Four
Four
What Benefit Is There to My Pain?
Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.
—C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
My friends who love to hike in the wilderness (and I would be right there with them if I could) tell me that the best trails are ones that “open up” now and then, giving them a wide-angle perspective on where they have been and where they are in relation to their goal.
In other words, it’s great to stop at vistas. If you can find a vantage point in life where the horizon fills your vision and you can gain a bit of perspective, you’re in a very good place.
A flat rock at a high overlook, warmed by the sun, is a first-rate place for a slightly smunched peanut butter and jam sandwich out of the backpack—or maybe just a swig of cool water.
Some trails wind endlessly through the forest, never emerging from the sheltering canopy of tree boughs. They’re nice, too, of course. I can remember walking such wooded trails in Maryland in my early days—especially savoring the autumn afternoons, with the wine-sweet smell of fallen leaves and the crunch of that red and golden carpet under my feet. (The memories are faint, but still there!)
But after a few hours of walking, you begin to want to see some sky. You crave a viewpoint—maybe on a little hill or high rock—where you can cast your eyes back on the winding path behind you, taking a little well-earned satisfaction in your progress.
I think the author of Psalm 119 had found one of those places in his life where he could pause, catch his breath, and take that long view behind him before squaring his shoulders, tightening the straps on his pack, and setting out on the trail once again.
His words remind me again—on a day when I need reminding—that even though pain and suffering may be our experience during our brief earthly passage, our Lord knows how to turn even such disappointments and hardships toward our favor and help. I’d like to capture several of those benefits in the next few pages—and give thanks for them.
Benefit No. 1: Suffering Can Turn Us from a Dangerous Direction
Looking back over his life (if not his hiking trail), the psalmist scribbled these words in his journal:
Before I was afflicted I went astray,
but now I obey your word.
(Ps. 119:67)
“Well,” you may say, “I’ve heard that before. That’s really nothing new.”
But think about it: For this man at this particular place in his life, it was something new. And the thought stopped him in his tracks. It had suddenly dawned on him that the trouble in his life—sorrowful, upsetting, annoying, pressure-packed, or painful as it may have been at the time—had been good for him, and had been specifically allowed by God to benefit him.
Say what you will, my friend, but that is a profound realization for anyone.
No, he wasn’t saying that the trouble itself had been good. Far from it! But looking back, he could (now) honestly admit that it had produced a good effect.
It had turned him … and he’d needed turning.
He had been heading one direction, then—wham!—he was flattened by this whatever-it-was event in his life.
He frankly acknowledged that before this “affliction” came—an injury, an illness, a financial reversal, a broken love affair, who knows?—he was heading down an unwise, unhealthy path. In the back of his mind, in his heart of hearts, he might have known it was wrong. And yet he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—turn back. The path he had felt so determined to follow might have taken him into a foolish marriage, a careless business deal, alcoholism, pornography, estrangement from his children, criminal activities, or maybe just into a proud, careless lifestyle that pushed God to the far margins.
Then the affliction came. The bad thing that became a good thing.
The wound. The disappointment. The setback. The pink slip. The rejection. The heartache. The divorce. The failure. The doctor’s report.
That intruder in his life—whatever it was—took hold of both his shoulders and wrenched him a little (or a lot), dragging him back on course. And now, many happy miles down the right road, he was looking back and saying to himself, “You know that was a very hard thing, but thank God for it! Lord, You are good and do good. I’m so thankful. If I had kept heading in that direction—if I had insisted on going my own way—who knows what would have happened?”
It didn’t mean that his troubles all went away. No, the implication in the following verses is that at least some circumstances in his life continued to bring a great deal of pain to his heart. But even as he reflects on these things, the strong assurance once again wells up in his heart:
It was good for me to be afflicted
so that I might learn your decrees.
(v. 71)
Benefit No. 2: Suffering Reminds Us Where Our True Strength Lies
The scenario I just described is so God. That whole way of looking at life runs precisely counter to the way most people naturally think or respond.
One of the reasons I know the Bible is true is by the way its wisdom runs consistently cross-grain to common human assumptions. God’s Word never, ever tags along behind human thinking and philosophies, never tries to stay in style, never seeks to accommodate itself or somehow make itself “relevant.”
No, God’s truth simply is, like a towering mountain, majestic and serene, dominating the horizon, utterly unmoved by wind or weather or the fickle judgments of the so-called opinion makers in our world.
Take the biblical teaching on human strength.
