The Distillery Church

Suffering – why?

With the recent earthquake in Haiti in our minds and recent discussions about why God allows bad things happen to good people, we turned our thoughts to the question of suffering this evening.

We started by remembering that easy answers are rarely what we find when we look at issues such as this and I shared the cartoon graph from nakedpastor. So is that to say that we cannot have anything to say on this topic? Next we shared some of the ways we or others have, in the past, explained away the apparent inaction of a powerful and loving God when people are suffering. In this we touched on the beliefs of many that all suffering is punishment from God – and reflected on the way the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis is used as a basis for believing this can apply to whole communities or nations as well as to individuals. Then we turned, with the help of Nooma 24: Whirlwind to the story of Job. Although we acknowledged that the story has many different elements and paints a curious picture of God at times, I – along with Rob Bell on the video – encouraged us all to look at the story from Job’s perspective. He was a good man, bad – apparently random – things happened to him. He asked God for an explanation and God just said (in a nutshell) I am God, you are not, who are you to think you could understand or make the decisions I make?

We ended with a reminder that these issues only come to life when we apply them to reality in our lives – many of us can testify to God being with us, alongside us in suffering, most of us have been able to support or comfort others by doing the same. Words are easy to throw around, but as God teaches Job, sometimes we need to be quiet and accept that we are not the ones in control.

An old friend, far away, posted this on her blog, struggling with the same issue:

…all I know is that I was fully aware of suffering before I became aware of God, and so the two have to live alongside each other. I also know that prayer changes me and hopefully I become more compassionate and reach out to help alleviate or perhaps simply weep over some of the shit that happens.

So, I hope that we can put aside the need to find answers and to embrace our call as children of the God of love to mourn and weep over the suffering we see and help where we can to put broken lives back together wherever we encounter them.