Pain and the Plan

What do we do with a God who never fails us, but surely disappoints us?

Of all the disappointments I’m unpacking in middle age, this one hurtled me into depths before taking me to new heights.

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“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” – Matthew 5:4

Under the light of the moon, I stomped and sobbed, each footstep landing hard enough to cause reverberations through my body.

Jesus warned of an “outer darkness,” far removed from the presence of God, where weeping and gnashing of teeth provides the soundtrack for the tormented forsaken (Matt 25:30).

As my heart pounded in my chest, and the hot tears streaked down my face, and the moonlight above bathed the very real world in a wash of silver, I was reminded that I was still in the land of the living though every day felt like I had slipped through the portal of a fresh hell.

I was in outer darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth filling my nights, whispered grief and stifled wails filling my days.

I was alone, walking my little sister through the valley of the shadow of death. Her young and beautiful body was decaying before my eyes. Her once porcelain, baby-soft skin was now dry and rough and lay across her bones like a thin sheet. Her mouth was permanently agape, her teeth rotting. The rank odor of death was so heavily upon her it burned my nostrils and clawed at my throat.

Eventually, she stopped communicating her excruciating pain and I prayed that this meant she was no longer feeling it. But before the silence of fast-approaching death had stolen her voice from the world, I thought I would go mad from the echo of her anguished cries for a help no one could provide.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

I kept a death-watch over my sister for weeks, spending day after day by her side. I prayed over her, sang over her, spoke to her; but mostly, I sat in silence with her. And at night, after retreating to my hotel room, I walked with God.

These walks were not pleasant.

I was fury incarnate. I was an open and infected wound. I was a scared child. I was seeing through a mirror darkly. I was ablaze with the injustice of it all. I was alone in the night.

I felt alone, anyway.

“Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.” – Psalm 139:7-8

I once heard an elder priest say that he’d come to realize pain was always part of the plan and this realization, he believed, had set him free. And Marcel Proust seems to concur as he famously offered,

“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one can make for us, which no one can spare us.”

My sister’s gruesome death shattered whatever religious illusions I had about God’s willingness to allow horrific pain into my life. I came face-to-face with a God who I knew was present with me, but who was absolutely going to allow my path to be riddled with suffering.

Part of my mid-life journey has been learning what to do with that truth.

What do we do with a God who never fails us, but surely disappoints us? How do we hold space for pain that gifts us and wounds us both?

Philosopher and theologian Cornel West posits that the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. That resonates, doesn’t it? What is our suffering saying to us? What truth is it offering?

Far be it from me to attempt to explain why things couldn’t have been different or how a good and omniscient God works with suffering. Theologians and philosophers and farmers and housewives have been pondering these questions since the dawn of time, and I have nothing novel to offer the debate on the problem of pain.

However, what I’m learning is that, if we can risk allowing our suffering to speak, we just might discover how pain can be helpful to the plan of our individual and collective lives.

For instance, when I listen carefully to the suffering I endured watching my sister die with no human person to tend to her soul with me, I hear something radically different than my immediate sensory experience I took in at the time.

I wailed at God, “You’re really going to leave me to do this impossible thing alone, aren’t you?”

And God answered, “You can do this. You were meant to do this. I’m going to be right here with you, and nothing is impossible when we’re together.”

Theologian Barbara Brown Taylor offers this candle in the dark:

“Meanwhile, here is some good news you can use: even when light fades and darkness falls – as it does every single day, in every single life – God does not turn the world over to some other deity. Even when you cannot see where you are going and no one answers when you call, this is not sufficient proof that you are alone. There is a divine presence that transcends all your ideas about it, along with all your language for calling it to your aid, which is not above using darkness as the wrecking ball that brings all your false gods down – but whether you decide to trust the witness of those who have gone before you, or you decide to do whatever it takes to become a witness yourself, here is the testimony of faith: darkness is not the dark to God; the night is as bright as the day.”

God is not above using darkness as a wrecking ball to bring all my false gods down.

As I survey my life, I see clearly all the false gods that have needed to come down: ego, pride, self-righteousness, ignorance, self-reliance, and self-protection to name but a few. It took sitting next to my dying sister, with the Angel of Death hovering over us, for me to experience the God of My Life as realer than the ground beneath my feet and as closer than the breath in my lungs. I witnessed my sister experiencing the same. And it was glorious.

Pain is helpful as part of the plan because adverse experiences are the proving ground where we learn to trust – really trust – God. Here’s the bottom line: we don’t learn to trust through reading our Bibles or going to church or praying or doing good works. That’s not how trust works.

 Just as babies learn to trust their parents through first feeling the sheer panic that comes with the pangs of hunger and thirst, and then being soothed and comforted by their parents’ attentive response to their cries, our souls need this ritual to trust God. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he responded to the disciples’ question of who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven:

“He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” – Matthew 18:1-5

God is not above using the darkness, the wilderness, the pain, and the suffering, to bring all our false gods down. Just as a confident parent comes to comfort and soothe their sobbing child who cannot see clearly through the panic and the tears, our God comes to us, unsurprised and unshaken, ready to attend and to care.

As I stomped through the moonlit night so long ago, as my sister’s soul hovered between this world and the next, as I picked up the pieces of my shattered life after she was gone, God heard our cries and was there, even when the tears and the panic blinded us. I was never alone in the night. I just had to listen carefully to my suffering to discover that truth.

What is your suffering saying? What truth is it telling you? When you’re ready to listen, dear one, know that God is here, ready to attend to you, in the beautiful ritual of trust that was always part of the plan.