Pastor William Willimon tells a story about visiting a woman in his church who had just given birth. When he got there, the husband and wife were waiting forth doctor because they had received the ominous news that “there were problems with the birth.” When the doctor arrived, he told the couple that the child had been born with Down syndrome, but he also had a minor and correctible respiratory condition. He said, “My recommendation is for you to consider just letting nature take its course, and then in a few days there shouldn’t be a problem.” The child would die “naturally” if they just left things as they were. The couple was confused and asked why they shouldn’t fix the problem. The doctor looked at them and said that raising a Down syndrome child would create enormous amounts of stress in the marriage, and that studies showed that many parents of Down syndrome children separated or divorced. He then said, “Is it fair of you to bring this sort of suffering upon your other two children?”
At the word suffering, the wife suddenly seemed to understand. She countered that her children had lived a safe and comfortable life with every advantage in the world. They had known, if anything, too little of suffering and the difficulty of life in the world. She spoke of “God’s hand” and said, “I could certainly see why it would make sense for a child like this to be born into a family like ours. Our children will do just fine. When you think about it, it could be a great opportunity.”
The doctor was dumbfounded and turned to the pastor, urging him to “talk some reason into them.” Willimon of course knew that the couple needed to be given good instruction as to what lay ahead so that they did not take up their parenting of this new child without some notion of what to expect. But, he wrote, the couple was using reasoning, though it was reasoning foreign to the doctor. It was the reasoning that suffering is not to be avoided at all costs.
The Bible does not give us all the answers we would like when it comes to all the particulars of suffering, but it does take it seriously, it provides a perspective from which to face it, and it does tell us what will finally become of suffering.
The book of Job tells us that though we may not understand from our limited perspectives, there is greater purposes at play even in the midst of suffering. Like Job, the New Testament book of Romans tells us that God is in control and does have a plan (Romans 8:28; see also Ephesians 1:11), and Revelation tells us that one day suffering will be no more (Revelation 21:3-4).
In the meantime, the Bible assures us that suffering can be used by God to instruct us, humble us, and teach us not to set our ultimate hopes on transitory things (Romans 5:3-4). Pastor Tim Keller sums this up well, “One of the main teachings of the Bible is that almost no one grows into greatness or finds God without suffering, without pain coming into our lives like smelling salts to wake us up to all sorts of facts about life and our own hearts to which we were blind.”
Christians may understand many doctrinal truths, but those truths seldom make the journey down into the heart except through enduring times of disappointment, hardship, and loss. As C.S. Lewis famously put it, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.”
