Today is my Sabbath. So, of course, I sit in a coffee shop (that has music playing just loudly enough to be distracting) reading Where Is God When It Hurts?, by Philip Yancey. Here are some thoughts from the first chapter. Hopefully this will be useful to you as a sort of summary and recommendation, and useful to me as a place I can put down my thoughts.
Yancey argues that in the West (America specifically, but as I live in the UK now, I say first hand that it applies here, too), Christians have a great deficiency. He quotes Helmut Thielicke, “They have an inadequate view of suffering.”
In the chapter, he talks about different types of Christian “comforters,” which leads him to ask, “Is Christianity supposed to make a sufferer feel even worse? . . .” surely, “A faith founded on the Great Physician should bring peace, not confusion, at a time of crisis.” Right?
For sufferers, any kind of a positive answer is difficult in the face of the following answers from “comforter” to the problems of pain and suffering…
“God’s trying to teach you something, or punish you for something you’ve done. All suffering God uses to sanctify us. That’s the whole point.”
“Be positive! Move past the suffering, and lift your spirits to the joys of heaven! It’s alright. Sing this happy hymn with me!” – someone has never read Ecclesiastes 7:2!
“This isn’t God’s will! God is waiting on you to have enough faith. This isn’t in God’s plan – He’s just waiting for you to believe enough.”
“Everything that happens is God’s plan. You need to be brought to a place where you can praise Him for everything – even your pain and suffering.”
As Christians, we need to be better comforters, because God provides better comfort. As sufferers, we need clarity in the suffering: God’s answer to suffer is better than these.
It’s not easy. Yancey opens the chapter with his own admission:
I feel helpless around people in great pain. Helpless, and also guilty. I stand beside them, watching facial features contort and listening to the sighs and moans, deeply aware of the huge gulf between us. I cannot penetrate their suffering, I can only watch. Whatever I attempt to say seems weak and stiff, as if I’d memorized the lines for a school play.
How the devil loves to make men fear death so much that they avoid any conversation about it like the plague. If the reality of death is avoided, the Overcomer of death will likewise be avoided – like the plague.
Far too often, Christian responses to pain and death avoid the reality of pain and death, and so never get to our Saviour. Answers and truths are offered from Scripture, sometimes valid ones. Yet, how often are those answer divorced from or devoid of the Author of those truths.
Let’s speak more of Christ than of the sufferer’s responsibility to respond or think in a certain way. In suffering, lift eyes to our Sufferer who is with us.
Series page here:
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