Can Suffering be a Gift?

Philippians is a mysteriously joyous book of the Bible. Mysterious, because its author, as he writes, is enshrouded in suffering. Suffering AND joy! The two go together, you see?

Perhaps not. It’s hard for people of our culture to see it. Hard for people of any culture. And it’s impossible for us to see how suffering coalesces with joy, unless through Christ, we’re brought to a place of loss, and from such a place to continually ask why?

Do you see? It is our engagement with God when most of life would have us ignore him that takes us through to his cherished presence to a place where with Christ is gain and all the world is loss.

These are such difficult concepts to write about, because nested within these truths are the inscrutable mysteries of God.

When Paul opens his letter to the Philippians, he greets them and then explains his own perilous and pleasing situation. For Paul, “living is Christ and dying is gain.” He is in a completely paradoxical position. Whatever happens to him is okay. If he lives it is for Christ, all of it. If he dies, it’s all gain, for he passes into the actual Presence of Christ.

Now at the risk of losing you, this is the position that we are blessed to find ourselves in, when, through Christ in our loss, we connect to a joy that surpasses despair because of suffering.

I am not glorifying suffering here.
I hope and pray I’m able to communication that.

If not for the suffering, there would be no extravagance of joy for what only Christ may do in us.

Paul does not come from a place of having lost nothing. He has lost much for the Gospel.

In chapter three of Philippians, Paul convinces us that he knows the privileges of high Judaism. He knows all the delicacies of this life. He has intelligence; the best of education. He has wanted for nothing. Yet, he considers them all “rubbish” compared with one thing: Jesus Christ.

Only having lost all of what
mattered most to us can we see this.

Before we experience such loss, we think such a thought is abhorrent. Truly we do. We cannot understand what to us is purely illogical. Not until we’re backwashed into a grief we cannot escape from, however, do we run into the arms of a waiting God — the only one who can help us in such unparalleled distress.

When we arrive in that place of being, a place that we had no prior concept of, a place where being alive feels like death, we do what finally we were created to do.

We look up, and in cries of despair,
helpless and forlorn, we implore God,
“Help me, Lord!”

And the paradox then comes into play.

~

In such a ‘gift’ of grief we stay,
for an extended time,
so we can learn how to fully rely on God.

As we endeavour to make sense of the nonsensical journey of a suffering beyond anything we ever thought we’d experience, we also make a discovery that was saved for such a place, bereft of spirit and vanquished of soul.

This discovery is a gift. It is a gift because it has been given to us. Not the suffering so much, but the inordinate Presence of God as we, so poor of spirit, no longer have the resources to live life without him. It sounds pathetic to a worldly person. But out of such weakness comes the knowledge of God that is the gift that transcends all gifts.

I’m not sure if I would say that suffering is a gift, but I can say that suffering is the only way through to a gift that God has for us.

What I can say is that suffering is the gateway to something that proves to be a gift: as we come to know God amid tormenting grief, we come to realise we can live without everything else but him.

That’s the gift.

Photo by Rob Bates on Unsplash