking for help in return. Yet this denial of my true self came at a great cost. The greatest cost was my loss of ministry to those that God wanted me to interact with, and to be there for them as well. Actually scratch that, my greatest loss was my lack of awareness of my dependence upon God. Fix it people rarely sit still, and even rarer choose to be transparent about their own realities. This cost me greatly in lack of deep friendships and relationships with those I should have deeply loved, with God being at the top of that list.
God is still teaching me about my unique brokenness, but I am so thankful that He is allowing me to share my story and connect with others in a way I never dreamed was possible. I'm often reminded of the story about the introvert who gets on a plane with his book, desiring nothing other than his own company and silence, who upon hearing the pilot's announcement that the plane is going to crash, desires only the companionship of the people around him.
We are all broken, and we are all in need of those around us. This is why C. S. Lewis said, “We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.”
Suffering can feel like an invasion, an intruder robbing us of what we love and enjoy. But it’s more than an invasion; it’s a personal invitation from God. He shouts amid the storm to come and be with him.
You’ve called out to God to change your life and he didn’t. Paul experienced the same. He pleaded with the Lord to remove his suffering, and God answered Paul as he often answers us: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). God says he won’t give Paul the gift of deliverance, but he’ll give him something greater: the grace of knowing his presence and power.
There are aspects of God’s character and power we’ll never know if we don’t first experience our weakness. I only knew what it meant to count on God as my Father after my divorce. I would never have known Jesus’s faithful presence as a friend had I not moved hundreds of miles, leaving all my friends and family behind. I would never have known that God is my provider had I not struggled to pay the bills. I wouldn’t have known what it means that he knows my name without the experience of feeling inferior. I wouldn’t have known the freedom of forgiveness had I not seen my own sin.
God wants to give you more than mere knowledge about him; he wants you to experience him personally. Paul says, “I will most boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. . . . For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:9–10).
To “boast” means we stay confident that God is good and wise and hasn’t abandoned us even when we don’t understand, even when we feel alone, and even when we long for our circumstances to be different. Boasting in God makes us stronger because we stop leaning on ourselves and the strength that fails us, instead finding our true source of power and joy in Him.
We all live with suffering. We all experience the disappearance of what we’ve loved and hoped for. You may feel this fruitlessness and the failure right now. But suffering is more than something to “get through.” God is doing a million things in your suffering, working out countless details we can never imagine. We don’t know most of what he’s doing, but we do know that if we belong to him, suffering is a gift.
