October, 2006
Last month when I wrote about contentment, I thought I had learned what God wanted to teach me. But lately it seems He has ratcheted the lessons up a notch so that everywhere I turn, I am learning more of the topic of suffering. This is not about contentment when things aren’t going my way, but rather about facing life when things are actively going against me.
This past year I’ve had a couple of areas of my character that God has actively been honing. For those who have gotten more than one of these newsletters, the fact that I am task-oriented is pretty well-known. One of the areas God has been putting into check is my (perceived) control of my time. When I have goals and when others make their demands on me, I feel like my time is being squandered. It frustrates me to no end. I know that I am a Martha. I like measurable goals that can be checked off my task list. How can one “check off” a relationship?
This honing or pruning process, this suffering, is just plain draining. The only thing getting me through has been knowing that my character (hopefully) is being changed. As I shared about this with a friend of mine, she told me how she had gone through a period of suffering and it wasn’t until she turned to embrace the suffering and thanked God one by one – verbally – listing out all of the aspects of her trials that she found her passion returning.
I want more passion in my life and so I have been praying for God to teach me. At first it was easy, coming in the form of stories. One was of an underground pastor who had been imprisoned. His wife had taken over his church in his absence until she came under the ire of the local officials who hauled her in and beat her mercilessly. After being released she returned to serving the church. Later when a foreigner asker her about that time she only spoke of the high privilege of being able to share in Christ’s sufferings. Wow. I am such a wimp. I can’t even imagine being able to rejoice at such brutality. I whine just because I’m tired.
God didn’t leave me there, however. As I nursed my self-pity, I thought of that oft-quoted verse that “all things work together for good”. God reminded me next of what a Greek friend once told me – that verse is frequently misused and misunderstood. This friend explained that the verse in Greek implies that the good that is worked out is not in the person that loves God but rather through the person who loves God to others. I don’t know Greek, but I did understand where the Holy Spirit was leading my mind. I mulled this over while jogging on a treadmill. I may have to endure suffering for someone else to get a blessing? Whoa. I nearly fell off the machine. (I think) I could handle this if one of the recipients were my husband, kids, or other family members, but…others?? I mean, I love all you guys, but frankly I’m not sure I love you that much. Yet that is how much Christ loved me. Wow. So now I’m not only a wimp, I’m a selfish wimp.
I decided I had had enough of that thinking so I plugged in my Ipod and began listening to a sermon by John Piper. Big mistake. It was on the life of Adoniram Judson. I was familiar with Judson’s biography. (I liked him so much, in fact, that I wanted to name a son after him - nickname: Ram. Mike overruled.) Judson’s suffering was intense – loss of wives, children, illnesses, depression, and on goes the list. But from his sufferings, Piper reported that there were over 3000 churches in
As I continued my jog to nowhere, Piper went on to tell about Judson’s death. I’ve often heard of people being motivated in their lives by giving thought to what they’d like their epitaph to read. But what if you knew there’d be no epitaph, nothing to acknowledge your existence, not even a grave itself? Judson was ill and separated from his wife, traveling on a boat to get medical help when he died. His body was unceremoniously dumped at sea by a pagan crew. No grave. No marker. No epitaph. Nothing. Man, if I’m going to have to suffer, can’t someone at least let the whole world know that I suffered well? By this time, I was blubbering all over the treadmill, mystifying the hairy guy on the recumbent bike. OK, God. I get it. Now I am a prideful selfish wimp.
I thought about my own “suffering”. A few years ago God brought someone into my life who called me up short. Like Martha, I saw the needs around me and wanted to take care of them. The problems came when I would, like Martha, take on the martyr syndrome that “well, no one else would do it so I had to do this” and wear my suffering on my sleeve. My friend called my martyrdom what it truly was – arrogance. I was assuming no one else would do it (thus implying they were all lazy – unlike me, the hard worker). I was assuming no one else would do the tasks as well (implying the others were inept – unlike me, the brilliant worker). I was assuming that no one else cared about the project at hand (implying they were all self-centered bums – unlike me, the generous kind-hearted worker). And I assumed that the world would fall apart unless the task were accomplished right then (implying no one else had a brain and that I could do a better job of taking care of the world than God). My friend nailed it – such voluntary martyrdom is pride. Now I find that people who whine about how they do all of the work irritate the crud out of me. (In case you are wondering, God is working on my character in this area too, reminding me that extending grace is a good thing.)
There is an area where, if you can keep a cap on the pride, voluntary suffering could be good such as when our taking on suffering would relieve another of their suffering. I am thinking here of a family who gives sacrificially to help another in need or of a family who stretches their budget to accommodate adopting another child. I think of a family overseas that has lived with a squat toilet and below-freezing conditions for eleven years to bring the good news to a lost land. I am reminded of others who give up lives of comparative luxury to serve in areas where poverty and agony reign.
Yet my mind goes back to those trials which we do not choose but which God has ordained. How can I embrace the painful mercy of God which chisels away at my sinfulness? Some say that suffering is simply the results of living in a fallen world. But lately that has been insufficient for me. I don’t think I could endure suffering if it were the capricious result of evil. I need to know that it is for my good, coming from the Ultimate Goodness. And then, just as I ended my jog, there was a quote by Judson, “If I had not felt certain that every additional trial was ordered by infinite love and mercy, I could not have survived my accumulated sufferings.” For me, the only way to get through suffering is to draw closer to the One who causes the suffering, to learn more of His character, and to rest in the fact that He is remaking my own character to more closely resemble His.
Like a rock,
The Submissive Despot
Amy Louise
Amy Shane
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