Chapter One: The Terrible Truth
Chapter 1
The Terrible Truth
When I was told that my first husband, Jim, was missing in Auca Indian country, the Lord brought to my mind some words from the Prophet Isaiah. “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee” (Isa. 43:2 kjv). I prayed silently, Lord, let not the waters overflow. And He heard me and He answered me.
Two years later I went to live with the Indians who had killed Jim. Sixteen years after that, after I had come back to the states, I married a theologian named Addison Leitch. He died of cancer three and a half years later.
There have been some hard things in my life, of course, as there have been in yours, and I cannot say to you, I know exactly what you’re going through. But I can say that I know the One who knows. And I’ve come to see that it’s through the deepest suffering that God has taught me the deepest lessons. And if we’ll trust Him for it, we can come through to the unshakable assurance that He’s in charge. He has a loving purpose. And He can transform something terrible into something wonderful. Suffering is never for nothing.
There have been some hard things in my life, of course, as there have been in yours, and I cannot say to you, I know exactly what you’re going through. But I can say that I know the One who knows. And I’ve come to see that it’s through the deepest suffering that God has taught me the deepest lessons.
When C. S. Lewis was asked to write a book on the problem of pain, he asked permission to write it anonymously. Permission was denied as not being in keeping with that particular series. And this is what he wrote in his preface, “If I were to say what I really thought about pain, I should be forced to make statements of such apparent fortitude that they would become ridiculous if anyone knew who made them.”1 I echo those sentiments.
When I hear other people’s stories about their own sufferings, I feel as though I know practically nothing about the subject myself. I’m in kindergarten, as it were, compared to, for example, my friend Jan who is a quadriplegic and lies on one side or the other twenty-four hours a day in a nursing home in Connecticut. Or my friend Judy Squires in California who was born with no legs. Or my late friend Joe Bailey, who lost three children.
But if all I knew about suffering was by observation alone, it would still be sufficient to tell me that we’re up against a tremendous mystery. Suffering is a mystery that none of us is really capable of plumbing. And it’s a mystery about which I’m sure everyone at some time or other has asked why. If we try to put together the mystery of suffering with the Christian idea of a God who we know loves us, if we think about it for as much as five minutes, the notion of a loving God cannot be possibly be deduced from the evidence that we see around us, let alone from human experience.
I’d like to go back to some of my own home training. I grew up in a very strong Christian home in Philadelphia where both of my parents were what I call seven-day-a-week kind of Christians. We had a little brass plate over the front doorbell that said “Christ is the head of this home, the unseen guest at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation.” We were taught that God is love. I suppose one of the earliest hymns we were taught was that little gospel song, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
When I was nine years old, I lived in a neighborhood of forty-two boys, but I had a friend who lived about six blocks away whose name was Essie. And Essie and I were both nine years old when she died. When I was probably three or four years old, we had a guest in our home who was on her way to China as a missionary. Her name was Betty Scott. She went to China and married her fiancé John Stam. A few years later, I’m not sure just how old I was, maybe six or seven, my father came home one evening with a newspaper telling that John and Betty Stam had been captured by Chinese communists, marched almost naked through the streets of a Chinese village, and had then been beheaded.
You can imagine the impression this made on the mind of a young child in view of the fact that Betty Stam had sat at our supper table and had given us her testimony as she was on her way to China. I also remember very vividly the newspaper stories of the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby, and I would go to sleep at night imagining that I saw a ladder coming up by my window. And my parents, not knowing that I was concerned in this way, didn’t think to tell me that there wasn’t really a whole lot of danger that anybody was going to be interested in kidnapping a child like me because we were not really what you might call rich.
Nevertheless, I did have some experience of death as a small child. And just a few weeks ago, to bring it more up-to-date, some friends of my husband’s and mine called to say that their little four-year-old child, who was born with spina bifida, was doing very well. But the mother was pregnant and for various reasons had had some tests which had revealed that the child she’s now carrying also has spina bifida. And so they were calling just to say we’re hurting. Please pray for us. And when I hear stories like that, it’s what makes me think that my own experience of suffering is really very little.
The question is unavoidable for a thinking person. Where is God in all of this? Can you look at the data and believe? And it’s the question that was put to Alyosha by Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s famous novel, The Brothers Karamazov, recounting the story of a little girl of five.
