Towards a hopeful suffering…
18 May 2009
Paul writes… one of the hardest problems I face is reconciling my faith to the experiences of my life or vice versa.
I’ll often say in response to a question about my experience of God, “nope, that’s not the God I know…” By which I am saying that is not a God who I’ve experienced or want to experience. It is a flippant way of dealing with a God who is being portrayed as a miserable lemon sucking, guilty making miser. Or a God who is out for lunch, doesn’t care, leave your name and number after the tone and he’ll get back to you later… much later. Or indeed a God who is a happy go lucky glowing cheeked santa claus/generous grandfather dispensing pats on heads, freebies and Worthers Orginals at will.
In truth though my experience of God is shaped by my subjective shifting experience of God in my life. I am grateful for counterpoints such as the bible and other people’s experience of God to challenge my creation of God in the image of my own life – and it is some challenge!
The moments where my faith stutters the most like a scratched CD are those moments where life does not match my God expectations. My faith does not fit my life. Nor does my life fit my faith. It is those moments of congruence where I feel the furthest from God. Ironically as I flounder and flail in my faith, at the end of myself, God is, I’m sure, the most closet to me.
A few years ago I struggled with an expectation of faith which was a straight line to glory. That saints were saved and did not need to question or have doubts. That suffering in life could be swept under the rug as a smiling face and a gleeful I’m fine was a joyful vindication of eternal salvation. It was all mountain top or bust. No problem could not be overcome by praying harder, believing harder, reading the bible harder. The faith of fevered fervent furrowed brows. When life of course did not improve, when actually struggles, pains and problems increased the choice was simple – celebrate the stuckness and recalibrate faith or ignore the problem/person and hope they went away.
So I was delighted to find Christians who took the former way. Who were prepared to admit to being works in progress. Who could share pain and problems. Here was a most hopeful way forward, denial wouldn’t work, patterns of pain avoidance were thrown into the light – Jesus, in his crucifixion and his call to pick up our crosses and follow him through the cross, became the ultimate example and inspiration.
Of course a few years on and being a fickle shallow sort of soul I am now pining for those glory days again. At least back then I had some kind of foolish hope whereas now I am living in a grey grinding reality stripped of denial. I feel like Neo awakening out of the Matrix into the reality of the world. Or those cucumbers craving Israelites wandering around in the wilderness, wishing for the hope of liberation rather than the gritty numbing reality of it.
Have I lurched from one extreme to another, I wonder? Have I embraced the pain of the cross without the glory of the ascension? Am I guilty of trading in my wishful life after death happily heavenly ever after for a life on earth full of cynical soil bound faith?
Am I alone in this dilemma or have others found ways to embrace the glory and the pain, the hope and the darkness into your faith?
Is it about character – the Spirit growing patience in our impatience? Is it about calendar – celebrating the triumphs as well as the pains of the christian calendar and connecting them into our faith? Does it penetrate further into our conversations, our sermons, our songs?
What are your experiences and suggestions? How do we move towards a hopeful suffering?
14 comments
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Comment by Buddy Owen
4.02 pm on 18 May 2009
For me ‘a hopeful suffering’ is one that hopes in the return of Jesus that will end all suffering. I think that too much of our suffering serves to turn us inward: why me?; why now?; why isn’t God looking after me?; why do I have to hurt?; etc. Whereas our loving creator wants us to turn to Him in the midst of our suffering and change our point of view. Instead of God against us, it’s God with us. He’s in the middle of our suffering loving, caring, protecting, teaching, moulding, sustaining.
This burden is also shared as we live in community, taking the time and effort to serve our brothers and sisters in their suffering as they serve us in ours. One of our problems is that we have chosen to accept and believe the world’s teaching that ‘I’ am the most important person on the planet. Therefore, everything that happens that causes me pain is someone else’s fault and a world ending catastrophe.
I believe that as we take time in our suffering to look outside of ourselves and serve others, we gain perspective and follow the model of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, who willingly endured suffering in the greatest act of service ever performed. I agree with you, Jason, that we struggle to get the balance between denial and self-pity. I believe that what we need is acceptance of the suffering as unavoidable in a broken world. But that has to be married with the hope of what is to come, Jesus Christ in all His glory the focus of ‘a hopeful suffering!’
Comment by Paul
8.21 am on 20 May 2009
Thanks David, your words remind of Paul’s encouragement in Romans to “rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn”
Comment by John Santic
7.06 pm on 18 May 2009
Jason,
The big challenge for me is to no longer view my self and situation as divided and away from God. The reality of my faith is such that God is present and always working…in the mundane and the pain, joy and laughter of life. It takes eyes to see and often my circumstance thwarts my vision in a way that makes me see things from the perspective of the fall and not the resurrection that has God beside me working and wooing me closer to him…so that he might work well through me.