In the pages of Scripture, authentic strength—of the sort that wins battles, overcomes impossible odds, and takes on overwhelming opposition—walks hand in hand with weakness.
Now, that’s anything but a popular notion. It’s definitely not Hollywood. And yet it is true ten thousand times over. Those in Scripture who take pride in their own might or prowess or superior resources fail and fail again. But those who acknowledge their weakness and their need, those who cry out to God in their heartbreak and frustration and utter inability, those whose need for Christ isn’t partial, but total, find vast amounts of strength beyond their own.
One of the last words recorded in red in the New Testament, prior to the book of Revelation, are the words of Jesus to the apostle Paul, when He said: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9).
The word perfect springs from the same Greek term that Jesus used when He cried out from the cross with His last breath, “It is finished!”
Tetélestai! Accomplished. Done. Fulfilled. Paid in full.
To Paul, in his weakness and distress, Jesus said, “Teleítai! My power is accomplished or brought to completion in your weakness or frailty.”
Ah, but here’s the rub. To access that incomparable resurrection power, you and I must first be thoroughly convinced of our own utter bankruptcy and turn to Him with all our hearts. As C. S. Lewis wrote on one occasion, we must “fall into Jesus.”
You would think that this simple truth would be a no-brainer for a person like me, in a wheelchair. But it hasn’t always been so.
I can’t recall how far back it was—maybe when I was at the University of Maryland in the late sixties or early seventies—but I was really big on “being independent” in those early days of my paralysis. I remember wheeling around that huge campus, my face a mask of determination, firmly resolved to “make my own way.”
Absurd? Yes. In denial? Probably. Bound to fail? Of course.
Nevertheless, I’d made up my mind that there would be no special considerations or help for me in my classes, and that I would feed myself in the cafeteria using a special spoon inserted into my arm splint. I didn’t want to be “treated any differently,” although quite obviously my needs and challenges were vastly different from 99 percent of my fellow students.
The truth is, I didn’t want anyone to see me as “weak” or “needy.”
As a consequence of this mind-set, there was one particular Scripture verse I never wanted anyone to quote in my presence. It was 1 Corinthians 12:23, where Paul says to treat the weaker parts of the body with special honor. I looked at that verse as nothing more than a pity-the-poor-unfortunate perspective on people like me in wheelchairs. Treated with special honor? No, sir. Not me. I was young and strong. I was on my own. I wasn’t weak. I could handle it. Get the picture?
Years later, God’s wisdom began to seep into my soul—it takes awhile sometimes, doesn’t it?—and I began to see the real truth behind 1 Corinthians 12. It’s not a pity-the-poor-disabled verse at all. On the contrary, I think the whole chapter makes the point that we are all weak, all needy, whether we like to admit it or not. And what is it that we need? We need each other in the body of Christ. It just happens the weaknesses of some people (like me) are more evident.
People who have obvious disabilities more readily get what it means to be weak and feel needy. As a result, maybe the light goes on a little sooner for us when we hear the apostle Paul say, “I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.… For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:9,10).
There’s that theme again: strength out of weakness. Profound life direction growing right out of seemingly immovable obstacles in our path.
I think back to my high school friend Bobby who never took God seriously until trouble hit. Bagging a football scholarship to a Big Ten university consumed all his attention. But during his sophomore year he got slammed down hard on the five-yard line. Two surgeries and three sidelined seasons later, he had done some serious thinking. Life was short. Where were his priorities?
Today, he’s still into sports. (He coaches the Tiny Tornadoes after work.) But his priorities are straighter. Bible study and prayer get their chunk of time on his schedule now, and I don’t think that would have happened—Bobby doesn’t think it would have happened—had it not been for that painful moment of destiny on the five-yard line.
Then look what happened to my neighbors who used to live down the street. When the Southern California economy was flying high, Brian and his family had all the materialistic toys and status symbols their hearts desired. But then the state’s economy tanked. Brian lost his job and found himself with some serious thinking to do.
In fact, the family will tell you now that it was one of the best things that could have happened to them. They discovered that God was still on the throne, cared deeply about the direction of their lives, and was fully able to care for them as they climbed back on their feet. They also found that family meant more than possessions, and that community college wasn’t so bad for their college-bound daughter, who had her heart set on Princeton. I don’t think my neighbors would have learned all that had it not been for Brian’s losing his job.
Remember the psalmist’s words? “It was good for me to be afflicted, so that I might learn your decrees.”
