“Why Must We Suffer?”

“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

Why so far from my call for help,

from my cries of anguish?

My God, I call by day, but you do not answer;

I call by night, but I have no relief.” (Psalm 22)

A question humans have sought understanding for throughout all of human history: why do we suffer? We see suffering everywhere we go. We feel suffering within us. We all experience our “Dark Night of the Soul” in life, and we try to put meaning on it. We try to discredit our own suffering and tell ourselves that we need to be positive because other people might have it worse. We try to heal our wounds with positive thoughts and “well maybe it means this.” In worst case scenarios, we feel our suffering is a form of punishment.

I have been in a place where all of these thoughts have come and gone. None of it brought me any kind of relief to think about. It wasn’t until I was out of my suffering that I could look back and realize the profound growth and spiritual evolvement that occurred within that suffering. Something that I learned in reflection is that God does not necessarily speak to us in our suffering, but He is there, present and listening. I believe that He knows we cannot understand when we are in a state of despair, but that He will speak to us when we are in a place that we can.

God can be much louder in our lives when we turn to Him. I can look back at suffering I’ve experienced now and say “God, what the heck was that!?” and get an answer. We do not have to thank God for our suffering, we just need to thank God (that he is there, listening.) There are things that happen to us in life that completely empty and deplete us… and maybe… it’s so that we can be filled back up again and used to help others. It is not how we respond in the moment of our suffering, but how we learn and grow from it. How will that experience ripple off of us and help others in the future? How can we allow God to use us in our suffering?

I remember as early as High School noting how good my mom was at talking to other people who were suffering immense losses. She didn’t shy away from deep conversations with people that were suffering. She asked the important questions and stayed present with them in a way that I have never seen other people have the ability to do when it comes to grief. Yet, she has no formal counseling skills or “How to Respond to Grief” handbooks. It was in her own experience with grief that she could properly be there for someone else. While she probably didn’t understand why she was going through grief at a young and vulnerable age, she probably could have never imagined she would develop a natural ability to be present with someone else experiencing grief. Our experiences with suffering ripple in a way that we cannot understand.

I have openly talked about my own experience with the loss of our first pregnancy, and earlier miscarriages that have happened between Natalie’s birth and our next. The first one was awful because it was 12 weeks in and entirely unexpected. I couldn’t understand why that would happen. Now that I’ve come to Faith and have a real relationship with God, I have an understanding of suffering that brings me peace daily and motivates me to allow God to use my suffering to help others. I like to think that God can help me speak to others at a timely moment in their lives to bring comfort when He may not be able to get through to them in their despair. So often, suffering turns us away from God. I am guilty of that, too. It is natural to ask why God would allow this suffering to happen to us.

It is what we do with our suffering later that we can find meaning. I believe that it is absolutely okay to stay present in our suffering while we are experiencing our darkest days. It’s okay to ask questions. It’s okay to not try to find meaning in those moments. We will never understand until later, when maybe our suffering can be used to help someone else who is going through something similar. We may turn our suffering into action for a cause that has a much deeper meaning to us down the road.

We can only have faith and trust that God hears us in our despair. Many Bible versus point to this truth:

1 Peter 3:12 “For the eyes of the Lord are righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer.”

Psalm 145:18: “The Lord is near to all who call on him”

Psalm 66:19: “But truly God has listened; he has attended to the voice of my prayer.”

Jeremiah 29:12: “Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you.”

Psalm 55:17: “Evening and morning and at noon I utter my complaint and moan, and he hears my voice.”