YEARS ago I remember reading some luminary saying — like it was God speaking through them — that writing on suffering will always be needed.
It resonated with me because of the journey I’d been on. It spoke to my purpose.
It seems absolutely berserk to say that suffering produces goodness in us, but of course, the Bible’s said this longer than even Jesus’ teachings.
Not that any of us embraces the journey of suffering.
The point of this article is this:
We cannot pretend we know the wisdom,
maturity, and fruit that comes from suffering.
We need to have BEEN THERE to credibly and capably state truths resplendent of the “deeper magic” as C.S. Lewis put it.
I believe God allows us to struggle whole seasons of life so we genuinely KNOW in the deepest fissures of our being what it is like NOT to be able to easily escape such an existence — eternally speaking, the passage to a gift if we would learn it, but hell in a world like ours.
In counselling those in existential conflict I’ve drawn on this so many times. It is a saving grace to have been caught up in the vortex of suffering for an extended period of time — we would not learn the deeper humility to be gained in such seasons if we weren’t caught there for months or years.
Grief always takes far too long.
Getting to the point where our lives and happiness are secondary is the purpose of the journey — having died to ourselves — but truthfully, as human beings, in humility, we never remain there. That’s okay, because God can show us enough in a glimpse of death what we can carry for the rest of our lives. Re-reading these words, it can be easy to just write them; living them is another reality altogether!
But I’m getting distracted.
Who is it that can speak authoritatively
into the space of suffering?
Usually the person who does so consistently speak into the space, for they cannot speak on other matters. But the person needs to have been there, to the pit of their own personal hell — to be held there for a time — to have been kept there — for a substantial period of time.
Suffering teaches us so much, not least that one person’s suffering is worlds apart from another’s. Humility is the wisdom of the person forged through fire.
My real question when I see a person ministering in the struggles of others, is, have you, yourself, struggled?
I need to see this in the person counselling others in the temerity of pain they have no idea about. Counselling’s the most humbling task — you have no idea. What an anachronism if the guide hasn’t been there — to their own existence of suffering, I mean. But the guide who has been there knows in the pit of their gut that they know nothing.
But they do know how inextricably painful it is to suffer. And that’s enough.
For the person assisting the sufferer, the person walking alongside, if you have been chosen, you have the noblest task.
The sufferer sees something in you, and you may well doubt your worth to them. This is an important doubt to have, because God will only shine through you, and use you, when you insist He fills you, because you otherwise have nothing to offer.
BUT… have you, yourself, struggled as the one before you is? You stand on sacred ground around them. Your work will go well when you know you stand right where God does as you minister together.
There is no greater work in the whole of life than to sit with another in their suffering and, like them, to have no answers either, but to wait on God who is the answer.
Who am I? What do I have to offer? Nothing. And yet it is everything in this work.
