NILS VON KALM says God never promised to keep us from suffering, but promised to be with us through it…
Melbourne, Australia
“I believe in a God who protects me from nothing but sustains me in everything” – Gregory Boyle
When I was on a white-water rafting trip many years ago, we were facing some particularly wild rapids. It was possible that some of our dinghies might get tipped over as we went through.
Before we got into the boats, one of our leaders said that he no longer prays for safety; he instead prays for wisdom. I’ve never forgotten that.
PICTURE: Anne Nygård/Unsplash
We ended up getting through the rapids with no dramas, but it was a bit scary. You get to a point close to the rapids where’s there’s no turning back. It’s too late to turn around and you can’t get out of the dinghy, so you just hope that your skill will be enough to get you through.
An age-old question about God is why some people get through certain events unscathed while others go through unbearable suffering. Why does God seemingly allow some people to suffer while others don’t?
“It’s a cliche but it’s true that God never promised to keep us from suffering, but promised to be with us through it. That is the Biblical pattern. Job is the classic example. Having everything he knew stripped away from him, Job never found out why he suffered the way he did. But God was with him all the way through it.”
In the part of Australia where I live, bushfires are a semi-regular part of life for people in rural areas. Sometimes a fire will rage through a town, leaving almost every house in ashes, while one or two houses will be literally untouched. It’s just the combination of wind and flames and where they blow in a certain instant.
Something else I sometimes question is why I was born into incredible privilege when about 20 children under the age of five will die in the few minutes it takes you to read this post? Why was I so fortunate while others don’t even get the chance to start their lives? Their lives are no less worthy than mine.
I don’t have any profound answers. To try to formulate an answer is to try to explain the unexplainable and it doesn’t provide comfort for those who suffer. I know that when I suffer, I don’t necessarily want an answer, I want comfort and to feel heard and seen.
It’s natural for humans to almost expect that God will protect us from calamity. Christians are probably more prone to it than anyone. As we so often do, we take certain Bible passages way out of context and form our own theology out of them, making God in our own image as someone who is there to keep life nice and pleasant for us.
It’s a cliche but it’s true that God never promised to keep us from suffering, but promised to be with us through it. That is the Biblical pattern. Job is the classic example. Having everything he knew stripped away from him, Job never found out why he suffered the way he did. But God was with him all the way through it.
The Bible is full of examples of its heroes going through suffering. It’s the norm rather than the exception. So, why we think God will protect us when the heroes of the faith were never protected seems pretty arrogant to me. Why do we think we’re so entitled? I think it comes at least partly from living in such over-indulgent privilege that we’re blinded to the suffering of the rest of the world. So, when something goes wrong in our lives, we are shocked.
I love the attitude of the early Christians who rejoiced in their trials for being considered worthy of suffering for the Way, as the fledgling Christian movement was called back then.
I remember a preacher I heard once making the point that every major leader in the Bible went through a wilderness experience, including Jesus. And He was even referred to as the Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief.
The fact is that God protecting us miraculously from suffering is the exception rather than the norm. In our affluent Western lives, the main reason we are protected from so much suffering is because we can afford to build our houses in places which are less likely to suffer from natural disasters. As well as that, we live in societies that live off the backs of the poor of the world, who inevitably suffer the most when disaster occurs. Just look at the current impacts of climate change.
People in the Pacific islands, who contribute the least to global warming, are now being threatened with the very real possibility of having to relocate because of rising sea levels. Meanwhile, we in the West, who contribute the most to global warming, watch their plight on the news from the comfort of our safely guarded homes. The inequity of it makes God weep.
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Yet it is those who suffer the most who generally have the most humble attitudes to their suffering. Australian Christian leader Tim Costello has talked about when he visited Sri Lanka just after the devastating Asian tsunami of 2004. Tim asked some of the locals how they could still believe in God when they had lost everything. They replied by saying how could they not believe in God. God was all they had left! Their faith remained strong in the midst of their trials.
When we want to see how God operates in certain situations, we either need to accept that we just don’t know and accept the uncertainty of it, or else shut up and listen to those who are the most vulnerable. It is they who are often the closest to God.
The Biblical norm is for God to be close to the broken-hearted. Jesus never said anything about God protecting us from disaster. In fact, later in the New Testament, we are told that if we are Christian, we can expect suffering. They way of the cross is the way of Jesus. And ironically, it is the way to life.
There is no resurrection without death. That’s just the way life is. It is a rare person indeed who goes through life without experiencing some sort of intense suffering. And when we do, what we can expect is for God to be walking alongside us right there in it.
We have nothing to be afraid of. That might sound easy for me to say if you’re currently going through intense suffering. And even if we don’t feel the presence of God with us, that’s OK. When Mother Theresa’s memos came out after she died, it was revealed that she spent 50 long years going through her own dark night of the soul, never experiencing the presence of God. Yet she persisted in her service. That’s faithfulness. It’s the faithfulness of Jesus on the cross, who, despite feeling abandoned by God, still committed His spirit into God’s hands.
Faithful service is what matters, come what may. That’s the example of the heroes of the faith. We might not be protected from calamity; we might even die in our service of God. There are no guarantees. And if we are not protected by God in our trials, we have a multiple cloud of faithful witnesses who have gone before us to show us the way. And we have a God who always walks alongside us through it all.
