Till We Are Home

We all will suffer. At some point in our lives, whether in the rearview of our days, a present suffering today, or one to come, because we live in a fallen world, our time will come to suffer. Though we live in a celebrity and social media culture where it seems that everyone else lives a fantastic and glamorous life, our world indeed groans (Rom 8:19-21) and we will fight battles from time-to-time. Jesus promised this for His followers (Jn 16:33), so if He did, why does the fiery trial that comes our way (1 Peter 4:12) still surprise us?

Several years ago at our kitchen sink in Tennessee, I just put our three children to bed for the evening, then began making my way through a pile of dishes from three straight meals, loads of laundry still to do along with a days’ worth of work from my full-time job, and my wife lay sleeping in our bedroom, exhaustion-overwhelmed from her round of chemo that week. 

With each spray of soap and scrub of brush, I stood there washing those dishes with mounting anger and frustration. 

This is too much, I thought. I can’t manage to take care of three little kids, clean and care for an entire home, maintain a full-time job, and care for my bride physically while she suffers through chemo for her cancer,emotionally through her turmoil of pain and questions and fear, or spiritually when my own faith was hanging by a thread.

Those pots and pans received the scrubbing of their lifetime. However, let me tell you a truth that usually only comes when you put on those corrective lenses of hindsight: shame fills my heart today of how I handled the trial of those days.

In his 1^st epistolary letter, Peter tells his audience, who, themselves, experienced suffering through persecution from government and those around them, the following:

For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly. For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. (1 Pet 2:19-20)

In this passage we see a picture of two kinds of suffering: the kind implied in the passage that most will undergo because we live in a fallen world and cannot escape the truth that suffering will come. And then there is the kind that you endure with a mind towards God. 

In our suffering, we can take the route that all of us want to and are tempted to take, the route that says, ‘just get me through this, just get me to the other side where I no longer feel this pain.’ Through this way and this suffering we experience, we do not engage with the Lord in order to achieve His desire for this pain. 

Instead, we complain and murmur and want to destroy dishes in sinks.

Then, there’s the other more biblical way to endure suffering, mindful of God throughout the process which is a gracious thing in the sight of God according to Peter. In this approach, we lament before the Lord. Just like the psalmists frequently did in their suffering, we bring our troubles to Him, telling Him of the difficulties and pain we experience, but then we turn it all around leaving those troubles at His feet and telling Him that we trust and believe that His promises are still true even though my circumstances at that time muddy the waters of my understanding them. 

And like the next verse tells us, we have an example from our Savior, “For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.” (1 Pet 2:21) Remember what Jesus said in the garden the night before His crucifixion? As He poured sweat like blood, knowing what awaited Him on the cross, Jesus prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” (Lk 22:42)

Jesus submitted to the will of the Father, leaving us an example to bring our requests in the same way, yet submit to the Lord and endure. 

Like I said, I’m ashamed of how I handled my wife’s first bout with cancer. Yet God was gracious and redeemed that time, growing and discipling me through the last several years. When it came time to bring my little girl Home to Him, the Lord worked in our hearts, in my heart a willingness to submit to Him and trust that He will carry us through. 

We would take her back a million times over, but in the midst of our loss and then in the midst of suffering through my wife’s 2^nd bout with cancer a year after losing our daughter, the Lord had already worked in us a mindfulness toward Him to endure this suffering differently than before. We still suffered during that time, and the pain of missing my little girl and the continued recovery for my darling bride bring waves of sorrow today, but my hope is this experience is more of the “gracious thing” variety.