And finally, I’m thinking of my twenty-six-year-old cousin whose girlfriend returned the engagement ring. He let it sit on his dresser for months as a monument to his failed love life. Finally, he dealt with his grief by pouring himself into a troubled kid who lived two doors down and had never known a father. He took him to the stables on weekends and taught him to ride horseback. It made the jilted young man grow up. He learned that his problems, which had at first loomed so large in his eyes, were really pretty small potatoes after all.
Two years later, my cousin ducked into a bookstore to buy a present and spied a honey-blonde girl with a knock-out smile flipping through a calendar of palomino horses. They got to talking and discovered they had more in common than just equines. He took her riding the next weekend, joined the singles group at her church, and not long afterward, she said a big yes when he popped the question on her front-porch swing. Today he shudders to think that he could have missed her. And frankly, it just wouldn’t have all panned out that way had he never felt the crush of being rejected by his first girlfriend.
Who can understand the ways of God? As Solomon noted, “A man’s steps are directed by the LORD. How then can anyone understand his own way?” (Prov. 20:24). The truth is that you and I—if we see anything at all—perceive only the dimmest outline or shadow of God’s plan and purpose. His ways are often mysterious, and it’s beyond our capacity to analyze His actions or predict what He might do next.
As the prophet Isaiah asked:
Who has understood the mind of the LORD,
Or instructed him as his counselor?1
The answer: no one. Not ever.
But even with our limited understanding, with time and with much prayer, the daylight dawns, and we discover what Jeremiah told us so many centuries ago: God’s plans for us really are full of hope and a future.
Even when that path leads through pain.
Benefit No. 3: Suffering Restores a Lost Beauty in Christ
Maybe, like me, you’ve occasionally worried that the cares, troubles, and afflictions of life will simply begin to wear you down, dulling your joy, diluting your hope, and robbing you of the radiance you once experienced as a believer.
In fact, it may be the very opposite.
It isn’t the hurts, blows, and bruises that rob us of the freshness of Christ’s beauty in our lives. More likely, it is careless ease, empty pride, earthly preoccupations, and too much prosperity that will put layers of dirty film over our souls.
I’ll never forget years ago when I had a chance to visit Notre Dame Cathedral while I was in Paris. There it was, almost one thousand years old, standing there so huge and … black. I had never seen such a dirty cathedral! After hundreds of years of soot, dust, and smoke, Notre Dame was covered in layers of black grime. It was even difficult to make out the beautiful carvings and details on the exterior.
But then the grand old cathedral went through a years-long restoration. Scaffolding was erected, and the entire exterior was sandblasted. I was stunned when I saw a recent photograph of the cathedral. It was beautiful—and so very different from the way I remembered it. I wonder if the people who have lived under its great shadow for many years recognized it.
The ancient stones glowed bright and golden. You could see details on carvings that hadn’t been visible in decades. It was like a different cathedral. What a wonder a bit of strategic sandblasting can accomplish!
When I use the word sandblasting—and when I think of how that process changed that cathedral in Paris—I can’t help but consider the way God uses suffering to sandblast you and me. There’s nothing like real hardships to strip off the veneer in which you and I so carefully cloak ourselves. Heartache and physical pain reach below the superficial, surface places of our lives, stripping away years of accumulated indifference and neglect. When pain and problems press us up against a holy God, suffering can’t help but strip away years of dirt. Affliction has a way of jackhammering our character, shaking us up and loosening our grip on everything we hold tightly.
But the beauty of being stripped down to the basics, sandblasted until we reach a place where we feel empty and helpless, is that God can fill us up with Himself. When pride and pettiness have been removed, God can fill us with “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
Suffering doesn’t teach you about yourself from a textbook—it teaches you from experience. It empties you so that by faith you can be filled with His Spirit.
Where’s the benefit? The process of divine sandblasting can reveal something quite beautiful—not only on the outside, but on the inside. And people may find themselves seeing something in you—some grace or quality of life—they had never seen before, or hadn’t seen for years and years.
It was Nathaniel Hawthorne who said, “Christian faith is a grand cathedral with divinely pictured windows. Standing without you see no glory” (Maybe, like me, you see a rather dark and dirty cathedral.) “But standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors.”2
Let affliction have its perfect work. The result?
Nothing short of the unspeakable splendor of Christ in you, the hope of glory.
