5 Steps for Suffering Well

Suffering well.  Phhh…this is not my expertise.  It’s been a ginormous growing edge for me.  God has taken me on a pretty crazy journey to teach me a little bit more about suffering well.  Here are some of the practical insights He has taught me during this time. 

1.     Grieve our Loss, Both Big and Small.  Whether it’s losing a limb, a job, your temper or growing up without a mom or dad—it is vital we grieve it all.   It’s how we move on.   Ask the Lord to show you some of the pain you may have buried and not processed through so you can move on into deeper freedom with Christ. 

2.     Perspective is HUGE.  Sometimes when life gets tough, the only thing we can see is the negative present pain.  Yet, I’ve found that God’s grace is so abundant in our suffering.  Ask God to help you see your life from His perspective, an eternal perspective that sees both the really awesome stuff and the really painful stuff in proper balance. 

3.     Faith in His Word.  God has given us His Word of Truth in the Bible and He tells us that suffering and pain leads to good things, really good things.  Things like hope, love, and a more mature complete faith--suffering is how we become more like Christ.  Not only that but that He has a purpose for our lives, and it is good.  So, from God’s perspective suffering and pain is actually a good thing and not something to avoid (wrap your mind around that one!).  Ask God to grow your faith in His Word concerning your pain and loss. 

4.     Contentment, Joy, and Praise.  It really can happen in the midst of loss. We can be content, joyful people who are bent on praise, but it will take a very conscious choice to be this type of person.  Beloved, I am convinced of this, there is some deep freedom when we praise God through pain.  I admit though, this has been a big growing edge for me...my emotions have a way of guiding me.  I’m asking God to change my attitudes and to help me be a person of praise and thanksgiving in all circumstances.  Won’t you?

5.     Jesus is Enough.  This one is BIG.   Some things we loss, we may never get back.  We can live aching for what we’ve lost, but I believe God desires for us to come to His Son to find He really is enough for us.  I think it’s one of the main reasons He allows loss and suffering, He desires for us to come to Him in desperation for our well-being like never before.  His love, forgiveness and grace are what really sustain us.  Ask the Lord to help you turn to Him for inner peace and satisfaction so you may find that He is more than enough for you. 

Joy Through Pain

I’m tired.  I’m hungry.  I ache.  I’m hot.  I’m a punching bag.  My stomach feels like Gumby, but I’m not Gumby…I’m pregnant. Yes, this is the beloved last trimester of pregnancy.  Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely ecstatic that I am pregnant and I will endure because I am waiting for the amazing day that I will meet our precious baby and hold him in my arms.  Wow, that makes it all worth it, doesn’t it? 

I keep thinking about how this relates to our walk with Jesus (sorry people this is just how my brain worksJ). 

I believe when we desire deeper intimacy with Jesus Christ there will come a time when life gets really hard.  It’s like having a baby and going through the last trimester and birth.  We have an Enemy, he doesn’t play by the rules and he wants us to give up on going deeper with Jesus.  So when life gets tough, the pain becomes unbearable, the accusations, the guilt, and the shame gets stronger and stronger—that’s the Enemy trying to deter you from walking into deeper intimacy with Christ.  He knows your freedom is sure in Christ so he’ll do everything he can to bring you to doubt God, filling your heart with unbelief and despair to keep you stuck.   Beloved, your God has deeper freedom for you through His Son.  Press on, trust, and rest!  Remember who you are in Christ, an overcomer and more than a conqueror (Rom. 8:37, Rev. 12:11).

The reality is, if we want to become like Jesus and grow in intimacy with Him, we will suffer and struggle. 

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.  Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”

God uses what Satan has intended to harm us to make us more complete in Him.  THAT’S THE TRUTH.  God is in complete control of our lives and nothing He allows is beyond His control.  Surrender it all to Him, stop holding on, let it go and let God transform your pain and grow your faith.   He can and will use it for His great glory and for a deeper intimacy with Christ.  Like the pains and discomfort of labor, it is totally worth it.  

Our Pregnancy Story and the Fear of Loss

So, it happened.  I got scared.  I became afraid of losing our baby boy.  I talked about this fear before due to my miscarriage and how I was sure it would happen again sometime throughout the pregnancy.  Well it did.  It happened.  A few things led up to it, things out of my control.  Things that happened to others around me and this conversation at the doctors office 5 weeks ago…

“We couldn’t get a good look at his heart, but everything else looks fine.  If you didn’t have your appointment with Dr. Abrams (the high risk doctor) in two weeks we would have to do another ultrasound.”   

