JULIANNE ATKINSON |GUEST

As soon as I saw the area code of the phone call my husband was receiving, I knew something was off. I was pregnant with our first child and set to move for his job to Nashville, TN at the beginning of my third trimester. This was a city I had friends in, I knew there were good churches there, and it was a city we both liked. After a short conversation, my husband conveyed the news that there was a post they hadn’t accounted for in rural, northern New York state and he was now at the top of the list to take it. I was disappointed, but it wasn’t my first move and I hoped that God would have a good church and community there waiting when we arrived.

Instead, I found a desolate place I never grew to love. I had left a large church in San Antonio where I was on staff and knew and loved each family and their kids by name. In New York, there were a  handful of families hoping for a PCA pastor to come and pastor them. Church members brought meals when I had my son, but it felt more like they were checking off a box than done so out of friendship. I gathered the women of the church and started a Bible study in hopes of fostering fellowship as we studied God’s Word together. I ended up spending the study time preventing my son from climbing sky high, getting into people’s desks, and drinking bathroom chemicals. My husband worked long hours, weekends, and sometimes over an hour away. I was more lonely than I was during the Covid lockdown. It seemed like every hope I had for our move was dashed.

The depths of disappointment I felt contrasted with the hope of change and led me to wrestle with God through it. Here my head-knowledge intersected with my very real and difficult circumstances. Were my toes digging into a sandy beach as the storm swirled around me or were they resting on the solid rock of the foundation of God’s promises? If everything around me fell down, I knew He would not. 

As believers, sometimes we suffer pain and loss so deep that we come to a crossroads in our relationship with God and who he is. Some might respond to that pain as though with a finger in his face saying, “How could GOD do this to ME?” Our hearts are hardened. We feel bitter. We struggle to forgive God. And we turn and run FROM him. Others might ask the same question, but with trust in God’s faithfulness to his promises—that he really is who he says he is. “How COULD God do this to me?” In that moment, we run TO Him and His Word. As we wrestle with his Word, we will find rest in the midst of our pain and rock under our feet. 

The World in Thick Darkness

When I go through seasons of suffering, I find it helpful to frame the battle of suffering and death we see from the beginning of creation to the end of time in the biblical theme of light vs darkness. Isaiah 60 describes the world as covered in THICK DARKNESS. This is what we should expect every morning as we get up and get dressed and walk out the door. Because of the Fall in Genesis 3, we have broken relationships with God, with each other, with our own selves, and with all of creation. Romans 3 tells us no one is good, not even one. All have turned aside from the ways of the Lord. Even the creation groans in longing for freedom from suffering. Nothing escapes this state of darkness. Throughout the Bible, we see beloved saints of the Lord suffer deeply and often for lengthy periods of time. This means, suffering should not surprise us. As we take up our cross and follow Jesus, we are promised that in this world we WILL have tribulation. 

God in Jesus Enters Into the Darkness

The question of how COULD God do this to me is not asked to a God distant or removed from humanity. The story of suffering in this world is centered on the incarnation. Our one true God became incarnate. He was fully human so that he could be a perfect substitute FOR us. He felt the full range of human emotions. He grieved, laughed, endured loss, betrayal, denial, horrific physical pain, and temptation. He cried tears and felt deep anger. He was also fully God and lived a perfect life that he might be the second Adam, doing what the first Adam could not do. His substitution on the cross was without blemish. God’s participation in suffering TRANSFORMED our suffering by redeeming it. 

God in Jesus Has Victory Over the Darkness

Because of Jesus’ suffering on the cross, we don’t just suffer in unrelenting despair. That’s because the story of the incarnation doesn’t end in suffering but in resurrection. Revelation 21 says the city we will live in when Jesus returns has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The light has conquered the darkness. Dr. Kelly Kapic writes in his book Embodied Hope that “God is not interested in being eternally miserable: he enters suffering for the purpose of overcoming it, for the purpose of freeing us from the plague of our own sin and the cosmic consequences of human sin. Jesus’ story ends not with him as an eternal victim but as the eternal Lord who conquers sin and suffering in order to promise hope and renewal.”

 These are truths we tell ourselves when we face suffering in our lives. It gives us a place to rest our weary hearts that both acknowledges the importance of lament and also gives us hope–both now and in the future. While it’s tempting to put lament and hope at two opposite ends of the spectrum and think we have to choose which place to live in, the biblical teaching of faithful suffering involves upholding both truths simultaneously: lamenting the brokenness of this world and hope in the restoration that our suffering Savior embodies.

I experienced this during the time I was in New York. I never had the community or church I expected God would provide, but he did give me the opportunity to mentor and support younger youth workers through a parachurch ministry. He gave me a friend my parents’ age who had raised triplets and walked me through being a new mom. She pulled me onto our worship team to sing with her through my sorrows. Finally, God gave us the opportunity to move away again after only a year and a half. During that season of hardship, I learned to cling to the hope that God would use our time there to bring Him glory, while at the same time I learned to lament my disappointments, loneliness, and sorrow. 

As believers, we all hold this tension as we navigate suffering in a broken world, knowing that one day, our tears will be wiped away forever.

Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash