Overcoming Disappoinment

Disappointment is the death of a hope or dream. Like all deaths, it's good to grieve. Some of you would rather skip that step. That's foolish. There's only so much sweeping things under the carpet you can do before it starts to smell real bad under there.

But for those of us who have no problem grieving disappointment, there's the equal and opposite temptation: to dwell in disappointment land forever.

Grief can be such a powerful and loaded-up emotion that it can demand all of us. And for a season we might need to pay that steep cost--especially if the disappointment is life-altering in some significant way.

But eventually you reach the point of diminishing returns. Your grief over your disappointment is no longer healthy or processing. It becomes wallowing and incestuous--an endless rehearsing of the events or the feelings.

There comes a point when you have to either decide to allow grief and disappointment to be your God or God to be your God. They aren't fundamentally mutually exclusive--certainly God leads us through grieving processes and, in fact, grieves with us. But there comes a point when he invites us to carry our grief with us into another season, towards a different destination.

And so we have a choice to make. Will we take up this cross and follow Jesus, or will we linger over the disappointment, nurse it, keep the anger and hurt fresh by recycling through the whole thing over and over again?

My father-in-law worked at Kent State University for several years, a campus famous for the shooting of students during a Vietnam Protest. He talked about how for some of the folks who were around back in those days, the clock stopped. They were so shocked that something like that could happen on their beloved campus and they just couldn't move past it.

Alas that some of our lives are stagnating by pooling at the place of disappointment well beyond the shelf life of healthy grieving.

There comes a time when you've got to move on. Some of us try to over-rush that process--those of you in this camp need to allow Jesus to tend to your wounds rather than rush on. But many of us are tempted to over-stay our welcome.

And for us, the point is that this life doesn't stop because of disappointment. There's good work prepared in advance for us to do by our Father. If we let disappointment hijack our lives, we pay the steep cost for the idol we have made in the image of our shattered hopes.

There comes a time to say good-bye to the disappointment and move on.

Drilling Down and Striking Gold with the Betrayal

I tend to be a generalist: I prefer the big-picture and trends, don't bog me down with too many details. This can be either a character flaw or a strength, depending on who you ask and what exactly is going down.

But in Scripture study, I tend to be a plodder. I'm in no rush to get through anything. I tend to drill down and soak in a small portion of Scripture rather than race through, check it off, and get precisely zero out of it.

But this summer I'm skimming over Matthew as I spend the summer looking at the questions Jesus asks. And sometimes in the process I realize some of the larger arcs that I've missed in my plodding over the years.

And other days I drill down into a question and the immediate context and I strike gold.

This morning I was in the scene in Matthew 26 where Jesus is betrayed. One of the disciples (traditionally ascribed to Peter) pulls a sword out to fight off the crowd (and to cut off the ear of one of them) coming to arrest Jesus. But Jesus rebukes him and poses these two questions:

"Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the scriptures be fulfilled which say it must happen this way?....all this has taken place so that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled."

The double-appeal to the scriptures being fulfilled is what struck me this morning. Taken in isolation this entire event can be seen as nothing other than a tragedy, a brilliant life cut tragically short. Unfortunately, many have attempted to read it this way over the years.

But Jesus insists that this isn't an isolated event. This mob-scene is not an accident. And Jesus is committed to submitting his life, this particular crisis and potential-for-panic-moment all to a larger story which he is the climax of but over which he has no control at this particular moment. He has relinquished control--on purpose.

The question then is this: am I willing to enter this larger story as well even and especially at moments of crisis, trauma, or great uncertainty?

What if my life isn't about what I experience in my life? What if I'm honestly just a "bit part" in God's saving work? What if my great, great, great, great grandkids are in some ways God's real purposes my life?

What if there's difficult seasons of my life that aren't there for any other reason than so that the God's plans might be fulfilled? Am I okay with that?

And I think the answer, for me anyway, is that it depends on what day you ask me and what's going on at any particular moment. But for today, the submission of Jesus to his Father's larger purposes, even at excruciating cost to himself, is cause for worship...and serious self-reflection.

Whither Grumpy Christians...And the Better Option with Pain and Suffering

So I usually have a grumpy day or two after camp--I crash hard after getting over-amped on all that extrovert time combined with the general severe sleep-deprivation. Today, I was grumpy. I would hope that this isn't a permanent posture, but you'd have to check with my wife and kids on that.