Ivan said to his brother, Alyosha:
These educated parents subjected the poor five-year-old girl to every possible torture. They beat her, flogged her, kicked her, not knowing why themselves, until her whole body was nothing but bruises; all night in the outhouse, because she wouldn’t ask to get up and go in the middle of the night (as if a five-year-old child sleeping its sound angelic sleep could have learned to ask by that age)—for that they smeared her face with her excrement and made her eat the excrement, and it was her mother, her mother who made her! And this mother could sleep while her poor child was moaning all night in that vile place! Can you understand that a small creature, who cannot even comprehend what is being done to her, in a vile place, in the dark and the cold, beats herself on her strained little chest with her tiny fist and weeps with her anguished, gentle, meek tears for “dear God” to protect her—can you understand such nonsense, my friend and my brother, my godly and humble novice, can you understand why this nonsense is needed and created? . . . And therefore I hasten to return my ticket. And it is my duty, if only as an honest man, to return it as far ahead of time as possible. Which is what I am doing. It’s not that I don’t accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket . . . Tell me straight out, I call on you—answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears—would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Tell me the truth.2
And what I want to share with you is what I see to be the straight truth with no evasions and no clear, flat platitudes. It’s very fresh in my mind just this week, a picture that I saw in Time magazine of an inconsolable newborn baby whose mother was on crack cocaine. Just to look at that picture brought down on my own head, as it were, everything I was planning to say to you in this series.
I happened to be sitting on the plane yesterday next to a woman who was reading a book called Master of Life Manual, which according to the cover was about metaphysics, brain-mind awareness, human potential principles and this stunning statement: “Create your own reality now.” And I thought I would hate to be down to such an extreme that I had to create my own reality in the face of the data of human experience.
So I would ask the question, is there a reason to believe that suffering is not for nothing? Is there an eternal and perfectly loving purpose behind it all? If there is, it’s not obvious. It doesn’t exactly meet the eye. Yet if for thousands of years in the face of these stunning realities—this terrible truth—people have believed that there is a loving God and that God is looking down on the realities around us and still loves us. If these people have still continued to insist that God knows what He’s doing, that He’s got the whole world in His hands, then I repeat, the reason cannot possibly be obvious. It can’t be because those thousands of people were all deaf, dumb, blind, or stupid and incapable of looking clearly and steadily at the data that you and I are constantly having to look at. What is the answer?
I’m convinced that there are a good many things in this life that we really can’t do anything about, but that God wants us to do something with.
F. W. H. Myers, in his poem St. Paul, wrote these words: “Is there not wrong too bitter for atoning? What are these desperate and hidden years? Hast Thou not heard Thy whole creation groaning, sighs of the bondsmen and a woman’s tears?”3 The answer is not obvious. There must be an explanation somewhere. And it’s my purpose to try to get at the explanation and then to see if there’s something that you and I can do about this question of suffering. I’m convinced that there are a good many things in this life that we really can’t do anything about, but that God wants us to do something with. And I hope that by the time I’m finished, I will have made myself clear.
Now the word suffering may seem very high flowing and perhaps much too dignified for our particular set of troubles today. And I can look around this audience to whom I’m teaching this content and I don’t know a person here, I have no idea who might receive this content later on in some other form. But if I knew you and if I knew your stories, then I would know that I can’t possibly speak personally to every need that’s here, to every kind of suffering. And I’m fairly sure that there would be some people here tonight that would be saying, well, I really don’t know any such thing as suffering. I’ve never been through anything like Joni Eareckson or Jo Bailey or even Elisabeth Elliot, and of course, that’s true. And I can say the very same thing if I knew your story. I could say, well, I’ve never been through anything like that.
So I want to give you a definition of suffering which will cover the whole gamut from when the washing machine overflows or when the roast burns and you’re having the boss for dinner that night, all those things about which our immediate human reaction is oh, no! From that kind of triviality, relatively speaking, to your husband has cancer. Your child has spina bifida or you, yourself, have just lost everything. I think you’ll find that the definition that I’m going to give you will cover that gamut.
The things that I’m going to try to say to you will apply to the small things, those sometimes ridiculously small things, that if you’re anything like me, you get all upset about and all bent out of shape about, that matter not at all by comparison with the big things. And here it is, my definition of suffering. “Suffering is having what you don’t want or wanting what you don’t have.” I think that covers everything.
