Introduction
Smoothed and flattened, the wrinkled sheet of wide-lined tablet paper lay in the center of my empty desk.
A crayoned sun in the upper right corner beamed five thick rays onto the happy faces of dancing flowers. A white house with two large windows and red shutters sat squarely in the middle. In front of the house,sitting in a chair with large, spoked wheels, was a girl with blond hair, two pink circles on her cheeks, and a wide smile with neatly lined teeth.
I smiled. A portrait of me?
Big blockish letters scrawled with a red marker bore the following message:
DEAR JONI,
I LIKE MY CAT AND I LIKE SCHOOL.
WHEN I GROW UP I WANT TO HAVE A
WHEELCHAIR JUST LIKE YOURS.
LOVE,
SHANNON
My smile broke into laughter.
Shannon is a healthy, active little girl who plays hopscotch, four square, and “Mother, May I.” She may not realize it now, but she has absolutely no use for a wheelchair.
Try telling that to Shannon! A wheelchair would top her birthday list, more coveted even than a purple bicycle with pink and white streamers on the handles. As far as she’s concerned, a wheelchair means adventure. A joyride. An initiation into a very special club.
Shannon hasn’t a clue about the price one actually pays to join such a club. The pain. The paralysis. The disappointment. The heartache and the hurdles. She discounts all that. She disregards the dark side, considering it not worth even knowing. All she desires is the chance to identify with me, to be like me, to know me. If that means having a wheelchair, then great—she’ll take it!
It takes a child like Shannon to illuminate the meaning behind Paul’s words to the Philippians:
I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.… I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.
3:8, 10
There’s no better way to identify with Jesus—to be like Him and to know Him—than to gain initiation into the fellowship of His sufferings. Or as Shannon might say, “the Club.”
Suffering has a way of taking life out of the abstract, out of the theoretical, making it painfully concrete. Lofty sermons from eloquent Bible teachers don’t bring release to people locked in suffering. Ph.D. programs in ivy-walled seminaries don’t deliver hope and comfort to those in deep pain.
When we suffer, we realize we are not handling theological ideas, we are rather being handled by a Person—the warm and intimate Person of the Lord Jesus. At other times, when life is rosier, we may slide by with knowing about Him. With imitating Him and quoting Him and speaking of Him. But only in the fellowship of suffering will we know Jesus. We identify with Him at the point of His deepest humiliation. The cross, symbol of His greatest suffering, becomes our personal touchpoint with the Lord of the universe.
No one’s asking you to beg membership in the Club as my little friend Shannon might. But there is something about her wonderful, wild abandon, her childlike trust, that must endear her to the Lord.
You don’t have to choose suffering. You don’t have to choose pain and humiliation. All you need do is choose God’s will, as Jesus did on His cross. When you do, you’ll be initiated into the Club—the fellowship of His suffering. And this is intimacy of the highest order.
Dear friend, since you’ve picked up this particular book and read this far, I think I know something about your heart. You have a longing to move toward a closer, deeper, more intimate walk with our God. That’s what I want, too! More than anything. So why don’t we agree to walk together for a while? Let’s take a thirty-one-day journey toward the heart of heaven, and into the love of our Father and our Savior. Since we can never come to the end of His love, or truly understand the fellowship of His suffering, this little excursion represents only a few steps on the way.
Maybe so. But they will be steps in the right direction.