Suffering: How do we make sense of it?

All people suffer.  That is where we must begin in our search to make sense of it.  In other words, regardless of how we explain it, rage against it, despair of it, ignore it, overcome it, or surrender to it, we will all experience it.   No one is spared from its brutality and erosiveness.

Suffering poses a special problem for Christians because Christians face the daunting challenge of reconciling their belief in God with the horror and pain of suffering.  You know how the question goes, and perhaps you have asked it yourself in the wake of some loss—

“How could a good and powerful God allow suffering?”

It is a good question.  An inevitable question.  And an unavoidable question.  The experience of suffering turns it from the theoretical to the ruthlessly existential.  It is one thing to ponder the death of a child to some unknown mother living on the other side of the world; it is quite another to ponder the death of your own.  Our perspective changes when it becomes OUR suffering.

Many people choose agnosticism or atheism in the wake of suffering.  They simply cannot reconcile the existence of a good and powerful God with the experience of suffering.  God is good but not powerful?  God is powerful but not good?  They simply cannot accept those two options.  And neither, for that matter, do most Christians.

Nor can they accept a third—that God is both good and powerful but, for some unknown reason, is unwilling to deliver us from suffering.  In their minds no belief is better than belief in such a God.

Atheism might mitigate the cognitive dissonance Christians feel.  Still, it doesn’t solve the problem.  Non-religious people still suffer.

All people suffer, whether they are unbelieving, disbelieving, or believing.  No philosophical answer will spare us.  No magic wand.  No genie.  No incantation or chant or prayer.  No practice or discipline.  No formula of positive thinking.  Nothing.  Suffering is an inescapable reality.

What then do we do?  It seems impossible to stop trying to make sense of it.  We can’t help but think about it.  It is in our nature to ask questions because our desire to understand—no, our NEED to understand—is insatiable.  Our very nature compels us to keep searching.

Here is where I have landed.

No explanation satisfies me, not completely anyway.  I would be surprised if it satisfies anyone.  And for one simple reason: answers can’t and won’t rescue us.  Every explanation must take that into account.  The affliction will continue, even if we hear the voice of God or experience some miraculous deliverance or reach a state of mystical transcendence or muscle our way through.  Suffering has a way of unsettling even the most religiously confident among us.

It might therefore become intolerable to believe in a gracious and sovereign God and yet suffer at the same time.  It makes life even more torturous.  Suffering is bad enough; belief in God only makes it worse.  How long should an adult child continue in a relationship with an abusive parent?  Does the time come when it is best to break it off?

Fair enough.

But there is something equally and intolerably terrifying about living in a cold and metallic universe that consists only of physical matter, chance, and pain.

I have chosen to embrace a Christian response to suffering.  I embrace it because it seems true to life.  But again, this “answer,” such as it is, has not and will not deliver me from the experience of suffering, though it has helped and will help me bear it.

After Jesus spoke harshly about what it means to follow him, only to see masses of people abandon him, he asked his disciples what they would do, “Do you also wish to go away?”  Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.  We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

That is where I end up, too.  I simply don’t know where else to go.  It is true that suffering keeps stalking me, like a recurring nightmare.  It is all around me, as ubiquitous as air.  I am far more aware of it now than I was twenty years ago, or even ten years ago.

In most instances I don’t know what to do or say.  During my morning devotions I often pray, “God, the world is bleeding and groaning.  There is misery all around me.  Have mercy.”  That brief prayer is all I can muster, which puts me in the same company as the tax collector.  Paul said that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us when we don’t know how to pray.

I hope so.  Because I don’t often know what to say to God.

Do I sound like a man with little faith?  I probably do.  Yet faith itself is not some commodity that can be quantified, as if we could have more or less of it.  Faith is the practice of turning away from self—our intelligence, strength, confidence, and competence—and turning toward God—in faith, hope, and love, yes, but also in desperation and doubt.

God has given us enough evidence to believe in him, but not so much that we have to believe in him.  God doesn’t coerce.  There is mystery and ambiguity in the Christian faith, which is why we must live by faith.  We see in part; we don’t see the whole.

But the part I see persuades me and holds me fast, even in suffering.