Trust me people when you’re a gal with a cardiac history, open-heart surgery at 11, and a pacemaker at 28—this is not something you enjoy hearing about your baby during their 20 week appointment.  I wanted to hear about his heart.  I wanted to know he had his dad’s heart and not his mom’s, but I couldn’t know I would have to wait.  Jesus, I trust You.

Thankfully, we went to the high-risk doctor two weeks later and our hearts were put at ease as we learned that our baby’s heart looked wonderful.   Thank You Jesus.  Deep breath. 

Yet, within those two weeks of waiting I can recall being overwhelmed with fear for a couple of days.  While meeting with a dear friend of mine I shared this fear, and let me tell you this friend of mine she is a prayer warrior.  We prayed together over this fear, and it was as if right there in that room Jesus lifted the fear right off of me.  By God’s grace, it’s been about a month since then and I haven’t felt the fear since. 

It tells us in James 5:16, “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.”

Now, I wonder how often we don’t share the pain of our hearts out of fear and pride.  Go with me here.   Asking for prayer means that we have to be vulnerable and open ourselves up to the fact that we are weak.  That takes guts to do sometimes doesn’t it? 

The longer I walk with Jesus, the more I realize how much I need the prayers of other people.  By God’s grace I’m learning just how powerful it is to admit my weakness and need for prayer.  We need both individual and communal prayer. 

How about you?  Are you asking others for prayer or burying the cries of your heart?

Unmet Desires: What About You?

I hope you were as blessed as I was by the guest post series on Unmet Desires.  I was challenged by Stephanie’s words, “the old desires will undoubtedly be replaced with new, more complicated struggles” and Heather’s, “I was set on finding my hope and joy in Jesus Christ alone.”  How easily we forget that there will always be unmet desires throughout our lives and how important it is to wholeheartedly set our selves on finding our hope and joy in Christ.  Cassidy’s words also challenged me to praise God even for the painful times when she wrote, “I lift my hands in praise to Him as never before, and thank Him for this pain.”  Whoa, easier said than done sometimes!  Yet, it brings deep freedom as we let go of the bitterness and unanswered questions, choosing now instead to praise!  Becky’s words reminded me of the importance of perspective when speaking about her unmet desire, “He has the best perspective on how they’re going to be fulfilled.”  We often think God should do it one way and when it doesn’t turn out that way we become confused, but when we reflect as Becky did, we see that God knew exactly what He was doing all along.  Emmi’s beautiful words touched me deep within when she wrote, “There is nothing on this earth to compare to His intimacy. He has used this unfulfilled dream as an open door for a richer relationship with Himself that is so unbelievably satisfying my words can’t describe it.”  God desires for us to find our ultimate satisfaction in Him alone, so often He will allow us to be without something so we learn to feast on Him and nothing else for our satisfaction.  When we come to this place, we find He is more than enough for our unmet desires; He’s what we were after all along.

What’s your unmet desire?  I know I have had them, have them, and will continue to have them throughout my life.  These women found hope and deep satisfaction in Jesus Christ.  Our unmet desires are opportunities to seek the face of God, to walk more intimately with Jesus, and to be more dependent upon the Holy Spirit which brings us to the place where our hearts can say—Jesus you are more than enough for me, even if I never have____________. 

Learning to See my Desires Through His Eyes

Ever since high school, I’ve had this desire to be a missionary. Somewhere along the line, I went on a short-term cross-cultural mission trip and got “hooked on missions” and have been ruined ever since. I’ve done everything I could think of to “become” a missionary. I went to a Christian college and took all the missions classes offered while getting a degree in something practical (nursing) so I would have marketable skills if God called me to a creative-access country. I went on multiple short-term trips to see if there was a specific place I felt like God was leading me. I signed up for an eleven-month trip to quite a few places because I thought surely God wouldn’t let me go all the way around the world and not bring me back to one of them. I came home from that trip unsure of my next steps, so I settled down, got a real job (which was actually a really good thing - it’s hard to do a lot in the nursing/medical world when you have no experience. and there’s something about obedience), and tried to adjust to “normal American life.”