But the reality is that there are grumpy Christians. There's grumpy people everywhere, but the real mystery is that there are Christians who are grumpy.

The Scriptures promise that all things must work together for our good. In fact, 1 Peter 4 invites us to rejoice when we suffer because we are participating in the sufferings of Christ so that we might more fully rejoice when he returns again (see vs. 13).

So whither grumpy Christians--what gives?

Grumpiness is generally the fruit of trials or pain that has not been fully dealt with. And it would seem that somewhere in the process of those trials, we have a very small but very important decision to make: what will we do with it?

It seems that there are two ways for us to deal with pain--either we can stew on it or we can submit it to Christ. The former is far easier and what I typically want to do with my grumps. It's more or less what I did for most of my day today.

The latter, however, holds the one true promise of genuine redemption of our pain. All of us will suffer to some degree or another (more on that at a later date). That suffering holds the key to our joy and character or the undermining of them both.

To put it in Peter's terms, we can choose to join our suffering with Christ's suffering and in doing so we find joy in the promise that this suffering must bless us. Or we can choose to suffer apart from Christ--leaving us to deal with it alone and bearing the fruit of that alone-ness: anger, malice, self-pity, self-loathing, uncertainty, fear, resentment, just to name a few.

What might it look like for us to choose to bring our suffering and pain to the cross and have it bear the fruit of joy rather than cling to it with a great deal of covetousness to no apparent gain for our souls? When we step back and look at it clear-eyed, why would we ever choose the way of death?

I hope some day to come back from my two week stint at camp and be able to avoid the now-inevitable grumpy day. But even more so, I am praying that I might learn how to join any and all my pain and trials to the sufferings of Christ...and so look forward to the day when all my experiences will serve to bring me (and those around me) joy.

Old School Caedmon's Granting Some Perspective on Some Old School Frustrations

Given that I'm heading into a season of transition, I've done a good bit reflecting on my five years at UNC.

Much of it has been joyful. Some of it has not. In fact, just last week I kicked over/the Lord showed me a place where I was carrying around some bitterness and frustration from a season that was particularly hard.

This morning I was praying about the hard stuff. And on my way down to campus, as I was fasting from sermons and listening to some worship music, the Lord met me in worship.

I was hitting up some really old-school Caedmon's Call, the song is called "Lead of Love." It reminded me of what's true, maybe it'll encourage you today, too:

Looking back at the road so far
The journey's left its share of scars
Mostly from leaving the narrow and straight

Looking back it is clear to me
That a man is more than the sum of his deeds
And how You've made good of this mess I've made
Is a profound mystery

Looking back You know You had to bring me through
All that I was so afraid of
Though I questioned the sky, now I see why
Had to walk the rocks to see the mountain view
Looking back I see the lead of love

Looking back I can finally see (I'd rather have wisdom)
How failures bring humility (than be)
Brings me to my knees (a comfortable fool)
Helps me see my need for Thee

Forgiveness, Unloading Pain, and Living the Full-Blown Twinkie Life

So the core of the Christian story is grace and forgiveness flowing toward us from God. And then Jesus and the rest of the New Testament is adamant that we pay that same grace and forgiveness forward to people who hurt us or sin against us.

Of course, if you're really ticked at someone for good reason, that really stinks.

In Christian circles, we often talk about forgiving others out of gratitude for what Christ has done for us. This is true to a point, but feelings of gratitude don't really cut it for the hardest cases. I need a completely new power at work in me, not just feelings of gratitude.

And so enters the central importance of Jesus actually taking up residence in our hearts and minds. To be a Christian is to be "in Christ." And to be in Christ is to have him dwell inside of you. You are the Twinkie, incomplete without the filling. To be filled up with Christ is to be fully what you were created to be.

We have a limited capacity to forgive. But Christ in us has an infinite capacity to forgive. In fact, no matter what's happened to you, Jesus has already paid for that sin and forgiven it: "Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world," his cousin John declared.

And so our job in the work of forgiveness is not to generate forgiveness but to demonstrate forgiveness. Read that again, nice and slow.