Benefit No. 4: Suffering Can Heighten Our Thirst for Christ
I can remember a strenuous backpacking trip through the Rawah Wilderness of northern Colorado. Even though that trip was long ago, before the accident that ended my hiking career, I recall that adventure as if it were yesterday.… Ah, that burning, aching feeling in my legs as we hiked up steep mountains, the feel of the hot, high-mountain sun on my face. Most of all, I remember dipping my canteen into the Cache la Poudre River after a long, tiring morning on the trail.
It’s not that I needed to fill my canteen just then. In fact, it was already mostly full. But after hours in the hot sun, the water was warm, metallic, and tasted a little bit stale. Why drink that when there was a rushing mountain river of fresh, crystal-clear, ice-cold water right at my feet? No way was I going to sip tepid tap water from my canteen! When you’ve got the real deal, why waste your thirst on second best?
I thought of that morning by the Cache la Poudre when I recently read a special verse in the book of Jeremiah. God tells the prophet, “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”3
Now that little canteen of mine, metallic and warm as it may have been, could definitely hold water, but I think you get the point. So many of us settle for second-best things that really cannot and do not satisfy.
And here’s the jarring thing: God calls that sin.
It is an offense to Him when we Christians know full well that Jesus is the clear, fresh, and satisfying Living Water … and yet we turn to the attractions of this world, telling ourselves that such substitute pleasures truly can and do refresh and satisfy.
Where are our heads? When we choose earthly things over godly things, it’s like, well, licking the inside of a hot, empty, leaky canteen, and saying, “Oh yes, more, more! This tastes so great. This is so refreshing!” Really, we’re not even convincing ourselves. Yet we try to do so time and again.
Jesus is the spring of Living Water, and when we drink of Him, out of us flow rivers of living water. And the offense against God comes when we know that Jesus is the only one who satisfies, yet still dig around in the dust and sand, groping for cisterns that can’t hold half a teacup of tepid tap water.
That’s where the offense against God comes, when we in effect tell Him that Jesus doesn’t satisfy. That He’s not enough. That He doesn’t refresh. That we need something else—something more. Something better.
This is the point, I believe, at which God sometimes allows His discipline to enter our lives. Sometimes we become so enamored with our tinny, brackish canteen water that we can’t even see the rushing crystal stream at our very feet. We forget all about it. But then when trials or suffering overwhelm our lives, it dawns on us that all of our God-substitutes fall pitifully short of helping us.
Thirsty, dry, and weary beyond telling, we finally push aside our leaky canteens and fall on our knees beside the Never-Failing Stream. We come back to the fountain. And when we do, we sometimes realize that if God hadn’t allowed the hurt or suffering in our lives, we might have wandered for years, subsisting on stale, rationed canteen water rather than plunging our faces into the very essence of refreshment and life.
If we allow it, suffering will lead us to the bank of the stream, where we can always find a long, cold drink of the refreshing grace of the Lord Jesus.
Benefit No. 5: Suffering Can Increase Our Fruitfulness
As I look out my window now, I’m noticing the early blossoms on some of the fruit trees—a sight that never fails to touch my heart, bringing back a poignant childhood memory.
Around this time of year our family used to pack our bags and head up to western Maryland near the little town of Hancock, where my Uncle Don and Aunt Emma lived. They had a small apple farm, their house nestled on top of a ridge with the orchard spread out below like a wide skirt. In early spring there was row after row of trees laden with fragrant white blossoms. You could stand on the back porch and smell the perfume, hear the drone of busy bees.
It was a truly beautiful orchard, and I hope it’s still there. But even if it’s been leveled to make room for a big-box store or a subdivision, it shines in my memory. And it also holds a deep secret about God.
You see, early spring is grafting time. Uncle Don would select his trees, find just the right place on the bark, peel it away, and make a slanting cut into the heart of the wood. He would then take a small branch, whittle its end, then push the graft into the damp center of the tree, covering the union to keep it cool and moist. Later that spring, new life would emerge: blossoms to tiny buds to beautiful fruit.
But it didn’t happen without a wounding in both the tree and branch.
If you could interview the tree at the time of the surgery, I suspect it wouldn’t be all that happy about the prospect of being cut to the core and accepting this alien graft into its very flesh. But late in the summer, when the enhanced, abundant fruit hangs heavy on the new limb … well, at that point the tree might be willing to amend its opinion.