The problem was, I wasn’t cut out for normal American life.

I wasn’t satisfied with the place God had put me. I had this itch that wasn’t getting scratched and this void that wasn’t being filled.

After a season of obedience to the mundane, I decided it was time. I figured God hadn’t given me this desire for nothing - He had to have something in store for me. So, I quit my job, packed all my stuff back into my car, moved it back across the country to my parents’ house, and headed back overseas for what I thought was “it” - the time I was finally going to be a missionary.

Except it wasn’t quite that smooth or planned out long-term. I signed up for a short-term assignment with an organization as a “test the waters” gig, so I had no long-term commitment. The country I headed to was in political turmoil (my organization actually called me a few days before I was scheduled to leave, unsure if I should even go because of everything that was going on). My three-month commitment turned into only 5 weeks because of aforementioned turmoil, and then faster than I even knew, I was back in the US. I felt like I failed.

So I did what any sane person who wants to be a missionary would do - I found a different country with different people and a different organization and a completely different strategy and planned to move there instead. I signed up for a two-year commitment with a team of 4 other women, and moved to said country less than a year later with three of those women (through various circumstances, one had dropped out of training and preparing before we left). I was living the life I thought I always wanted, the life I felt like God had picked out for me over 10 years before. Guess what, though - it didn’t work. I ended up back in the US after only 6 months. I felt like I failed. Again. I felt like I missed what God was saying to me, like I missed the calling He placed on my life.

I felt like this desire I felt God had given me to “be a missionary” was never going to be met.

But maybe, just maybe, I missed something long before that. Maybe I missed what it meant when He called me to be a “missionary” in the first place. See, I thought He gave me that desire so I could magically transform into this saintly person who lived in some really cool place overseas and help fix people’s problems, and that hadn’t happened.

But maybe what God was calling me to wasn’t so far off from what He’d brought me through; I just needed a perspective shift. Maybe it wasn’t that I heard Him wrong, but that I got my definitions messed up a little.

See, He’s met so many of the desires He’s given me, even if they weren’t quite how I envisioned them.

He met my desire to live and serve overseas (and has provided me with the opportunity to call multiple places home for a month or more).

He met my desire to travel as well as experience new cultures (and try my hand at learning new languages).

He met my desire to mold together my gifts and abilities with serving Him (nursing and loving people well go hand-in-hand in my book).

He met my desire to have a family I can call my own (even if they are of all ages and nationalities and scattered across the whole entire world).

He met my desire to grow in my relationship with Him and my unspoken desire to trust Him more (and honestly, that’s been one of the hardest, because I didn’t think I needed as much growth as He’s provided).

He met my desire to continue to learn about the world and the people that He has placed on my heart by allowing me to enroll in classes and read textbooks while I’m here in the USA (and hopefully someday He’ll allow me the opportunity to take what I’ve learned practically and put it to use experientially, meeting people where they are).

See, it’s not about Him not fulfilling the desires He gave me.

It’s about me realizing that I need to look at my desires through His eyes instead of my own. They’re desires that He has given me, so obviously He has the best perspective on how they’re going to be fulfilled.

And yeah, I don’t have it all figured out yet. I’m still sitting on my nice couch in my nice house in my nice suburb and wondering what in the world I’m doing; and maybe someday I’ll get to understand the process He’s taking me through, but for now, I get to keep working through all those “unmet” desires and see how He’s working.

Bio & Disclaimer:

Becky is a single 20-something who’s not sure if she’ll ever get married or have her own kids (but that’s another “unmet desire” for another day, and God’s working on her heart with that too). She currently works as a school nurse for an inner-city district (which is not all “putting bandaids on boo-boos” - sometimes she has to save lives!), she loves to run and got hooked on distance running about a year ago with her first 25K race (she’s done a full- and half-marathon since and is running another 25K in a couple weeks), and she likes to travel to anywhere on a plane, train, bus, or hiking trail can get her. Oh, and she loves Jesus with all her heart and has been on a crazy journey of trust with Him for as long as she can remember.

Also, she doesn’t really like the “m-word” and tries not to use it when talking about herself. See, she’s still pretty sure she’s going to end up in one of those creative-access places where that word isn’t allowed, and that just wouldn’t go over well. So please don’t link this to her blog or facebook page. Just be careful with how you share it, okay?