Now can you imagine a world, for example, in which nobody had anything that he didn’t want—no toothaches, no taxes, no touchy relatives, no traffic jams? Or by contrast, can you imagine a world in which everybody had everything they wanted—perfect weather, perfect wife, perfect husband, perfect health, perfect score, perfect happiness?
Malcolm Muggeridge said, “Supposing you eliminated suffering, what a dreadful place the world would be because everything that corrects the tendency of man to feel over-important and over-pleased with himself would disappear. He’s bad enough now, but he would be absolutely intolerable if he never suffered.”4 Muggeridge gets at the heart of what I want to say. It’s never for nothing.
Now how do I know that? The deepest things that I have learned in my own life have come from the deepest suffering. And out of the deepest waters and the hottest fires have come the deepest things that I know about God. And I imagine that most of you would say exactly the same. And I would add this, that the greatest gifts of my life have also entailed the greatest suffering. The greatest gifts of my life, for example, have been marriage and motherhood. And let’s never forget that if we don’t ever want to suffer, we must be very careful never to love anything or anybody. The gifts of love have been the gifts of suffering. Those two things are inseparable.
The deepest things that I have learned in my own life have come from the deepest suffering. And out of the deepest waters and the hottest fires have come the deepest things that I know about God.
Now I come to you not like R. C. Sproul who is a theologian and a scholar. I come to you not merely as one who has stood on the sidelines and pondered these things, but as one in whose life God has seen to it that there has been a certain measure of suffering, a certain measure of pain. And it has been out of that very measure of pain that has come the unshakable conviction that God is love.
Now when my little girl, Valerie, was two years old, her father had been dead for more than a year. And I was beginning to teach her things like Psalm 23. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul” (Ps. 23:1–3a kjv). And I can still hear that tiny, little baby voice saying, “He leadeth me beside the still waters.” And I realized when I heard her say that again—and I still have a tape of her saying that—I thought where did she get that weird intonation? And I realized that she got it from her mother who was coaching her word by word. She’d say, “He leadeth me,” and I would say, “Beside.” And she would say, “Beside.” Anyway, she learned it.
And things like Psalm 91, one of my favorite psalms, “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust. Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee” (Ps. 91:1–7 kjv).
The greatest gifts of my life have also entailed the greatest suffering.
Now I want you to think of how a mother, who is a widow, tries to teach her little daughter whose father was killed by a group of savage Indians who thought that he was a cannibal what this psalm means. What the words of Scripture mean. She learned “Jesus loves me, this I know,” not because her daddy was killed. She didn’t know it that way. But rather, “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” She learned to sing “God will take care of me,” and how was I to explain a thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousand at thy right hand but it shall not come nigh thee?
I tell you this because maybe it’ll help you to see that I’ve been forced, from the circumstances in my own life, to try to get down to the very bedrock of faith. The things that are infrangible and unshakable. God is my refuge. Was He Jim’s refuge? Was He his fortress? On the night before those five men who were killed by the Waorani went into the Waorani territory they sang, “We rest on thee, our Shield and our Defender.” What does your faith do with the irony of those words?
There would be no intellectual satisfaction on this side of Heaven to that age-old question, why. Although I have not found intellectual satisfaction, I have found peace. The answer I say to you is not an explanation but a person, Jesus Christ, my Lord and my God. As I shared at the beginning of this chapter, when I came to the realization that my husband was missing, not knowing for another five days that he was dead, the words that God brought to me then were from Isaiah the 43rd chapter, “When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. For I am the Lord thy God” (Isa. 43:2–3a kjv).
And I realized then that God was not telling me that everything was going to be fine, humanly speaking, that He was going to preserve my husband physically and bring him back to me. But He was giving me one unmistakable promise: I will be with you. For I am the Lord your God. He is the one who loved me and gave Himself for me.
And that challenge that Ivan Karamazov gave to his brother, Alyosha, echoed a challenge that was given thousands of years earlier, the challenge flung at Jesus when He hung on the cross. You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself. If you’re the Son of God, come down. And then you remember how the religious elite in derision taunted Him with words that accused. He saved others. Himself, He could not save. He trusts in God. Let God deliver Him now. He’s a miracle worker. Let Him prove it to us now because He said I am the Son of God.
