I just drove back from Knoxville after a wonderful Thanksgiving celebration with all 16 of our crazy clan. The entire drive back I had my WOW Hymns from like the 90’s going. As I sang along and praised God on the way home I couldn’t help but remember how different this drive was just a few years ago. You look forward to going home for so long, then your there for 24-48 hours and then have to turn around and go back. Those drives back could be SOOOOO long and lonely and very depressing. But not this drive. Not because it isn’t just as sad to be leaving my family again, but because my focus was on the God who gave me that family. I was reminded as I drove of the blessing of pain and suffering. Hear me out.
I used to live just down the street from my older sister and her 2 children. We had way too much fun together those two years and were very spoiled. Moving away from them was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done and I still miss them almost daily. Possibly because I have a placemat with all of their faces all over it sitting on the table where I eat every day. I dearly miss them and I could not wait to see them this past weekend. All that longing and sadness about missing them made it that much more special when both children ran to greet me and jump into my arms as soon as I arrived. Would their embrace have been special if I had not been missing them? Of course, but not nearly to the extent that it was.
Here’s another real life example. Modern day Leprosy (or Hansen’s Disease) is a bacteria that affects the nerves and skins and mucus membranes. Part (but certainly not all) of the problem in this disease is numbness. Similar to someone with bad diabetes, small nerves in the feet no longer transmit pain signals. Their feet can no longer feel pain. Sounds like a good thing, right? Actually, this is very dangerous. Pain serves as a warning sign to the body that something is wrong. For example, that rock in your shoe is supposed to hurt every time you step on it to remind you to take it out. But if you can’t feel the rock or the pain it brings you just leave it there. And, after some time that rock causes a sore on your foot and then it gets infected.
On a much larger scale than a rock in our shoe, God uses painful experiences as warnings for us, or as a way to allow us to more fully experience the good. This gets at the heart of the question ‘why does God allow bad things to happen’. Think with me for a moment, and go down deep with me. If we were perfect and sin never entered in to the world, how could we know the mercy of God, or the grace of God? He would not need to be merciful because we would not sin, and He would not need to show grace because we would not require it to be in fellowship with Him. Yes, we may know that He loves us, but could we really know the depth of that love? Our ability to know the complexity of God is already limited by our finite minds, yet not knowing sin would severely limit our ability to know multiple attributes of the person of God.
It is because of my sin, the utter heinousness of it and the fact that there is no good thing in me apart from God that I can know His love for me to be so unfathomable, amazing, and beautiful! Seeing my sin for what it is allows me to see His grace and mercy that reaches to the heavens. I could not know God to the capacity that I do if he had not allowed sin in this world. Likewise, if I did not know the pain and heartache of losing a patient, a friend or a family member could I know the joy of my time with them to the extent that I do? My pastor always says we are all individually going through hard times now, just came out of a hard time, or headed into a hard time. That is part of this life the way that God intends it. I cannot tell you the specifics of why God has you going through the specific hard time you are in, but I firmly believe and trust that if we fix our eyes on Him through it all that He will not only carry us through the hard time, but also allow us to know Him more intimately that we could have known Him before. I heard once that each stumbling block can also be a stepping stone. When the hard times come, and they will, I encourage us all to fix our eyes on the One who we trust through it all. As muscles only get stronger if you cause them to tear (microtears) by over using them, we too will become stronger and better equipped for this road ahead as we allow God to use hard times to make us more like Him.
So, as strange as it is, this season I am thanking God for the pain, the loneliness, the sadness. Because through it He has allowed me to know Him, and there is no greater gift!
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