Growing Into Our Suffering

 They've been hard ones at times, these recent days. Some moments spent thankful for a distraction from the grief, others spent wanting nothing more than quiet to ponder what's been lost. Either way, the suffering is present, and I've struggled to figure out how to properly process the pain when the world just keeps rushing on and seemingly expecting you to move past your tragedy. It's as if you're being dropped on some conveyer belt and been pushed along when all you really want to do is hit the stop button and ask everyone else if they've ever felt this way, too. 

Juggling writing commitments, the on-going summer baseball season, community events, church activities, and even friendships seems, at times, to take all of the emotional strength I have. And when you hurt, sometimes that daily allotment is quite small. And in the midst of feeling this tug to keep going with life, you also feel a tug in the other direction - that you're not giving proper due to your journey of healing if you get too busy and do not allow yourself time to deal with your suffering. 

And I'm left wondering if our definition of healing is perhaps inaccurate. If healing isn't so much a learning to let go, move on, or get over as it is a learning to live with, embrace, and make friends with. If our seasons of suffering aren't just periods to get through but actually opportunities for us to LIVE IN our adversity - to get low, to be humbled, to wrap ourselves in the pain so that we are refined, changed and our baser self can die just a bit more. Maybe healing is really an invitation to welcome the hurt on a deeper level so that one can become more Christ-like? 

I'm finding these days that I take an extra comfort in the company of those who have suffered hard. It's just easier somehow to converse with the ones who know what real hardship is...almost like there's a special language that's shared and a safe space that's created instantly with someone when you know that they have their share of scars, too. And it's as if I feel I can't find this often among those who've seemingly had an easier road than me. And as I seek to find greater understanding in the messes of my past, I long to fellowship with those whose pain has shaped them, changed them, resurrected them. And thus, I began recently to soak up the wisdom of one such person who knows well what true loss and suffering is. 

He's a college professor whose world was forever changed back in 1991 when a drunk driver struck the van that he was driving, killing his young wife Linda as well as his own mother and eldest daughter. He and the other three children survived. Suddenly becoming a single dad and having to find a way to grieve while still carrying on with the needs of a young family was extremely difficult for him but he's since made it his mission to help other grieving and suffering souls feel understood. I read two of his books years ago that detail his journey to healing and was struck by the relatable-ness of his story. In my recent season of grief, I turned to his story once again and started listening to a couple of lectures in which he sheds light on the suffering human existence. And one thing he said stood out to me - and just perhaps this is why we fail to properly "heal" following the devastation we have endured? 

Prof. Jerry Sittser observes, "In our modern culture, the language we tend to use is to 'get over' something. And I learned...that you don't 'get over,' you grow into. You begin to wear it. It becomes a part of the landscape of your life. It's not over, it's into. It's not through, it's absorbing. Wearing it. Growing into it. Until becomes clothes that fit better... We should carry loss in our hearts for the rest of our lives. Jesus said, 'Blessed are those who mourn.' He didn't say, Blessed are those who've overcome mourning. It's 'who mourn.' Maybe it's our own sorrows but also other people until we realize that we belong to a community of mourning that goes back thousands of years and wraps itself around the world today. So we spend so much of our time trying to escape these things, to avoid these things. But the call of discipleship is to grow into them." 

Not to escape but to grow into our suffering. Perhaps then healing isn't an expectation that things will one day go back to normal - back to life as it was prior to our suffering - but it is rather process by which we learn to live a new normal...one with a mended heart. 

If we grasped this truth, how might it just change the way we view the seasons of adversity and pain that we walk through? 

And just maybe you're reading this and realizing that many have told you in a time of great trial that this pain was just "something to get through" and that you'd "get over it" at some future time and you somehow feel like you're wrong for lasting in this wilderness space for so long. But just maybe what you're actually longing for is to hear that the real people of this life are made by their sufferings. That you are in reality a better Christ-follower if you have suffered. That you are blessed by your adversity.

We are promised that joy comes in the morning. But maybe it comes in the mourning, too. 

Prof. Sittser later goes on to say, "I know of no person of character who has not suffered. Not one. It was adversity that formed character in them. The New Testament word in his varying cognates describes someone who is well prove, tested and found true, pressured and purified. It implies a refining process by which 'thy dross is consumed and thy gold is refined.' Mature character reflects the character of Jesus who, 'for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame,' and thus learned obedience through what He suffered." 

And thus I am reminded once again that these sufferings are simply my share in the hardships of Christ. That, as He calls me to love, to give, to sacrifice, pain will often accompany those things. That as I learn to live deeper in the Gospel-hope, I am shaped by the heartbreaks that come along the way. I am taught greater levels of love because I have lost. I have been shown fuller measures of grace because I have been desperate. I have discovered stronger faith because I have felt fear. And all this now means that I gained in spite of my adversity. And my suffering turned out to be a kind of saving. 

As many have sought to offer me comfort in the wake of my late friend's passing, as many have tried to offer advice and lend their support in some way, no words have spoken to me so deeply or meant so much as this concept that one can grow into their pain. That it's not right to expect the pain to one day suddenly leave you. That it's not right to think you are on some time-table as to when you'll move on or get past the loss and brokenness you feel. But it's actually right to dive into the suffering, to wrap oneself in it, to welcome whatever it has to show us about ourselves and about a God who meets us deeply in the hurts we are facing. And to a certain extent the effect of these seasons in our lives, as Prof. Sitter points out, should never leave us because we continually refer back to them and the person we became as a result. 

I want my suffering to keep on moulding and forming me. I want to go as deep as I need to in order to grasp that truth which adversity alone can teach me. I don't want to "get over" what I've been through anymore because, without it, I wouldn't feel, sympathize, relate, understand, share, give, and know as I do now. For many years I bought into the idea that I somehow had to get past all this, and I prayed to God at length that the mourning would end. I don't ask that anymore. Rather, I ask that He not let me out of this valley of tears until I make it a well (Psalm 84:6). A well that someday, others can come to and drink of the water of living hope just as I have.