“…don’t be so quick with the tissues…”
He looked up from his notes and scanned the room, looking at the class full of students thick in the throws of Greek and Hebrew, church history, missiology, Biblical interpretation….. “don’t be so quick with the tissues.”
Rev. Dr. Paul Zhal wanted us to never forget that behind all of the deep things of God were people struggling to come to grips with the pain and suffering that every human being will encounter simply by being alive. …
suffering, like death and taxes, is inevitable…
Most of us in the lecture hall fit the demographic of those who suffer the least in this world…white men… but our school was a gathering place for Christians across the globe who had personally suffered deeply for their faith, or simply because they lived in lands that were filled with war, or decimated by climate change, or stripped of resources by foreign and internal greed.
… as a man of God once reminded me;
“money cannot build a wall high or strong enough to keep back the effects of sin and brokenness”
We all have a natural eversion to sorrow and pain but nowhere as much as in the White Evangelical North American Church. We tend to prooftext our way past it all the bad parts with scripture promises cherry-picked for the situation and twist them theologically to match the shallowness of our understanding of God’s Redemptive Suffering… or we toss in some greeting-card saccharin;
“God will never giver you more than you can handle”
“there is breakthrough coming”
“have faith the size of a mustard seed”
Yes, joy will always come in the morning and we are never to loose hope… but the sun may not rise on us until after decades of struggle with suicidal thoughts, or six fast months of pancreatic cancer, or escaping from domestic violence through the Underground Railroad….
and for some the morning may never taste victory until the doctor signs the time of death under their name on the paper…
“don’t be to quick with the tissues”
Jesus came and sat among us in grief. It hurts. It hurt him.
“a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.”
Isaiah 53:3
God allowed Jesus to suffer in life, and in death. He was given a sponge full of drugs by men to ease his pain, and he rejected them. He embraced his suffering for you and for me.
I was reminded of all this on Sunday. My pastor was away, so the woman who founded a minstry in CT that goes into the Strip Clubs to befriend the women caught in slavery and degradation brilliantly unpacked the Word of God for us reminding us to suffer with those who suffer.
and I wept in my pew, under the exposed rafters of the upper loft of the barn where our church first began… thinking of all those I have sat with and wept over and burried… and my wife was gently holding my had… the same hands who clutched her lifeless child in her arms after carrying him for nine beautiful months…. our friends came and sat with us in our trench of sorrow . It sucked for all of us…. and it suck for God too…
Lament the pain friends. They are birth pangs. They hurt, but they do not have the last say