It is not on us to dig deep and gut it out and drum up forgiveness. Christ in us has already forgiven, already absorbed that sin against you on the cross. We are therefore instruments of his grace and forgiveness, never initiators of grace and forgiveness on our own.

To be sure we have an important choice to make. We must decide to participate in Christ's forgiveness, we have to allow him in us to do the work in us of actual forgiveness and then allowing him through us to extend forgiveness.

But the hard parts have already been done: the sin has been paid for, the absorption of the sin has already taken place, and Christ already dwells in us.

This, by the way, is not only true in the case of forgiving someone else.

It's true for you when you catch yourself with that really disturbing/broken/angry/si

nful thought or motivation. Jesus already paid for that. No need to go around feeling guilty. Rush to him, he dwells inside of you, invite him to absorb that thought, that motive, and to replace it with his life and love.

And it's true for any pain you experience--be that caused by a specific person or just general pain in life. Jesus in you has the infinite capacity to absorb all your pain--what else would you want to do with it? Allow it to hijack your life/marriage/family/career/soul? Why not allow Jesus to absorb it all and give you life in exchange?

Jesus in us has already taken on all the pain and all the sin of the whole world--the stuff we do and the stuff done to us. The core question in the formation of all our souls is "what will you do with all your pain?"

Jesus has already taken it on himself. To be a Christian is to be the full-blown Twinkie. If you're not a Christian, the offer of living the full-blown Twinkie life is on the table.

Why continue to carry all of this anger, unforgiveness (both of others and yourself) and pain around?

What To Do If You're in (Temporary) Funk-Land

So February has occasionally been a hard time of year for me. I feel restless, have a hard time sleeping sometimes, get lethargic, slip into a mild funk. Some years it's been really hard. Other years, it's been barely a blip. This year, it's somewhere in-between. It's seldom lasted longer than a couple weeks.

A couple of things that I try to do that might be helpful for others.

First, I try to be more disciplined about sleep, decent eating, popping extra vitamin C to keep sickness from adding further complication to an already off-kilter body and soul.

But of course the bigger issue (and this is way more pronounced who have ongoing battles with depression and/or other emotional issues) is what do I do with God in all of this? Where is he? How can I connect when I feel so sluggish and un-motivated?

For those of us with shorter-term challenges like this, I would suggest that there's an invitation to meet Christ in the midst of our brokenness that we should not miss.

I just don't have my "A-Game" right now. Yesterday I got in a really stupid argument with a student. I got irrationally angry at a person blocking the steps for people who were going down the stairs while I passed them going up the stairs. Dumb stuff.

This reminds me that grace and mercy are the most real things in the universe. When I can't perform at my best, I am reminded that regardless of my performance, feelings or competencies, God's grace and mercy are sufficient. My abilities and moods will ebb and flow, the grace of God is the thing that remains constant.

I am reminded that it's in my weakness that Christ is most glorified. I am a "cracked pot" so that God's grace and mercy might shine through those cracks in ways that are uniquely powerful. I need Jesus right now in a way that is more palpable, humbling, and holy than at other times of the year.

Of course I want to qualify all of this by saying that this is my situation and emphatically add that it's temporary. For those of you with longer-term battles, getting professional help and sometimes medications will be the most important step towards help.

And even others with short-term battles have them more severely than I do. Again, I'd encourage you to get help.

But for me, these couple weeks in February is a time when I am tempted to lose "True North" for a little while. And so it's a unique couple of weeks where I am reminded of my need for a savior who is much stronger and greater than I. And in that knowledge, there is grace.

Just don't let me see you blocking anyone's passage up or down those stairs,that just might send me over the edge...

Answering Ehrman's Objections Part 1: Is God an Interventionist?

Last Wednesday UNC's most famous agnostic Dr. Bart Ehrman posed two very important questions that did not get addressed during his debate with Dinesh D'Souza on the question of the Christian God and suffering.

First, when Ehrman took inventory of the suffering around the world, it seemed that God did not act. The God of the Bible, it seemed, DID act--to free the Israelites from the Egyptians, for example. So how could it be that the God of the Bible existed when so much pain exists and so many prayers for rescue go un-answered?

Ehrman's answer: he doesn't. If there is a God, he/she/it is far off and un-involved in this world.

