Suffering, from a laboratory of God's work
Been thinking about suffering lately... Picked up a book which my paternal aunt gave me about a year ago by Joni Eareckson Tada and Steven Estes. Joni happens to be a wheelchair-bound lady who broke her neck in an accident and lives heavily on assistance from others to do her daily chores and activities.
"This is where God steps in.
He permits suffering He allows Peter's blindness, Laura's degenerative disease, Mr. Beach's hunting accident, my paralysis. Suffering reduces us to nothing and as Soren Kierkegaard noted, 'God creates everything out of nothing. And everything which God is to use, he first reduces to nothing.' To be reduced to nothing is to be dragged to the foot of the cross. It's a severe mercy. Our dark side abhors it; our enlightened side recognizes it as home base.
A miraculous exchange happens at the cross. When suffering forces us to our knees at the foot of Calvary, we die to self. We cannot kneel there for long without releasing our pride and anger, unclapsing our dreams and desires- this is what 'coming to the cross' is all about. In exchange, God imparts power and implants new and lasting hope. We rise, renewed. His yoke becomes easy; his burden light. But just when we begin to get a tad self-sufficient, suffering presses harder. And so, we seek the cross again, mortifying the martyr in us, destroying the self-display. The transaction then is able to continue. God reveals more of his love, more of his power and peace as we hold fast the cross of suffering. Stray away from it and... no power."- When God Weeps, Joni Eareckson Tada & Steven Estes, at 136.
It's truly a paradox. Suffering and being reduced to nothing is severe mercy and gives one power. Who can conceive of that? From the writings of a lady who had (and has) first-hand encounters with suffering, this proves more believable than not. What a shift in paradigm, if this thinking were to manifest in anyone's life!
There will no longer be complaints, just songs of praise, if we are given the shorter end of the stick. There will be graciousness in the face of an enemy of any kind, personified. Most of all, there will be laughter and joy in the face of any single thing or circumstance which causes physical, emotional, psychological pain.
Our dark side abhors suffering but our enlightened side recognizes it as home base. Our enlightened side will have an innate sense of gratitude that we are being perfected and thrown into a furnace of affliction to become a better person and mature man. Suffering is joy, pure joy! When recognized as such, braver persons we shall be, smiling in the face of darkness, unfazed by anything. I think that Joni Eareckson Tada brought up a most pertinent principle that suffering is like a transaction. The harder we cling to the cross of suffering the more we will experience His love, power and peace. Simply because life will illumine itself to become other-worldly and unreal, merely a physical shell-like existence in dictates not of our choosing--- but the joy is that the choice to recognize the soul and the valuable, invisible things will become to you the ONLY THING THAT IS REAL.
So suffering unveils the eyes, speaks volumes of truth.
Is it not wonderful? (: