3 The Awareness Trap
3
Suffering is real. Pain is real. Cries for relief are normal. This is what was in Shirley’s mind all the time. She wondered if people really understood how real it all was. The car that hit Shirley as she crossed the street on the summer shopping jaunt was real. The injuries she sustained were real, and their crippling effects on her daily life were both real and inescapable. Her chronic pain was not an idea; it was a real trauma that greeted her every morning and followed her throughout her day. It made sleeping difficult and staying awake arduous.
When Shirley shared her travail with others, she walked away thinking they heard just words, concepts without much reality. She felt again and again that well-meaning people thought they could “fix” her with words. She had heard every Christian and not-so-Christian cliché. She did not know what to do with the fact that what was very real to her seemed unreal to the people around her.
There are thousands and thousands of Shirleys. Perhaps you’re one of them. You are very aware of the fact that what is normal to you is way outside of what is normal for the people around you, that what are daily realities for you are just concepts to them, and what they say to you never has the power to take away the one thing you’d like to be rid of—your pain. You know they don’t mean it, but it seems that they always end up minimizing the gravity of your experience. They want to help, they think they’ve helped, but they haven’t. And you are frustrated that you cannot put your travail into words that they would once and for all understand. The distance between their understanding and your reality is one of the painful additions to what you are already suffering.
Here’s my experience. When people ask me how I’m doing, I don’t know how to answer. When I say I’m better, they hear me say that I’m okay when I’m actually not okay. I will forever live with the implications and results of the kidney damage I have sustained. If someone with knowledge of my medical problems asks me if I’m facing another surgery, and I say no, they think that my physical issues have been dealt with, and I’ve moved on. It’s hard to know what to communicate that will give people a sense of what I continue to deal with without sounding overly dramatic. I am thankful that I am not facing another surgery at this point. I am thankful that I feel better, but I am also very aware of the limits I will live with for the rest of my life and the fact that those around me don’t really grasp the difficulty of living with those limits.
Suffering is real, and its physical, spiritual, and relational effects are real. We should all take comfort in the fact that the Bible never treats suffering as anything but a real, significant, and often life-changing human experience. The content of the Bible is again and again punctuated with stories of suffering. Scripture records the real travail of real people. Disease, rape, weakness, murder, corrupt government, racism, famine, domestic violence, injustice, war, torture, betrayal, poverty, and death are some of the things that the Bible presents as the real suffering of real people.
Not only does Scripture record the history of sufferers, but a large portion of Scripture is dedicated to giving voice to their cries. I have always thought that the psalms are in the Bible to keep us honest about the messy nature of faith in this broken world. The largest body of content in the psalms is given to lament, in which the psalmist “laments” or mourns the situation he is in and the distress he is facing. There are about sixty-seven lament psalms. That means that roughly 44 percent of the content of the psalms is given over to psalms of suffering and sorrow. Not only does the Bible not minimize our suffering, but it also gives a lot of room for the voicing of our cries. In a real way the psalms record the emotional and spiritual drama of everyone who has ever suffered.
But the Bible does even more than that—it presents to us a suffering Savior. There was no relief to the travail of Jesus. It began with the ignominious conditions of his birth, to having to immediately flee with his parents for his life, to being essentially homeless, to being despised and rejected, to facing cruel injustice while being betrayed and forsaken by those closest to him, to facing torture and crucifixion and, finally, the ultimate torture of having the Father turn his back on him. None of us would be willing to exchange our life, no matter how hard it has been, for the life of Jesus while he was here on earth. He suffered not just in one way but in every way, and he suffered not just for a period of time but for his entire life. The One to whom we cry when we cry out in pain knows our pain because suffering of some kind was his experience from the moment of his birth until his final breath.
The War beneath the Battle
The reason I’ve taken the time here to write about how suffering is a real experience that Scripture in no way ever minimizes is that this book is not going to focus primarily on the physical aspect of suffering but on the spiritual war beneath it. In so doing, I don’t want you to think that I am minimizing your pain. My assumption is that pain, sometimes unspeakable pain, inflicts us all somehow. I want to get you to think about and finally find comfort in the fact that our experience of suffering is never just physical. The pain that stops us in our tracks, that makes us want to pull the covers over our head and not face the day, and at moments makes us wish that we could die, is never just physical.
Here is what is so important to understand: suffering is spiritual warfare. When you are suffering, it is vital to know that you aren’t just fighting for the health of your body, or for a relationship, or against racism or injustice, or for your marriage, or for your reputation, or for your job. As you fight for those things, you must also battle for your heart. Suffering always puts your heart under attack. Suffering makes us all susceptible to temptations that wouldn’t have had such power over us otherwise. Suffering is never just a matter of the body but is always also a matter of the heart. It’s never just an assault on our situation, but also an attack on our soul. Suffering takes us to the borders of our faith. It leads us to think about things we’ve never thought about before and maybe even question things we thought were settled in our hearts. Too many of us, while battling the cause of our suffering, forget to battle for our hearts.
The purpose of this book is to help you with the war beneath the battle, to alert you to places where you have to fight for your own heart and to help you to see the amazing ways your Savior meets you in your battle.
Why is suffering spiritual warfare? The answer is that you are not a machine. If something dysfunctions in a machine, the machine feels no sadness, is not tempted to worry, does not question long-held beliefs, doesn’t wish for the life of another machine, and has no concern for what the future holds. But you and I are not like that. We do not live mechanically or by instinct. We think, wonder, desire, feel, ponder, dream, interpret, perceive, crave, project, etc. We live out of our hearts (see Prov. 4:23; Mark 7:14–23; and Luke 6:43–45), and our hearts are an ever-flowing fountain of interactivity. You and I never leave our lives alone. We bring a rich, multifaceted inner world of thoughts, desires, and emotions to every experience. We never leave alone anything that happens to us or around us. We push everything in our lives through our conceptual, emotional, spiritual grid (CES). Whether you are conscious of it or not you bring your particular CES to everything in your life. This means that you’re not just shaped by your experiences, but you give shape to those experiences as well. You and I are never just influenced by what we suffer, but our CES influences the way we suffer.
The CES that you bring to your suffering shapes the way you see and understand it, and the short- and long-term impact it has on you. This is why two people in the very same difficult situation will have dramatically different experiences of it and responses to it. John and George both lost a lot of money when the stock market crashed some years ago, but they suffered through it in very different ways. For John, physical wealth was a large source of personal security, so when he lost a huge portion of his wealth, he not only lost money; he lost his security and was crippled by anxiety and anger. George knew he had to be a good steward of the money God had provided, but he never viewed it as a source of security; it frustrated him that he had lost so much, but it had little impact on his daily living.
Permit me to repeat something that I have spoken and written about before. As people made in God’s image, none of us lives life based on the raw facts of our experiences. We all live based on our particular interpretation of those facts. In this way, the central battleground of suffering is not physical, financial, situational, or relational. The impact of suffering on all those things is real, often long-term, and sometimes breathtakingly difficult. But the physical hardship always becomes hardship of the heart. Physical suffering soon becomes a war of thoughts and desires. Suffering yanks profound questions and cravings out of us. It forces us to examine and consider things in a new way or for the first time. It makes us wonder in ways we’ve never wondered, to doubt what we previously assumed, to crave what we’ve never desired, and to think in ways we’ve never thought.
Suffering exposes elements of our CES that we didn’t know were there. It challenges old assumptions, often replacing them with new questions. It tempts us to want answers where God has been silent, to want more from God than we have already been told. Suffering is emotionally exhausting and spiritually burdensome. It makes us vulnerable in places we thought we were strong. Suffering is never just physical, but always also becomes suffering of the heart. This deeper battle is the reason for this book.
I wish I could say that as I’ve suffered in ways I never thought I would, I’ve suffered with a heart at complete and constant peace and rest, but I can’t. My heart too has been assaulted with the cries and confusion that suffering brings. Assumptions I had carried for years worsened my travail, and cravings have made the burden heavier. I have examined things that made no sense at all. I’ve asked questions that have no promise of an answer. I’ve faced temptations that I have never faced before. I haven’t run from or rejected my Lord, but my suffering hasn’t been just bodily; it has been a battle of my heart as well.
What most of us fail to understand is that the impact on what our heart does with what we suffer is as powerful as the thing that we are suffering. You and I are never passive sufferers, and the pain we experience is never just physical or emotional. Suffering is a deeply theological and profoundly spiritual experience. It tends to assault deeply held beliefs and strengthen long-held doubts. But there is another element that begs discussion. Like everything else in our lives, the Bible doesn’t make suffering just about us. We are not isolated individuals, trying to make sense of and cope with life on our own. In fact, we are never on our own in anything. We suffer as the creatures of God. We suffer as the subjects of God’s sovereign rule. We suffer as the redeemed children of God.
This means that God is inextricably connected to and intimately involved in our suffering. Like everything else we face, suffering takes place under his sovereign rule, and it happens in the middle of his redemptive plan. Now, here’s the point I want to make about this: the sense you make about God’s involvement or noninvolvement in your suffering, the sense you make out of his purpose for or distance from your suffering, and the conclusions you make about his care and ability to help will have a huge influence on your experience of suffering. I will say much more later about how the Bible connects God to the things we suffer, but first I want to share two stories with you.
Suffering: Traps and Comforts
John lost his wife, and he was angry. She was the woman of his dreams. He met her at a corporation picnic and was pretty quickly smitten. He couldn’t believe that she would pay him the time of day, but she did. As their romance blossomed, John felt like the luckiest man on earth. She shared many of his interests and, most important of all, his faith. As he sat on the plane with Jeannie, on the way to their honeymoon location, John couldn’t believe that she had married him. He couldn’t grasp that they would actually spend life together. The first four years of marriage were wonderful, just the two of them enjoying what they’d each always enjoyed but were now able to enjoy together.
Five years into the marriage the first baby came, and two years later another. And although their son and daughter brought the typical chaos into their lives, what John thought was as good as it gets got even better. John’s business was thriving, Jeannie was a skilled and contented mother, and their church was a place where they felt happy and well fed. On the day of their son’s seventeenth birthday, Jeannie felt nauseous and weak, but she pressed on. In the days that followed, she felt even worse, and at John’s insistence she made an appointment with her doctor. She could tell that her doctor was concerned, but as he sent her for tests, he told her not to worry but to wait for the results.
The tests came back, and the news was not good. Jeannie had a virulent form of cancer that was already quite advanced. John cried with her but then said, “We will fight this thing any and every way we can.” And fight they did, from clinic to clinic and one experimental drug after another, but Jeannie’s condition worsened, and after six months she died. John could not have imagined a greater horror. He was paralyzed with grief. He would sit in the living room waiting to hear Jeannie’s voice in the kitchen or expect to walk into the bedroom and see her standing in front of her closet trying to decide what to wear. The little details of her life were all around him, but she wasn’t there. It seemed impossible, a horribly cruel joke.
The love of family and church got John through those days before the funeral and on that dark day of Jeannie’s burial, but then everyone went back to their normal lives, and John was left to himself with two teenagers. The more John thought about how wonderful but short their life together had been, the more depressed and angry he got. “Why give me this beautiful thing and then take it way for no reason?” he thought. “Why toy with my happiness? What did I do to deserve this punishment?” “What in the world am I supposed to do now?” “What condition am I in to take care of my kids?” “Why do this to them?” He couldn’t seem to turn off the questions, and each unanswered question just made him angrier. He couldn’t stand going to church. He couldn’t deal with all the questions and the well-meaning but stupid things people said. And he couldn’t take singing songs filled with promises that he felt had been broken in his life.
Being alone made John angry. Being a single father made him angry. Seeing happy families together made him angry. Having to fumble through Jeannie’s mail made him angry. His total lack of domestic skill made him angry. The people who said they’d be there for him but weren’t made him angry. Lonely mornings and sleepless nights made him angry. His teenagers’ constant needs and endless questions made him angry. Everywhere John looked, something seemed to stimulate his anger. And his anger wasn’t just about people and stuff. John was angry at God. Sometimes he thought that God had done this to him for no reason. Other times he thought that maybe what he had believed was a lie; maybe there was no God, or if there was one, he was too distant, too uncaring, or too small to make a difference.
The truths that John had once rested in, he now hated. One night in a fit of angry despair, John grabbed the Bible by his bedside and with all his might hurled it against the wall. That Bible sat crumpled on the floor for weeks, a symbol of what was happening in John’s heart. John isolated himself from his friends and gave up on most of his activities. He warmed prepared meals for his kids, but he ate alone and spent most of his evenings in his room watching TV.
It wasn’t long before John’s anger spilled over onto his children and his fellow workers. He blew up at home over inconsequential things, and at work he was earning a reputation for being disagreeable. Both his children and his coworkers avoided him as best they could but still endured the brunt of his anger. One evening John mollified his anger with a couple shots of whiskey, and it wasn’t long before this became a pattern, and the pattern became an addiction. Most nights he went to sleep drunk and woke up hungover. His kids saw the empty bottles and the massive changes in their dad, but they were too afraid of him to say anything. They both were just marking time until they could get out of that mess and away from their dad.
The first DUI was a warning sign, but John paid little attention. However, his boss paid attention and told John he needed to get help. But the anger and the alcohol blinded John from seeing himself with accuracy. He told himself that what he really needed was to have the clock roll back three years and he’d be okay.
Finally, after losing his job and his children, John was forced to get counseling, and he made an appointment with me. It was then that the long process of change began to take place.
Freda had always been a bit of a loner. She never thought of herself as physically attractive, and she always felt more comfortable with books than with people. She thought she’d be single and fill her life with her career and church. Freda was an academic star, so she got a full scholarship to a great college and a full fellowship for graduate school. It seemed that she’d been right: her world was the laboratory, where she was a research star, and she found a family with her colleagues and the friends in her church small group. Freda was fulfilled in her work and had made peace with her singleness. Sometimes she’d feel lonely in the evenings, but Jack, her terrier, would jump up onto her lap, and the feelings would fade.
