“Life is very hard for a lot of people. I totally understand why someone shoots up dope and thinks about jumping off the highway overpass. There are no quick fixes, no easy answers, and no one is “really recovered” until they meet Jesus face to face.” – Charlie Collier (a pastor who, unsurprisingly, was burnt out)
I wake up in a groggy ache. The tasks of the week have caught up with me in one rushing wave of morning. As I do daily, my morning routine consists of shots of insulin to assist an already restricted diet, and two pills to keep me from totally breaking up with reality. The perfect cocktail of serotonin and mood stabilizers has arrived after years of trial and error. Recently, I have been given a bit of mental reprieve despite conditions that make life extra worrisome. This is grace. The ability to awake and live with a muted anxiety grants me a hope that can easily be overlooked and under appreciated.
This week I spent reflecting on suffering. Fun, right? While I spend more time than is healthy thinking of evil and the Fall, this week has been in preparation for an upcoming sermon. God usually spends these times to really get me plunged into the content in order to speak more clearly. The problem of evil on a meta level and suffering on a personal one, is not lost on any of us. We have all known heartbreak.
Perhaps it’s genetic. From grandparents who took their lives, to immediate family who tried and thankfully failed, suicide and depression permeate through my genetic makeup. Both of these conditions have stuck with me throughout my adult life, rising and falling with the ever changing seasons. My condition tells me things are not as they should be. No matter how close I become to my savior, this ghost trails me, seeking weakness and sowing despair.
My faith has taught me to live in the unresolved. All too often we sanitize our salvation. With an honest desire to find resolution, we push testimony and story in a way to show that things do in fact get better with Jesus. We can miss perhaps the greatest lesson of grace – sometimes, they don’t. There is something telling in the fact that Jesus chose to suffer with us instead of ending our suffering. With this bold and understated action, He conquered it all while embracing the unresolved and unanswered. Perhaps if He wiped out the evil in the world, it would give way to a malaprop faith instead of living like desperate migrants of grace. Is it not our circumstance which drives us to or from God? If my suffering draws me in a deeper communion with the holy, why pray for anything else?
Today, may the Lord give you the courage to live in the unresolved. May He offer peace in the shadows and depth to your soul.
18 Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later – Romans 8:18
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