Suffer Well

"Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need." - Hebrews 4:16

"...faith knows that the mercy of God is given to those who seek Him in suffering, and that by his grace we can overcome evil with good." - Thomas Merton, "The Word of the Cross"

As a Pastor, I'm often the one a person calls when he/she needs to come to terms with pain. My experience has been that almost everyone can countenance the idea of suffering that has a clear goal; pain experienced while recovering from surgery, for instance. It's the body's way of healing itself; it is not an indication that anything is wrong. It's purposeless, random suffering that creates the most actual pain which leads to the theological dilemmas. Though we can talk about all the reasons why such suffering can and should exists while God is still omnipotent and good, that's not usually very helpful. There are many more times than not that there is no help for it. It's really going to hurt and probably for a while because pain is not a part of the problem; it is part of the solution.

It's at this point, that one reaches a fork in the road. Not all suffering is holy; as a matter of fact, nothing becomes unholy so easily as suffering. Merely accepted, suffering does nothing for our souls except, perhaps, to harden them. Edurance alone, as though Christianity were a cult of suffering, is no consecration. Suffering is consecrated by faith, not in suffering itself, but in God; in the end what we consecrate to God in suffering is not our pain but ourselves.

This is not to minimize the reality of evil or diminish the pain any one of us experiences in some patronizing way, as if "it's not really so bad" is God's answer to us when we cry out for relief. That is never the case. Suffering in and of itself is a product of the Fall and is of its own nature evil. God's desire is to ultimately end all suffering. Furthermore, there is no use in comparing our pain to another's pain, as though there were some formula with which it was possible all the suffering in the world to arrive at a "sum of all suffering" useful for the purpose of comparison. There is no "sum of all suffering" because there is no one who suffers it. Like the infinite, it is an idea, not a pragmatic reality.

This is the end-point I've reached after many years of wrestling with the hardest questions as a Pastor and as a fellow sufferer. It is not a pat answer, a fact that will be clear if you try to live as though you believe this. Ultimately, anything that causes us to seek God, and thus to find him (because he is found in the very act of seeking) is by definition "good". Suffering, then, becomes the good by accident, by the good that it enables us to receive more abundantly from the mercy of God. It does not make us good by itself, but it enables us to make ourselves better than we are.