What Does It Mean to Suffer?

In his book, God's Grace in Your Suffering, David Powlison sheds light into the darkness of suffering. Suffering is a heavy word that some may think only applies to situations like being in prison, or dealing with the loss of a loved one, or being terminally ill. But suffering takes many forms. Several years ago, I was at an event and the speaker was from a poor African country, and is now a professor and theologian. He said that while he had witnessed much suffering in his home country - especially physical suffering - it paled in comparison to some of the suffering he witnessed in his ministry among middle-class Americans: Broken families, loneliness, depression, suicides, estranged parents and children, struggling marriages, rebellious children, drug addiction, and other heartaches. Suffering does not discriminate: it knows no economic class, race, ethnic group, or gender. In this fallen world, suffering is endemic. We cannot escape it, but how we respond to it is what defines us, not the suffering itself. What does suffering look like? Powlison offers us a sobering glimpse:

A sufferer's primal need is to hear God talking and to experience him purposefully at work. When you hear, take to heart, and know that he is with you, everything changes, even when nothing has changed in your situation. Left to yourself, you blindly react. Your troubles obsess you, distract you, depress you. You grasp at straws. God seems invisible, silent far away. Threat and pain and loss cry out long and loud. Faith seems inarticulate. Sorrow and confusion broadcast on all the channels. It's hard to remember anything else, hard to put into words what is actually happening, hard to feel any of the force of who Jesus Christ is.

You might mumble right answers to yourself, but it's like reading the phone book. You pray, but your words sound rote, vaguely unreal, mere pious generalities. You'd never talk to a real person that way. Meanwhile, the struggle churning within you is anything but rote and unreal. The pressure and hurt become completely engrossing. You're caught in a swirl of apprehension, anguish, regret, confusion, bitterness, emptiness, uncertainty.

Does this sound familiar? Have you ever felt this way? Do you feel this way now? You are not alone. Jesus promises that even as believers we will suffer. He suffered. But he is always with us. In the next post, I want to share some more insights from David Powlison on how God ministers to us is in the midst of our suffering.