Finding God in Suffering

If we live, if you are able to read this post, you have experienced suffering in your life.

We will experience loss, sadness, sorrow, despair, and regret. Along with joy, happiness, peace, contentment, and love, we will not escape our own challenges and we will not get out of this life alive.

But, if we look at life as a ledger sheet of positive and negative, sad versus happy moments, times of struggle and times of ease and contentment we might need to reconsider what our life is all about.

Preachers who preach that we can always live in nirvana on this planet and never have suffering or loss are lying. They are not preaching the gospel nor the truth.

Our life is about creation and growth and strength and becoming.

We simply cannot become who God intended us to be without struggle. When we deprive our children of struggle they only find the going harder in life when they are older.

But the news is good.

For it will be through struggles and loss and illness and aging we grow and learn and find truths in this world.

Great joy only comes from growing through the struggle to find God is always faithful and we have a real personal reason for hope.

As a two-time cancer survivor, I have seen hundreds pray for me. Family members, parishioners, people who others knew, but I didn’t, added me to their prayer list, people I met in hallways and others in my extended social circles around the world.

But I think we miss the power of prayer sometimes. Many of us think and talk about the “power of prayer” as if we are expecting miracles and healing and all to be well again.

We all want and should pray for healing but that isn’t the power of prayer that I have seen.

After all, the bottom line focus for a Christian is to one day be with our Father in heaven. To have lived according to the teachings of Jesus Christ. To follow his way. And the bottom line for a minister is to reach as many people to have them reconnect with God and have their lives changed and hearts softened.

When people pray for us they are talking to God. That’s a good thing.

For many, this might be the first time in a long time. When children come up to me and tell me that they are praying for me every night I find great joy in knowing they are starting to think more about God and praying to him.

When husbands and wives in broken marriages pray for me separately they are connecting to God who can turn hearts of stone into human hearts of love and forgiveness and find they now have a path to reconciliation.

Prayer associated with cancer or illness or loss or any struggles in life can bring families and communities closer to God.

Brotherhood or sisterhood for that matter has been defined by St Hilary as the bond of affection arising from single-minded purpose. That is what Church is and what the body of Christ is about too. So collective prayer for a purpose brings us together as family and the body of Christ.

And isn’t that the reason and purpose of our life?

So for many of us when we find our fragile bodies are succumbing to injuries, cancers or illness we may also find God is using our struggle, even where death is in our shadow, to bring life to others.

Joy, true and great joy is not about possessions or being healed or even about avoiding illness. Joy, true and great joy is about seeing God bring life from death, hope from the struggles of cancer, prayers of the innocent joined in petition for the ill or aged.

And this should not surprise us. For through Jesus Christ, God brought life and forgiveness from torture and death. As children made in his image, we too have the blessing to use our suffering, or rather to let God use our suffering to bring hope and love and life to others.

Great joy like great love is available only through sacrifice. Great joy like great love is a blessing given when we put our lives in God’s hands. The only word I know to describe it is succumb.

Not to succumb to illness.

To succumb to God.

To succumb to his will.

To give God our hurt and suffering and ask him to use it as he would. God does not want us to suffer, but he can use it to work miracles of the heart and soul.

And in the end, as much as we want to live forever we cannot. Our goal should not be immortality but holiness.

All we can do is ask God to use us to help others reach out to him. In good times and bad, in good health and bad, succumbing to God means allowing him to use us to reach our children, our family, our friends, our world.

We can be joyful even as we face struggle. Maybe not for our suffering but maybe for others who we love and will see again.