18. A Share in Christ’s Sufferings
18
A Share in Christ’s Sufferings
Valerie called me last evening to ask for prayer for her ten-year-old son who had cried that morning because he feels very much alone at school, even though it is a Christian school. It was hard for him when the family left Mississippi to move to California, for he feared he would have no friends. He and I prayed together that God would give him a close friend in California. He has yet to find one, though nine months have gone by.
“Sometimes I think I should do the bad things the other kids do,” he said, “just so they wouldn’t think I was a goody-two-shoes. Maybe I should go ahead and talk dirty or disobey the teachers or something. I wish there was at least one guy on my side.”
It wrung this grandmother-heart to think of the loneliness of that dear little boy. I asked the Lord to comfort him, and in some way to show him that this is a price he is paying for faithfulness, for which the Lord will one day reward him far beyond his dreams. I asked for wisdom for his parents, as they try to point him to the Cross.
Can God help this child to see beyond the schoolroom and the playground to things invisible? Can He show him this first hard lesson in what it means to take up the Cross? I believe He can. I pray that he will. The fact that his answer to the prayer for a friend has so far been No indicates to me that God does not think he needs the friend now—for God has promised to supply our needs. What we don’t have now we don’t need now. Possibly His very withholding is in order that the boy may learn, at this crucial juncture in his life, to turn to God in prayer for a deeply felt need.
When a man or woman, a boy or girl, accepts the way of loneliness for Christ’s sake, there are cosmic ramifications. That person, in a secret transaction with God, actually does something for the life of the world. This seems almost inconceivable, yet it is true, for it is one part of the mystery of suffering which has been revealed to us.
The children who taunt Walter as “teacher’s pet” because he does what is asked have no idea that God enters the picture at all. It is the last thing that would come to a child’s mind without an older person’s help. To submit to the authorities God puts over us is to submit to God. Rebellion is the spirit of what the Bible calls “the world,” and we have the Lord’s own Word for what Walter is suffering: “If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own; but because you do not belong to the world, because I have chosen you out of the world, for that reason the world hates you. Remember what I said: ‘A servant is not greater than his master’” (John 15:19–20 NEB).
A hard obedience accepted for Christ is the Cross taken up. It is His Cross. He would not give us one which He Himself is not also bearing, has not also borne at Calvary. Each time my heart in love to Christ says YES when my human nature says NO, there the Cross is taken up. There I become a little more like my Master, there I live in Him, there I participate in His work of fulfilling the Father’s will on earth.
For many years I thought of “suffering for Christ” as referring only to those forms of suffering which were the direct result of one’s having witnessed publicly for Him or served Him in some specially significant way. I assumed that when Paul wrote to the Colossians, “It is now my happiness to suffer for you” (Col. 1:24 NEB), he referred to being in prison because of something he had done for their sakes. No doubt that was true, but not in the limited way I had thought. He meant far more. He saw the great truth of “exchange”—that out of his suffering would come good for others, meaning not only the church in Colosse. He goes on to say, “This is my way of helping to complete, in my poor human flesh, the full tale of Christ’s afflictions still to be endured, for the sake of his body which is the church. I became its servant by virtue of the task assigned to me by God for your benefit” (Col. 1:24–25 NEB). While it is not difficult to see the task of an apostle as a divine assignment, it is often difficult to see our own as in any sense divinely assigned.
When Add died, one of his close friends, a minster whom I had never met, wrote to me that he believed I had been given “a vocation of suffering.” The phrase seemed an over-dramatization. I could think of thousands whose sufferings made mine look like nothing. But the forms of suffering we experience are not “electives.” And while I could not feel that I had any special vocation, it was perhaps a vocation nevertheless. God had called me. He had called me to learn of Him by being alone—again. It was the thing appointed at the time.
