Perhaps the greatest challenge to faith occurs when our walk through the valley of the shadow of death is accompanied by unconscionable pain, loss, and suffering.
These situations raise questions for which there may be no satisfying answers.
My wife, Michele, served as the International Director of Healthcare Outreach with ABWE International. She led 31 medical teams to 16 different countries over an 18-year period. She established relationships with national pastors and returned to these sites repeatedly with medical teams. People were coming to faith, and churches were growing. The Lord was using her in a unique and profound way.
She was also maintaining a very demanding schedule. She began to develop symptoms that seemed to be consistent with burnout. An MRI on April 11, 2022, revealed that she had Frontal Temporal Disorder. Five months later, she was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. In July 2023, she lost her ability to speak. In October 2023, she lost her ability to swallow. In November 2023, she fractured both bones in her right ankle. Michele was cut down at the height of a dynamic, dramatic ministry. It doesn’t make any sense. It seems so cruel.
We are often surprised when we experience incalculable suffering and loss, perhaps due to a faulty perspective about the Christian life, which Jesus told us requires self-denial and cross bearing (Luke 9:23). As I walk through suffering alongside Michele, there are four things that I am learning.
First, we are much better at dealing with death than with dying. When someone dies, we send flowers, go to the funeral, pay our respects, and go home. Dying is more complicated, uncomfortable, and dissociating. People don’t know what to say, so they say nothing. Family and friends disappear. Our incomplete understanding of theology doesn’t prepare us for a slow, anguishing process of dying.
Second, affliction, pain, and suffering can make a person self-absorbed. Terminal illness consumes your time, your thoughts, your emotions, and your activities. Everything must be planned around circumstances created by the disease. When suffering has such a prominent place in your life, you expect it to be prominent in the lives of others. However, we can’t expect other people to carry our cross; they are carrying their own. We must realize that we can still serve others from a position of loss and suffering. This is how we can begin to find peace in suffering.
Third, I’m learning in new ways what it means to love my wife like Christ loved the church. The love of Christ isn’t reciprocal. We can’t love Christ the way he loves us. There is no service, obedience, gift, or sacrifice we could make that would reciprocate in kind the love that Christ has for us. We are totally dependent upon the love of Christ, but Christ is not dependent upon our love. He doesn’t need our love, but, amazingly, he wants it. As Michele fades physically and mentally, she is losing her ability to reciprocate my love. She’s increasingly dependent. We are in the same condition before Christ, and his love is unwavering.
Fourth, I’m learning what it means to lament. As Mark Vroegop explains, “Lament is the honest cry of a hurting heart wrestling with the paradox of pain and the promise of God’s goodness.”[1] There are four steps in a lament: turning, complaining, requesting, and praising. Lament begins by turning to God and offering a complaint. It’s legitimate to complain in lament, but lament shouldn’t begin or end with complaint or we will become despondent. As we move through the steps of lament, we express our requests to God and arrive at praise. It is here where we can find ourselves in a paradoxical place of peace and joy in the midst of sorrow and loss.
Biblical lament doesn’t remove the pain or answer the question of why this is happening, but it does reorient our focus. Who will we trust? Who will we follow?
God’s thoughts are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9). His judgments and ways are unknowable (Romans11:33). Even though we don’t have an answer now, one day we will know why (1Corinthians13:12). This is where faith meets life. We are all in a battle between God and the devil for the allegiance of our hearts. When we face affliction and loss at multiple levels—physically, mentally, professionally, relationally—and the Lord doesn’t seem to answer our prayers, how are we going to respond? Our allegiance rests in Christ and the hope of the resurrection. As Timothy Keller wrote, this hope isn’t “just a consolation for the life you never had but a restoration of the life you always wanted. This means that every horrible thing that ever happened will not only be undone and repaired but will in some way make the eventual glory and joy even greater.”[2] The Lord will make all things new (Revelation 21:5).
Editor’s Note: To hear more from John about the lessons he and Michele have learned through suffering, you can view his video presentation here.
[1] Mark Vroegop, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy (Wheaton: Crossway, 2019), 26.
[2] Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Dutton, 2008), 32.
