Suffering

I'm going to tell you a story that I don't often share, partly because it didn't make much sense to me until more recent years.

When I was a little girl I was diagnosed with Scoliosis. It was a mild case for quite a few years, but as I entered my teenage years it worsened to the point that I needed to wear a back brace at night to try to help correct the curve. Wearing a brace at night will stop scoliosis from becoming worse about 80% of the time. It will make it better about 10% of the time, and the other 10% of the time it will continue to get worse despite the brace. I was one of those cases where my back continued to worsen and about the time I was 16 it became so bad that my doctor was suggesting surgery in order to correct it as much as possible. My spine had a "S" shaped curve which helped in a sense because my back was still pretty balanced, and it didn't interfere with my ability to play sports or run track, but because it was worsening so quickly at the end, my doctors said it would eventually affect my organs if I never had surgery.

As a child I would lay in bed at night crying and praying, "God I know you can heal me! I believe you can. Please, oh please make me better!" I was begging God for a miracle, and in his goodness he gave me one. However, it didn't come in the form that I, in my childish mind, expected.

I went on to have surgery, and it was more effective that even the doctors anticipated. My spine was almost completely straight. But even after the surgery I continued to wonder why God didn't just heal me himself. Why did I have to go through all that hardship and pain? I had pleaded with God for a miracle. Why didn't he give me one?

As an adult I've come to realize that there is a reason why many times God does not miraculously heal people. I struggled with the answer to this problem for many years. But the truth is that it might be an even bigger miracle how God changes a person's heart through the suffering he continues to allow. Healing a person's body, yes that's a miracle. But changing a person's heart? That's truly something only God can do.

If I never had to deal with this issue from an early age, if God had just miraculously taken it all away from the beginning, I know that I would be a completely different person today. It set me on a different path. It has taught me a deeper level of compassion that I would not know otherwise. It has taught me to value other people that are sick, hurting, or living in poverty. It has taught me of the deep love that God has for me. That he loves me enough to lovingly and gently say no when I want something so badly in order to make me more like him. It has taught, and continues to teach me, to trust God in all circumstances.

Suffering is actually a blessing in disguise because it causes us to look upward for God to meet our needs and outward, to sympathize with others, which in turn starts to melt away some of the self-centeredness that is in all of us. I can look back and see how all of the hard things in life so far have been a blessing and have served to shape me and grow me more into the person I want to be... the person God wants me to be. This is how God teaches us and how we ultimately grow and mature. It's a process that will continue as long as we live.

Why does it shock us when God places us in difficult circumstances? So often we think that something is wrong, but I'm convinced that if we want to grow we have to embrace our suffering and look to learn from it instead of trying to run from it. It doesn't mean we don't get treatment from an illness or counseling during a hard time or anything like that. But it does mean that when suffering comes into our lives we should stop dwelling on the question, "How do I make it stop?" and start asking, "Lord, what do you want to teach me through this?" When we look at our troubles in this light, it makes a lot more sense when the Bible tells us to do things such as to rejoice in our suffering. We rejoice in our suffering because it is making us more like Christ!

Romans 5:3-5 "We rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us."