Suffering is a crossroad — which way to go?

Suffering is a crossroad.  It is designed as the opportunity to break our arrogance, because we cannot escape the pain of it.  That which we cannot control humbles us, though it feels distinctly unfair.  

Suffering can be a blessing in disguise
… or a curse.

Which way will we take it? 

This is a choice — a crossroad. 

Because suffering is a crossroad there is temptation to go the other way and to further dig our heels into the firm ground resenting the pain of it.

When I first faced suffering as a 36-year-old twenty years ago I did not know what had hit me.  I was flummoxed by it.  Suddenly I was living in a parallel universe with life otherwise going on around me, yet I was living an absolute nightmare.  Every day, every moment, was shrouded in emotional uncertainty.  I had no scaffold with which to understand it… it undid me completely.

The gamut of grief descended and tabernacled in me for several months, if not a year or more, transforming my existence acutely in those first six months.  That six months felt like a very, very long time.

I’ve used this experience a great deal in my pastoral ministry and counselling work — I was ‘held’ in this purgatory for an extended period where there was no possible escape for a reason.  

So I would not forget, and because I couldn’t escape, I had to endure the crossroad experience day after day, week after week, month after month.

At the crossroad, the decision point comes, “do I make something of this situation I’m in… do I take the opportunity to improve, to grow, to apply faith, to choose to respond in a mature way… DESPITE how I feel I want to respond… OR do I allow the experience to crush me and get stuck in the mire of bitterness, resentment, and disempowerment?”

Do I make this about me
and the opportunity in this hardship?

Or do I make this about me
and how unfair the world is?

(In case we don’t know, the world is unfair, but there is an opportunity in that unfairness — to rise above it.)

Do you see the crossroad that suffering brings us to?  It is a polarising place forcing us into the valley of decision.  

We go either of two ways
but we can’t go both ways.

Do we believe that the things against us now
can be part of the making of us?

Suffering is a precipice where all kinds of futures beckon.  

It won’t always be the way it is — so hard.  

Our choice: do we build brick by brick a future that we believe is possible or do we rage against the machine? 

The former has a future we hope for.  The latter is defeat.  Easy choice.  

The choice is to do the hard work now for a beautiful outcome rather than deny we have the power to forge a good future.  

You will reap a harvest of blessing if you do not give up

NINE years ago we were going through a very tough time, but in context it was just another season in a 20-year journey of becoming for me.  

That 20-year journey started with the loss of my family as we knew it in September 2003.  This broke me for months but was the cause of the rebuilding of me for the better.  This was followed by burnout in 2005, clinical depression and midlife crisis in 2007, and then an extended period of acute stress that became chronic, and then we lost our son Nathanael to stillbirth in 2014 (picture of me with him on the day of his funeral).  2016 to May this year were some of the hardest years, but always sprinkled with many reasons to be grateful.

We weren’t to know it at that time, when we lost Nathanael, but we were only a bit over fifty percent the way through the trial of twenty years (2003-2023) yet that’s the truth of it.  

It isn’t helpful to go into all of it it in graphic detail unless to say that there are others I’m journeying with right now (more than a few) who are either part the way through their hellish reality or are only just beginning.  

It does not help to attribute judgement — but when we are going through hell, as Sir Winston Churchill once said, we simply must keep going!

Some of these people are doing it tougher than I had it.  It is astonishing that they keep waking up in their nightmare yet keep agreeing with themselves and their loved ones to do their best.  They are nothing short of inspiring!  And they will make it out of their respective hell.

That tug of faith keeps us facing each day knowing somehow it won’t always be the way it is right now.  Our reality defies this faith, however, but it’s faith that helps us insist on a hope we do not yet see.  Only by faith can we continue to ‘show up’ when broken.  The faith of raw courage.

I want to encourage those on the toughest of journeys right now — those who are not there yet, especially those questioning their method or even their existence.  Keep going.  You will get there, and it will be even more beautiful than you dare to imagine right now as trudge through the mire.  Belief will get you all the way home.  

The title to this little article is part of a Bible verse: “Do not grow weary in doing good, for you will reap a harvest of blessing if you do not give up.” (Galatians 6:9). 

It’s a life-saving verse for some in their season of anguish that they cannot change.  For those of us who cannot relate, kindness, acknowledgement, and understanding go a long way.  Yet, if we can’t relate, we are an anachronism for those who have lost more than some will ever know.

May we go gently with those in our midst who are struggling,
and may those who endure trials right now be gentle with themselves.