And so, we come back again to the terrible truth that there is suffering. The question remains, is God paying attention? If so, why doesn’t He do something? I say He has, He did, He is doing something, and He will do something.
The subject can only be approached by the cross. That old, rugged cross so despised by the world. The very worst thing that ever happened in human history turns out to be the very best thing because it saved me. It saves the world. And so God’s love, which was represented, demonstrated to us in His giving His Son Jesus to die on the cross, has been brought together in harmony with suffering.
The gifts of love have been the gifts of suffering. Those two things are inseparable.
You see, this is the crux of the question. And those of you who have studied Latin may remember that the word crux is the Latin word, crux, for cross. It’s only in the cross that we can begin to harmonize this seeming contradiction between suffering and love. And we will never understand suffering unless we understand the love of God.
We’re talking about two different levels on which things are to be understood. And again and again in the Scriptures we have what seem to be complete paradoxes because we’re talking about two different kingdoms. We’re talking about this visible world and an invisible Kingdom on which the facts of this world are interpreted.
Take for example the Beatitudes, those wonderful statements of paradox that Jesus gave to the multitudes when He was preaching to them on the mountain. And He said very strange things like this: How happy are those who know what sorrow means. Happy are those who claim nothing. Happy are those who have suffered persecution. What happiness will be yours when people blame you and ill treat you and say all kinds of slanderous things against you. Be glad then, yes, be tremendously glad.
Does it make any sense at all? Not unless you see that there are two kingdoms: the kingdom of this world, and the kingdom of an invisible world. And the apostle Paul understood the difference when he made this stunning declaration. He said it is now my happiness to suffer for You, my happiness to suffer. It sounds like nonsense, doesn’t it? And yet this is the Word of God. Janet Erskine Stuart said, “Joy is not the absence of suffering but the presence of God.”5
It’s what the psalmist found in the valley of the shadow of death. You remember, he said, “I will fear no evil.” Now the psalmist was not naïve enough to say I will fear no evil because there isn’t any. There is. We live in an evil, broken, twisted, fallen, distorted world. What did he say? “I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
And when I stood by my shortwave radio in the jungle of Ecuador in 1956 and heard that my husband was missing, and God brought to my mind the words of the Prophet Isaiah, “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee.” You can imagine that my response was not terribly spiritual. I was saying, but Lord, You’re with me all the time. What I want is Jim. I want my husband. We had been married twenty-seven months after waiting five and a half years.
Five days later I knew that Jim was dead. And God’s presence with me was not Jim’s presence. That was a terrible fact. God’s presence did not change the terrible fact that I was a widow and I expected to be a widow until I died because I thought it was a miracle I got married the first time. I couldn’t imagine that I would ever get married a second time, let alone a third time. God’s presence did not change the fact of my widowhood. Jim’s absence thrust me, forced me, hurried me to God, my hope and my only refuge.
And I learned in that experience who God is. Who He is in a way that I could never have known otherwise. And so I can say to you that suffering is an irreplaceable medium through which I learned an indispensable truth. I Am. I am the Lord. In other words, that God is God. Well, I still want to go back and say, but Lord, what about those babies? What about that little child with spina bifida? What about those babies born terribly handicapped, with terrible suffering because their mothers were on cocaine or heroin or alcohol? What about my little Scottie dog, McDuff, who died of cancer at the age of six? What about the Lindbergh baby and the Stams who were beheaded? What about all of that?
And I can’t answer your questions, or even my own, except in the words of Scripture, these words from the apostle Paul who knew the power of the cross of Jesus. And this is what he wrote: “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God” (Rom. 8:18–19 kjv). It was made the victim of frustration—all those animals, all those babies who have no guilt whatsoever—the victim of frustration, not by its own choice, but because of him who made it so; yet always there was hope. And this is the part that brings me immeasurable comfort: The universe itself is to be freed from the shackles of mortality and enter upon the liberty and splendor of the children of God.
Where does this idea of a loving God come from? It is not a deduction. It is not man so desperately wanting a god that he manufactures Him in his mind. It’s He who was the Word before the foundation of the world, suffering as a lamb slain. And He has a lot up His sleeve that you and I haven’t the slightest idea about now. He’s told us enough so that we know that suffering is never for nothing.
Suffering is an irreplaceable medium through which I learned an indispensable truth.