If Paul could “fill up” or “complete,” in his “poor human flesh, the full tale of Christ’s afflictions,” is it not possible that we also may do that? May not we too find real happiness in the quantum of our adversities, whether trivial or serious? Imagine being able to speak of suffering as happiness. We would dismiss it as nonsense or masochism if the apostle had not shown us that suffering is never useless but can, by grace, bless others. It has eternal ramifications when we are willing to receive it in faith. In every task assigned to us we become helpers in a great mystery which he calls the completion of a “tale.” Our help affects the Body of Christ (the Church), and therefore, by extension, the whole world.
Although as the world looks at things, we may be “solo,” we are not, as God looks at things, solitary instruments. We belong to an orchestra and make harmony by playing our particular part of the score on the instrument given us.
Or, to use the scriptural metaphor referred to above, Christians are like hands, feet, or eyes—parts of a body. Paul explains the operation of this mystical Body in simple terms of the human body—a harmony of many parts under one head, all contributing to the perfect working together of the whole. If one part should complain that because it is different from another, it doesn’t belong in the body, that complaint will not change the facts. It does belong. If all parts had the same design and function, there would be no “body” at all. Unity is created out of diversity, not sameness. One part cannot accuse another of being superfluous simply because it isn’t doing the same job.
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I do not need you”; nor the head to the feet, “I do not need you.” God has combined the various parts of the body, giving special honour to the humbler parts, so that there might be no sense of division in the body, but that all its organs might feel the same concern for one another.
1 Corinthians 12:21, 24–25 NEB
Suppose the Supreme Designer sees that the Church, which is His body, would not work properly, would not be harmonious and balanced, without single people. He sees that the Church needs them. And suppose their response is, “I don’t want that role. I don’t feel comfortable with that. Why should I be appointed as that particular piece of the mechanism? No thanks. My function in the Body must be my choice. So the ‘humbler parts’ have special honor? I’ll forgo that distinction, thanks very much. The way things are now, I can’t stand to be single. I can’t take it.”
What is that person saying? My will be done. I’ll call myself a Christian, but I don’t accept the conditions. I’ll serve but only in the way I choose. I’ll be the one calling the shots.
Even in these times when the emphasis is very much on careers for women, the “blueprint” still cherished by most of those who talk to me includes marrying Mr. Right, having a home and at least one or two children. The experience of one such woman was similar to my own:
Immature and terribly naïve as to God’s higher purposes, I could not see the loving “hedge” He had placed around me. Any male student for whom I had an infatuation never knew I existed. Any who liked me were not my type.
God’s honing methods continue to vary, but my struggles with singleness itself continue much as they ever have, with this one exception: I have made my peace with the future spectre of living all my days as a “spinster” or “old maid.” Those two words and the connotations they evoked used to strike terror in my soul. At last, after years and years of running from the possibility that I may never know the love of a godly man, I told the Lord, “Yes. You’ll just have to take care of me.” Yet I must be honest and add that I still continue to hope celibacy will not always be my lot. Nevertheless I am quick to pray, “Not my will, Lord.”
She goes on to describe “sick” feelings, feelings of rage, despair, panic, fainting. “I choke upon the awful taste of faithlessness. Dear God, help my unbelief.” She tells of “mental skirmishes” when friends marry and bear healthy babies, recognizing in herself the resentment of the older brother of the Prodigal Son.
She revealed her soul to me on many more pages—a very human, womanly soul, striving hard to be honest. The fear of singleness was synonymous with the fear of a future in which she might not “feel fulfilled.”
“Mrs. Elliot, are you able to perceive from these excerpts some of my internal conflicts and battles?” she asks.
Am I able? Dear God in heaven, I am able! How completely I sympathize, for I’ve been there. It is for this very reason that I write to her about the whole mysterious and heavenly system of sacrifice which has so comforted me, has revealed to me the glory of sharing with Christ in His redemptive work. It has changed my response to life, with all its works, joys, and trouble. I am called close to the side of the Redeemer, given a small assignment which carries with it the power to help complete the quota or the tale of His own sufferings. The choice is mine.
Will you also go away? I hear Him say. Or will you come with Me?