In search for the meaning & purpose in suffering

“It is in the quiet crucible 
of your personal, private sufferings, 
that your noblest dreams are born, 
and God’s greatest gifts are given, 
in compensation for what you’ve been through... 
it is well.” 
— Wintley Phipps

Whenever we suffer, whether it’s a moment or an entire season, we want to know why.  Whatever our attitude, whether we’re stoic or struggling, we still want to know why.  We seek and search for meaning.  If only there’s some meaning in it or there’s a purpose for enduring what can feel like hell, there’s a gritting of the teeth and a determination to go on.

In the quiet crucible of your personal, private sufferings... a crucible is a pot made of material that withstands high temperatures.  We can well imagine being placed in one of these thick metal pots and the metaphor of being heated to molten temperature so that the impurities in our lives are burned off.  Actually, because they’re lighter and of less substance than the precious metal of our character that is to remain, the residue floats to the top and it’s skimmed off so when life cools, we’re purer.  The work going on in the crucible is quiet, unimpressive, but essential.  In our suffering, we’re hardly noticed, and we may even think nobody is interested and that nobody cares.  The world goes on without us.  But this process of being refined in the crucible builds patience within us, just as much as it requires patience from us.  This process always takes longer than we imagined it should take.  It is a great blessing to be able to see, afterwards, that the process of refinement necessarily needed that time.

It’s in these sufferings your noblest dreams are born... the first gift.  Somehow in the process of being refined, accepting what is occurring, which is a process in itself, the purity that is forming from within us manifests in the noblest dreams as God takes us back to our elemental selves.  God’s goal is to strip away pride that insists this suffering shouldn’t be so hard.  But the fact is, it is.  There is no way of re-cutting or re-forming it.  In terms of loss, grief cannot be bargained with.  It insists that it be faced.  And in facing it, humility pushes pride to the top where it can be skimmed off.  When we begin to see dreams that God has for us, dreams for the Kingdom, dreams that are all about others and not ourselves, we begin to see these are the noblest of dreams, and we agree with God and join the divine agenda.  In this, life makes the most sense it ever could.  It’s a purpose that’s far exceeds ourselves, even as it enters the realm of historical significance.  Deep down, we all want to do important work.

It’s in these sufferings your greatest gifts are given... the gift; gifts themselves and the deployment of those gifts to and for others.  The noblest dreams are fine, but they are merely a frustration if we see the dream and we have no way of bringing it to being.  This is where our gifts come into play.  In order to bring about God’s noblest dreams for us, we will need a new suite of gifts, of skills, using our unique knowledge and life experience, and there is something incredibly special about the process of God unveiling these gifts.  God can trust us with these beautiful gifts when God knows we will use them for divine glory and not our own.

All this in compensation for what you’ve been through... God cannot and will not change our circumstances, because that is not the way life works, but if we are diligent and faithful in withstanding the heat of the crucible, God make something incredibly powerful out of the legacy we are leaving.

Suffering is a skill.  Think of overcoming temptation.  You must deny yourself.  When we overcome temptation, we have suffered not having what might make us feel better in the short term.  Could it be that God has us endure a season of suffering to help us become disciplined?  Could it be that God is training us through a season of suffering for how we are supposed to live from now on?

When we consider Phipps’ quote, we can come to accept that God recognises how much suffering costs us, and the divine agenda is to compensate us over and above what it cost.  We see this afterwards, after we have received the noblest of dreams and the greatest gifts that we are always to be ours, but lay there in waiting, to be acquired.

We must have faith that our suffering has this kind of divine meaning and purpose.  It is what propels us through the toughest of days.

Photo by Creedi Zhong on Unsplash