When Freda was promoted to a prestigious new research group, she thought the work and the people it involved would provide new companionship and deeper fulfillment, but she was in for a surprise. Freda would never forget the day she met Ezekiel. She and Zeke were given a project to manage, and they immediately hit it off. Their personalities were complementary, and their interests and training matched. Freda walked home from their first dinner together finding it hard to believe that she had met a man who not only liked her but understood her. Soon their relationship began to blossom, and before long they were talking seriously about their future. Freda had never been happier, and discussion of marriage became a regular occurrence when she spent time with Zeke.
Then the unthinkable happened. Ezekiel was informed he would be transferred to an overseas research group for no less than three years. It was devastating, but Freda told herself they could make it work. As the time for Zeke to leave drew close, Freda could tell he was struggling. Then the bomb dropped. In a tense, dramatic, and tearful conversation, Ezekiel told Freda he just couldn’t do it. He couldn’t manage a long-distance relationship for three years. He couldn’t deal with the massive distraction it would be to the world that he loved. Zeke told her how much he cared for her and how sorry he was, but his decision was firm.
As Freda listened, she felt that she was going to pass out. It was like an unimaginably bad dream. The tears that streamed down her face as she was with Zeke became uncontrollable sobs by the time she got home. The next several days were a blur. Freda took long-overdue vacation days but had anything but a vacation. She felt toyed with and emotionally betrayed. She couldn’t believe that Zeke could so easily walk away from her and the love she thought they had. She began to be afraid of the anger and encroaching depression that had taken control of her heart. She was aware of the bitterness that haunted her when she thought of how easily Ezekiel had told her he was done. Freda knew she was in a very bad place. She knew that she couldn’t live this way. So she decided to run. She wasn’t going to run away from her life and make a horrible moment even worse. In her suffering, she wasn’t going to let herself run deeper into anger and despair. And she wasn’t going to allow her heart to run wherever it wanted to go.
Freda knew she had to run to God. She knew that she couldn’t handle on her own what she was facing and feeling. She knew the lies were too prevalent and the temptations too seductive. She knew there were traps laid in her path every day, traps of doubt, fear, anger, and despair. But she also knew deep in her broken heart that she was not alone. So she decided that she would run to her Redeemer. She would run to the comforts of his presence, his power, his promises, and his grace. She remembered that God welcomes the heavy and brokenhearted to come to him.
So Freda dove into the Word of God like she had never before. She ran to her small group, told them her story, and confessed that she needed help. She met with her pastor for guidance and comfort. She turned on Christian music the minute she got up to fight the darkness of heart that greeted her each morning. She fought the impulse to run from God and his people. She determined that rather than accusing God, she would trust him. She consumed anything and everything that would point her to the blessing of knowing God and being the object of his love and grace.
As she did all these things, she became more and more convinced that Zeke could take his love from her, but he could not take life from her. But something else began to happen: Freda was thinking about the people around her. She looked at people with new eyes and a different heart. She knew she wasn’t the only person to face crushing disappointment. The more she looked and listened, the more she realized that she was not alone in her suffering, and the more she realized she was not alone, a desire to help grew in her heart. Freda wanted others to get the help she’d received and to experience the light of comfort that shined in the moments of her darkest despair. She had experienced God’s comfort, and now Freda had become an instrument of that same comfort in the lives of others.
John and Freda, two people facing the unwanted, the unplanned, the unthinkable, but with very different experiences. For John, suffering was the context for the end of his street-level trust of God; and for Freda, suffering became the context for the deepening and maturing of her faith. So it is with suffering; it never leaves you the same. You run into the traps of temptation that greet every sufferer and are left with a cruel harvest in your heart and relationships, or you run toward the comforts of grace, which shine most brightly in the darkness of suffering, and reap a harvest of blessing. Yes, you may continue to suffer, or its effects may remain, but you now live with a changed heart, a sturdier faith, and a joy that suffering cannot take away.
Because there are traps of temptation that greet every sufferer, and comforts of grace available for everyone who groans in pain of loss, sickness, betrayal, and disappointment, and because the traps you fall into or the comforts you embrace will determine how you suffer, I want to invest the rest of this book examining both with you.
Suffering is dangerous because it exposes your heart to temptations as never before, but it is also a workroom for grace. This book is about how, in suffering, to identify and defend yourself against the dangers while you celebrate and seek the comforts of God’s grace. May the result be more and more people whose suffering does not produce a lasting legacy of weakness and disillusionment but increased strength and greater joy.
Review and Reflect
1. Paul Tripp writes about suffering as spiritual warfare. How does this encourage you to persevere in your difficulties?
2. What are the implications of having a suffering Savior?
3. What is the “war beneath the battle”?
4. How is your view of God and his involvement in your suffering connected to your suffering experience?
5. Note how suffering can be a “workroom for grace”.
Heart Reset
Proverbs 4:23
Mark 7:14–23
Luke 6:43–45