John Bunyan once wrote:
Conversion is not the smooth, easy-going process some men seem to think. It is wounding work, of course, this breaking of the hearts, but without wounding there is no saving.… Where there is grafting there is a cutting, the scion must be let in with a wound; to stick it onto the outside or tie it on with a string would be of no use. Heart must be set to heart and back to back, or there will be no sap from root to branch, and this I say, must be done by a wound.4
Never would I have dreamed, wandering through that orchard as a child, that my conversion process would be as hard as it has been. I was to learn through my broken neck that there was no saving grace, no saving work apart from a wounding. Yes, wounding of Christ on His cross, but also a wounding when you and I suffer and, as a result, are set, let in, cut into the body of Christ through affliction and hardship. “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God,” it says in the Bible (Acts 14:22).
My Christian life became a wounding work and remains so during this current crisis of chronic pain. My heart has been set to God’s like a grafting cut into the living heart of an apple tree. Whether I like it or not, it has been heart to heart and back to back, with so much doubt and fear, heartache and tears. It has definitely not been a smooth, easy-going process—and to this day, it isn’t.
Jesus speaks about grafting in John 15:5. It is here He tells His disciples—and you and me, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”
Friend, you may be going through a time of wounding right now and, if you are, take heart, because your heart is being set to God’s, and there is no saving work apart from pain. Your life will produce so much more fruit from it all—fruit that you probably won’t even see or know about.
For those whom God loves, He grafts.
Just remember what I have learned these many years: Apart from Him, you can do nothing. But in Him, with His life sap flowing through your branch and leaves, you have strength for everything. He said so.
And somehow, the result of all that cutting and wounding, grafting, and healing will be fruit beyond what you have ever produced.
Do We Really Believe This?
Maybe it all comes down to this.
Do we really believe what we say we really believe?
Do we believe that this life is just a brief staging area before real life begins on the other side, in heaven with Jesus? Are we truly counting on the fact that though these physical bodies of ours may change, or become incapacitated or severely limited, our authentic life—hidden with Christ Himself—will continue to grow and blossom and bear fruit through the rest of our years—and then forever beyond that?
In 2 Corinthians 4:16, Paul tells us, “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”
To me, that verse is so comforting. We all know what it feels like to be outwardly wasting away because we see it happening every time we look in a mirror. But I have a friend for whom that verse isn’t only a great comfort, it’s life itself.
Melinda is struggling with a severe—and I mean heartbreakingly severe—case of diabetes. In the process, she has lost both her legs through amputation. She has lost her eyesight. And she has lost several fingers. Not long ago she called to tell me that the doctors were about to remove another finger. My heart went out to her, as it always does. But my heart is also inspired by her struggle.
And here’s why.
Melinda has not lost heart.
The diabetes may be taking much away from her, but it can’t take that away. The doctors can’t amputate that. The woman is quite literally wasting away, week by week, day by day. But she has not lost heart because she places her trust and confidence in Christ. Melinda knows that no one—no disease—can take away the real Melinda, because He is actually renewing her day by day.
In some ways, I am convinced she’s getting even stronger. Why? How? Precisely because she is getting weaker! The more physical ability Melinda loses, the more she leans on Christ. And the harder she leans on Christ, the stronger she becomes.
Again, do we truly believe that? Do we believe that what Jesus told Paul was literally true—that His power is made perfect in weakness? I do. And I believe it for Melinda. Although I can’t explain it, I know that somehow, some way, the power of God’s Son, the mighty Creator and Redeemer of the world, is being perfected in this young woman’s life.
Her grafting to Jesus, through many wounds, is profound beyond telling.
You and I may not see it with our physical eyes, but it is being seen … by the hosts of heaven and hell, and perhaps by those saints who have gone before her who fill the heavenly grandstands and cheer her on in the race of her life. Who knows what the eternal results of her courage and faithfulness will mean? Dare we even speculate?
You may not have a debilitating disease like dear Melinda, but you do know—all of us do—what it means to be outwardly wasting away day by day. Perhaps you find yourself in your late fifties now, and the changes are encroaching; your limitations—the aches and pains—are catching you by surprise. Well, these are all little wake-up calls, as far as I’m concerned. Little alarm clocks, little waving yellow flags, small signals that remind us that as we are wasting away, we can go to God in our weakness to be renewed and made stronger day by day.
And what does the rest of Melinda’s favorite verse say?
For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. (2 Cor. 4:17–18)
Feet and toes, hands and fingers, wonderful as they may be, are only temporary appendages to help us get around in this temporary world. But the soul is eternal. That alone is worth all the “light and momentary troubles.”
Just ask Melinda.