God’s Healing for Life’s Losses: How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting
Creative Suffering
Countdown to God’s Healing: I’m excited to announce that BMH Books will release my fifth book soon (in April 2010). To read a sample section of God’s Healing for Life’s Losses: How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting please click here. To pre-order your autographed copy at 30% off, please visit here.
As we countdown to the release, I’ll be sharing periodic excerpts, such as today’s post: Creative Suffering.
Take Heart
We need to be able to deal with life’s losses in the context of God’s healing. Jesus did.
“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
Peace. With one word Jesus quiets the quest of our soul. We thirst for peace—shalom, wholeness, stillness, rest, healing.
Take heart. Hope. Come alive again.
That’s what you long for. I know it is, because it’s what I want.
The Anvil of God
We live in a fallen world and it often falls on us. When it does, when the weight of the world crushes us, squeezes the life out of us, we need hope. New life. A resuscitated heart. A resurrected life.
Brilliantly the Apostle Paul deals simultaneously with grieving and hoping. Do not “grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Paul, who offers people the Scriptures and his own soul (1 Thessalonians 2:8), skillfully ministers to sufferers.
To blend losses and healing, grieving and hoping, requires creative suffering. Frank Lake powerfully depicts the process.
“There is no human experience which cannot be put on the anvil of a lively relationship with God and man, and battered into a meaningful shape.”
Notice what the anvil is—a lively relationship with God and God’s people. Notice the process—battering. Notice the result—meaning, purpose. What cannot be removed, God makes creatively bearable.
Converting Suffering
Another individual, this one intimately acquainted with grief, also pictures creative suffering. British hostage, Terry Waite, spent 1,460 days in solitary confinement in his prison cell in Beirut. Reflecting on his savage mistreatment and his constant struggle to maintain his faith, he reveals:
“I have been determined in captivity, and still am determined, to convert this experience into something that will be useful and good for other people. I think that’s the way to approach suffering. It seems to me that Christianity doesn’t in any way lessen suffering. What it does is enable you to take it, to face it, to work through it and eventually convert it.”
Creative suffering doesn’t simply accept suffering, through the Cross it creatively converts it. In God’s Healing for Life’s Losses, our passion is to learn together how to grieve but not as those who have no hope.
Join the Conversation
What do you think about Terry Waite’s perspective? Christianity doesn’t lesson suffering, but enables you to face it, work through it, and convert it.
