Suffering and Sovereignty
“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken but – I hope – into a better shape.” Charles Dickens
We all know what Scripture says when it comes to enduring hard times as a believer. Jesus tells us to take heart, for he has overcome the world (John 16:33). Peter says that even if we suffer for what is right, we are blessed (1 Peter 3:14). And Paul, who endured all kinds of suffering, claims that it has been granted to us on behalf of Christ not only to believe him, but also to suffer for him (Philippians 1:29).
I had always thought these instructions were best applied to Christians all over the globe who suffer for their faith. The ones elsewhere who were persecuted for their beliefs. The ones forced into hiding. The ones who could only get access to ripped pages of the Word for fear of being caught. That is, until one day when suffering came knocking at my door.
I had been laying in bed for a full 24 hours straight, moaning in pain. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t even drink water without wanting to vomit. I was in agony, my insides felt like they had been ripped in half and were burning raw. My Mother had told me in the morning that I should go to the doctor, but I refused.
“I’m not going in there just so they can tell me I have heart burn and charge me $500 for giving me Pepcid AC!” I groaned. By later that afternoon she had had enough of my protests and demanded I go to urgent care. Thank God for mothers, because once I was in the clinic they quickly realized that whatever was wrong with me was something only a hospital was equipped to deal with. They gave me a referral to the emergency room, but even then I tried convincing my Mom just to take me home so I could pop some pain relievers and go to bed. I was still convinced this was just a bad case of heart burn – but it wasn’t. Turns out what I had could have killed me had the Lord not been as gracious as he was.
The ER doctor notified me that from the scans they had done it appeared I had a bowel obstruction. The pain in my chest had been an indicator of where foods and liquids could not make it through, and that was why I was vomiting everything back up. They had several theories as to what had caused it, but none of them were definitive. To fix me, there were two options: surgery, or a tube inserted into my stomach to hopefully untwist the bowel. We moved forward with the second option with the understanding that surgery would be required if it didn’t work. After that I was to be transported to a full-service hospital. I thought, okay, this will be over and done with in a day and I can go back home. But God had other plans.
While they gave me something to relieve the discomfort of the obstruction, I exchanged it for the pain of the tube that was now inside of me. To untwist my bowel, it was necessary to insert a tube into my nose, down my throat, and into my stomach. While the process of insertion was not pleasant, the pain it caused having a tube permanently inserted was more than what I could imagine and worse, even, than giving birth. I had assumed in error that this was just for an hour or two so I endured it. But shortly after I arrived at the hospital I was informed by the staff that not only did I have to stay there for the next three days minimum, but that the tube would not be removed until I started having normal bowel movements. The problem was that I hadn’t eaten in almost 24 hours, and they wouldn’t feed me until my body could produce gas or a bowel movement. Now all I could do was wait, in pain.
I had been praying throughout this entire experience. For the pain to recede, then for them to find what was wrong with me and then for the pain to recede. At this moment I turned to God again in fervent prayer, sobbing to myself from the raw burning in my body and pleading with him to take it away. I asked for pain medication, and they gave me morphine. It didn’t work. I prayed some more because clearly God hadn’t heard me the first time. It didn’t make any sense to me that he would continue to allow me to suffer like this when I had clearly prayed for it to end.
That night I barely slept, and now I was not only dealing with the feeling of swallowing glass but I was hungry. So hungry from no food for a day, knowing that they would not feed me anytime soon just brought further despair. If I slept at all it was from exhaustion of crying and praying to a God I thought had abandoned me in a very difficult hour.
Upon waking early the following morning I was greeted with the sunrise and a different disposition. I was still in agony, but somehow grateful. I read my Bible, and then prayed yet again for the pain to be gone and for the tube to be removed. That was when God spoke to me.
If I had taken your pain away quickly, you would not have remembered this and would have gone back to making the same mistakes.
There it was. A lesson, and a mighty fine one at that. He was right, as he always is, because I had been neglecting my health for quite some time. I knew full well that my body was in revolt and had been for a while, and the Lord had been leading me to make changes. Changes that I didn’t care to make. Not only that, I had been living in disobedience with certain areas of my life and it didn’t agree with me. In the end it had manifested itself within my body dramatically.
This lesson was a hard one, but crucial. One of the most common questions we ask as believers is how a good and loving God can allow suffering in any of his children. While we know some of that is rationalized as sin against one another, that doesn’t explain cancer or any number of awful diseases that plague us as humans. Surely this can’t be our fault, we say. Sometimes it really isn’t as simple as assigning blame. When we do this, we are missing the mark.
The Lord is gracious, loving, holy and more importantly – sovereign. He is not a genie that grants wishes automatically and we would do well to remember that. When I recall how irritated I was that my prayer wasn’t answered by him expediently, and on my time, I am ashamed of myself that I would treat him in such a disrespectful way. The God who so loved me he gave up his son, the Lord of my life who had delivered me so many times I couldn’t count, the one constant in my life who was always there. He deserved more than that from me, and now I understand.
I go forward in life with this knowledge. When trials come, I pray to remember that he is sovereign over all things including the small and mundane of my life. He is good, and his goodness always prevails. I cannot see the full picture, nor do I want to, but you can be sure I trust the artist.
“Praying in faith does not always mean being sure that the very thing we ask will happen. But it does always mean that because of Jesus we trust God to hear us and help us in the way that seems best to him.”
—John Piper