Comment by Paul
8.17 am on 20 May 2009
Thanks John, so God is always present in suffering and joy, but just cos it doesn’t feel like God is present doesn’t mean that he’s not?
Comment by John Santic
7.07 pm on 18 May 2009
sorry, I see the my last comment should have been at you, Paul.
Comment by Paul
8.09 am on 20 May 2009
No worries
Comment by Jason
8.32 am on 19 May 2009
Great thought provoking post Paul. It reminds of Augustine and how in many of his writings as a pastor, concerned for Christians formation in the real world, that they understand that the condition of human life is one of isolation from God and each other. The desire for God that is within us, to see that condition and respond to it, instead gets turned further inwards, and we desire desire itself, and isolate ourselves even further from each other. We build whole ways of life that protect us from suffering, because we don’t wan to face the reality of our separation from ourselves and God.
We now have a whole consumer culture built around supporting the worst of the human condition, isolating us from ourselves and each other, even as we connect to each other within that system more than ever, but as consumers. It’s all about me.
Augustine would then say perhaps, that Jesus who plunged into this material world so fully, wants us to participate with him, in rescuing us from that privatization and isolation. But when we do participate in that redemptive work of God, we are open to and experience the painful paradox, that shows us how far our world cannot experience fulfillment of this rescue in this life.
As Christians we try to resolve that tension. We either try to make it all happen now, name it and claim it, an overealised eschatology, and make a form of faith that is all about me and no need for rescue. Or we leave the rescue until we die, it’s so completely impossible for us to experience rescue, that it happens when we die.
The now and not yet of the Kingdom mean that the more we try to look outside ourselves with others, and do that with Jesus, the more we are aware of that situation being unresolved.
Augustine called it distenseo, the word from we derive distend. The more I try to be part of a church engaged in public life, the more I see God break into people’s lives, free them from isolation, and connect them to him and others, and at the same time the more open I am to the people who don’t care, collapse life into the ‘good life’ of holidays and shopping to numb the pain, with indifference, and how complicit I am in the problem.
When once I tried to resolve that distension, the want to have it all happening now, or collapse into Christian despair, maybe it all happens when we die, I know thank Jesus for that experience, and see it as normal to the Christian life.
Comment by Paul
8.16 am on 20 May 2009
Thanks Jason, so in some ways the more we experience suffering the more we want to withdraw into ourselves or wait for rescue outside of life. Would a hopeful suffering for you then be a shared one, which opens us up to redemptive action and experience?
Comment by David M
9.18 am on 19 May 2009
I beleive that all reflections on suffering, be it hopeful suffering or otherwise, must take into account the reality of evil. The scriptures often relate our suffering to the evil in the world – be that through human or, if you like, spiritual agency. It seems to me that this is often not the case. I’ve found Greg Boyd’s books, ‘God at War’ and ‘Satan and the problem of Evil’ very helpful is this regard.
Comment by Paul
8.14 am on 20 May 2009
Thanks David, so are you saying that suffering arises out of evil action we do or is done to us?
Comment by David M
9.38 am on 25 May 2009
It’s not either/or, but both/and, and in reality, more complex than that. Within the biblical world view there are a number of ‘wills’, ‘powers, ‘forces, ’spirits’; however they might be described or designated. God, humankind and satan are the obvious ones, but, depending on your reading of scripture, there are others such as ‘principalities and powers’ which some take to be evil spiritual forces, others human centres of power and others still, a combination of the two.
I’m not pointing this discussion to the largely Pentecostal Spiritual Warfare view of evil, but the more developed view of evil as in Boyd and also Walter Wink.
Comment by Becky
5.16 pm on 19 May 2009
As usual Paul, you’ve hit the nail on the head with me.
Let me know when you have the answers…?
Comment by Paul
8.11 am on 20 May 2009
Thanks Becky, I was hoping you’d tell me
Comment by Mel
12.54 am on 25 May 2009
Sometimes my mind is set/ renewed from my sin, and I am strong in the Lord, just to step out the door onto Satans hot coals there waiting.
I know I need to apply the gospel of peace more in my life and gift it outward. We cast our weaknesses onto our Lord, His cross, the suffering of the sins create a fog because we need to trust his strength to remove our sins. Then when I reach out to His word, or to a Christ follower, I find help in time of suffering.
So i struggle with how much Christ I let in to shine out which meets up with perceptions of others their opinions (even though I know God is to be pleased not self or men, yet no man liveth unto himself.) When I stop to see that the others in my life have just as many legitimate points as I do. Then the basics of how much I put God in or push him out can measure my faith abilities.
As you say, we live in a fallen world. The pain of love suffers when we know we are not loving enough, or others may not seem to love enough. To whom much is given much is required. How much of Gods love am I giving away for the cause of sins to be covered? I try to find Gods will in everything, even in confession, suffering, and healing.
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