It was with great frustration, two months ago, that I returned to therapy.
Two years past the death of my mother, I assumed I was through with grief and its associated struggles. But a legitimate panic attack—a new experience, for me—and a newfound inability to calm my emotions about anything sent me shuffling back, head bowed, resentful.
It felt like failing an open-book test.
I know all the answers. I know who God is, how God loves, I understand his promises, I believe. Why that belief was not magically turning into a calm and joyful heart I did not, at the time, understand. I was beginning to wonder what was wrong with me.
The best therapists, even if they are not religious themselves, willingly work with your faith as a part of your healing. Still, I was surprised when my (secular) therapist observed, just three weeks in: “It seems like when your Mom died, your relationship with God took a beating.”
Sure, I told her. Dark night of the soul and all that—but I’m fine, now.
“Are you?” She pondered a minute. “Tell me if this holds true for you, but—I have the impression that before your mother’s death, you felt like God wouldn’t actually allow you to go through anything hard or difficult. But now you know He can and will, and that’s really rocked your world.”
She was closer to the mark than I ever dreamed she’d get. Embarrassing, at my age.
To be clear, I’ve always known that believers will suffer loss and grief—as Scripture tells us. And the Bible promises there will be a meaning for, and redemption in, that suffering. The world is going to hurt us. I’m aware of that. I’ve seen that, observed it in the lives of believers around me: lost pregnancies, illness, bereavement, abandonment, death, among sundry other agonies.
Theodicy is a thing! And yet I somehow also believed, without realizing it, that maybe—sort of—as believers we could go through bad things but also not feel them.
In my life, after all, I’ve known many believers who shared their “avenues through the pain”: the ways that God shielded them from terrible things that happened to them. At times, it seems, God does protect us from suffering even when we are in the middle of the furnace (see: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego). Sometimes when we do suffer, He spares us the memory of it after the fact.
And then, sometimes, He doesn’t (see: Job, the Psalms, Jesus).
Yet I somehow forgot this or thought that I was entitled to more. I internalized somewhere that when God promised joy would follow mourning, the promise of the joy would negate that mourning, or allow me in some way to bypass it. That redemption meant I wouldn’t have to drink the fullness of whatever cup of sorrow is meant for me.
But that is not correct. As I’ve worked through all of this, I’ve realized how little, at times, I trust God.
There is a therapeutic modality called “radical acceptance” that stresses acknowledging difficulties and suffering without trying to judge or resist them. To simply say, “it is what it is,” to acknowledge your feelings, and then to proceed without being ruled by them. With its roots in Buddhism and the deeper implications of the practice, radical acceptance isn’t a practice whose principles I can fully embrace. But Christian acceptance does, and for me it looks a lot like this:
This situation is given to me today. Can I accept that this too is under God’s will and therefore will be made good in some way, while also acknowledging that it hurts? Can I believe that God’s love and my hurt can both exist and not contradict each other? Do I trust God even when I am in what feels like unbearable circumstances?
These sound like elementary truths. Of course God loves me while I am suffering, and of course there are special graces for the sufferer. Of course all we experience is under the sovereignty of God and will work to good according to His purpose, and of course we can feel miserable while also experiencing joy and peace in that understanding and through His love. Of course I can trust God.
And yet—not many of us are taught to suffer well, despite this being integral to our faith.
The Christianity playing out in many churches today wants to focus on victory: on what it means, crassly, to “win.” This Christianity wants us to believe that God’s special people, most beloved by Him, will enjoy special blessings and special graces and that all of this translates to power, authority, prosperity in every sense both here and in the kingdom to come.
Consequently, we tend to skip over or dismiss great pain, weakness, and suffering. We don’t want those experiences. We don’t want to think about having to endure. We don’t want to think about what it means to stagger through grief or loss or reckoning. We don’t want to reckon that God’s gifts may not be what we would wish.
But Holy Week is a haunting reminder that no victory comes without a cost.
I am, every year, somehow surprised by the sudden turn Palm Sunday takes. Yesterday the service started out with our palm fronds waving in the air and choruses of hosanna; it ended with the darkness of Good Friday ahead. Victory looks like resurrection, but there is no resurrection without death.
I’ve written before about how God was distinctly present to me in some of my suffering in a way that He had not been present to me before. Those who suffer and struggle do receive riches that it is easy to forget and easier to dismiss when they are not an immediate remedy for hurt. I remind myself of these frequently; they are precious.
The truth is, I’m feeling better these days, and it has nothing to do with circumstance.
That’s because there’s always something: a job frustration, a betrayal by a friend you thought you knew, an illness or a happenstance, something that throws life into disarray. That’s a feature, not a bug, of being human. To accept these things with open hands, believing in God’s goodness and His love, is the practice of a lifetime and produces a great change in us, if we do not give up. This is what I am slowly learning, slowly practicing, in ways my younger self was never able to accomplish.
It’s also too tempting to skip to Easter. But Good Friday must precede it.
If we must suffer, I hope we suffer well.
Samaritan's Song 