“Why suffering? I get it but I don’t get it,” a friend told me recently. Yep. I agree with her. This “problem of pain” we face in everyday life – from minor annoyances to heavy trauma – what good does it actually do and why does God allow it?
Let’s be real. I can’t answer that, but I can speak what I know from my own experience of suffering. For me, understanding begins with confession and the power I find there.
God says that confession leads to life.
(Romans 10:9, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”)
Pain hits, emotions surface, and we have two options: to stuff them inside or speak them out loud. Speaking out loud is confession. Believing our emotions are bad (or that we have to put on a happy face when life gets hard) crushes our spirits. It makes life harder. When we refuse to feel pain, we also numb out our joy.
I was rereading 2 Corinthians 4 this morning, basically Paul’s primer on how to survive hardship, and this stood out to me:
“We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair.We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed…YES, we live under constant danger of death because we serve Jesus” (verses 8-11, emphasis mine).
Do you see it? Paul isn’t glossing over the hardship. He’s confessing it out loud. “YES. IT’S HARD.”
Faith pushes through the trial confessing, “This hurts. I can’t do it. I hate this. BUT I TRUST YOU, GOD” over and over again until joy comes in the morning, whenever the morning comes.
We confess, “Yes, we live under danger and pain and struggle and death.”
We confess, “Yes, we are people who sin. People who get it wrong. People who fail.”
And yet we also confess, “God, who raised the Lord Jesus, will also raise us with Jesus and present us to himself together with you.” Amen.
“All of this is for your benefit. And as God’s grace reaches more and more people, there will be great thanksgiving, and God will receive more and more glory” (2 Corinthians 4:14-15).
God is bigger and better than anything else we think will make us feel safe and happy. As we confess our inadequacies, confess our pain, and confess our faith, we make it through one more dark night. We grasp just a little more how much we have to be grateful for. We understand God’s heart more deeply and believe just a bit more how much he loves us.
We have to confess that it’s hard and that we can’t do it. But we don’t move forward unless we also confess God’s power and love. I can’t explain why it works. I just know it does. Our faith carries us through suffering to a new level of understanding God’s character and his ways.
Suffering has potential to draw confession out of our hearts. Jesus himself confessed his fear of facing the cross. Why do we suffer? I can’t explain why but I know that suffering draws me closer to God, and I want to keep going, even when it’s hard.
With Paul we can say, “Since God in his mercy has given us this new way, we never give up” (2 Corinthians 4:1). There will be a joy-filled morning that won’t turn back into a dark night. That keeps us moving forward. YES, life is hard. But we choose not to give up.