The perennial struggle of many people is to try to understand why there is suffering a world created by an apparently good and loving God.
In this column, as my title states, I want to suggest that sometimes it’s because God uses the suffering we go through to purify and mold us into godliness. Indeed, that is what the Psalmist said in his experience: “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey Your word” Psalms 119:67. It was his trial and affliction that turned him from the wrong direction he had been going, back to the right way he should have been on.
Sometimes, God will use our suffering as a form of discipline in us: we are going on the wrong path; God sends us some suffering that causes us to reevaluate our lives, turn around and go on the right path.
This has happened to me more than once. I will never forget a health issue that I went through and as I pondered it, I realized that in my life, I had been allowing a vice to continue unchecked. Recognizing that, I turned away from my wrongdoing and to my delight, discovered the health issue ended too.
My recommendation is that when you are suffering, don’t ask, “Why?” but rather, “What?” Don’t ask, “Why am I suffering?” Instead ask: “What do You want me to learn from this?”
I like the way the poet puts it in the poem he entitles, “God Knows What He’s About”.
When God wants to drill a man and thrill a man and skill a man,
When God wants to mold a man to play the noblest part;
When God yearns with all His heart to create so great and bold a man that all the world shall be amazed,
Watch His methods, watch His ways.
How He ruthlessly perfects whom He royally elects. How He hammers him and hurts him and with mighty blows converts him into trial shapes of clay which only God understands;
While his tortured heart is crying and he lifts beseeching hands.
How He bends but never breaks when his good He undertakes;
How He uses whom He chooses and with every purpose fuses him;
By every act induces him to try His splendour out-
God knows what He’s about.
Some years ago, my wife Linda was asked to speak at a Ladies Retreat on the topic of “stress”. One day, she commented, “I wonder if God will put me through some stressful situation before I speak?” I remember thinking, “Hmmm… Possibly. Up till now, after 17 years of marriage to me, she’s never experienced any stress in her life…”
A month or so later, she went to the doctor’s for a regular checkup and he found a growth on her left ovary. It was a tumour that the doctor feared might be cancerous. It was and so the result was that shortly thereafter, she had an operation to remove that growth.
After her seminar was over, she said me to, “You know, I learned lessons from that experience that I would never have learned otherwise. It turned out to be a very meaningful seminar on the topic of stress because of my first hand experience.”
She concluded, “Next time I’m asked to speak, I hope I’m asked to speak on prosperity.”