And secondly, if the answer the problem of suffering is human choice (the classic "free will" defense offered by Christians and by D'Souza that night) is it not possible that God could have created a world where free will existed while suffering does not? In heaven, for example, Christians seem to believe that somehow freedom will exist while suffering will not. Is it necessary to have suffering to have free will?

Here's my shots at answering the first of these really good, really thoughtful objections posed by Dr. Ehrman.

The first question: God intervenes in the Bible, but there's no evidence of such intervention today, ergo there is no God like that. This seems to me to take the extraordinary works of God and mistake them for normative workings of God.

The OT story of the Israelites being freed from Egypt? That happens after 430 years. That's right: 430 years. That's thousands of prayers later, God acts. If you took a snapshot at any given moment, it certainly did not appear that God was particularly interventionist.

The Bible is indeed full of miraculous and wonderful saving, very interventionist, acts of God. And those are recorded precisely because they were miraculous, they were outside the normal workings of physics and nature and politics and military.

But these are recorded in order that the character of God might be made known, not to establish a normal operating procedure for how God will behave in every circumstance. God does act, in his timing, in his way. And when he does act, there is no force or army or kingdom or natural cause that can stand against him. That's what we learn from his interventions in the Scriptures.

And in regard to today--who knows how much suffering actually is relieved by God's working?

There are literally millions of testimonies, stories, all over the world of this same God working to do miraculous things to save people from all sorts of suffering. Not every time. But sometimes. Certainly some of those stories are bogus, and most are simply un-prove-able...just like in the Bible.

But to the woman or man of faith, with eyes to see and ears to hear, the stories bear a striking family resemblance, the flair and flavor of the same Artist at work.

This doesn't answer the question of why God chooses to intervene sometimes and not at other times. But let's not paint the false picture of a God who moves at the slightest whim of people in the Scriptures who has suddenly disappeared today.

Suffering Part 3: The Final Redemption

So our lives are like a thread. There will be colors that we wish weren't in there. There will be knots that just don't seem to get worked out. Pain and suffering will be a part of everyone's experiences, to greater or lesser degrees.

As the New Testament authors wrestled with the realities of suffering--Jesus' suffering and their own experiences of suffering as they followed Jesus--they came to one conclusion: all our experiences of suffering must serve and bless us, either in this life or the next.

When we're in the midst of it, suffering and pain can feel like they rule over us--like a thick blanket we can't get out from underneath. But if Jesus did indeed conquer the grave, he has the last word on his people, not their pain, not their suffering.

And so the invitation rings out throughout the New Testament: tie the thread of your life to the finished work of Jesus Christ.

See, we're going to tie the threads of our lives to something. We'll look to tie the threads of our lives to some sort of 'driver,' some sort of energy or goal to pull us along.

On campus, it's often GPA, our talents, pre-med/pharm/law/whatever. Many of us look to other people or a boyfriend or girlfriend, our work/career paths, the next party, sexual experience, our families, whatever.

But the problem is that none of those have the power to redeem our suffering. None of those can promise to gather up the dis-colored and knotted up parts of the thread and make them whole and beautiful and good. All of those drivers are stuck in the same system that we are.

Only in Jesus Christ are we promised that all shall be well.

Only in Jesus Christ is there power to take all the ugly, broken, painful parts of our lives and make them bless us, serve us, make them to be a part of our beauty and character and goodness and joy. He stands outside of time, outside of the system as Lord over the system, to mend all those who are willing to submit to his offer of grace.

There is one driver that we can tie the threads of our lives to that gather up all our pain and make it part of our beauty--both in this life and/or in the next.

The invitation is to recklessly and repeatedly tie our stories to this Great Story, the conquering of sin and death and pain, and the promised gift that one day, he will make all things new.

Suffering With My Thoughts on Suffering, Part 2

So suffering is our problem. But God makes it his.

The Christian story is of a God who takes on flesh. He wades into our pain, becomes a man. He lives for 33 years. He gets hungry, cold, tired. People talk about him behind his back.

Ultimately his friends betray him, abandon him. He is executed in one of the most painful ways ever invented by human beings. One Biblical tradition says that he descended into hell. Three days later, he is raised again.

God comes in the flesh to take on all our suffering, all our pain, all our sin and brokenness. And he takes it on himself, coming all the way down, and comes all the way back up, to conquer it once and for all.

Suffering and death no longer have the last word on humanity. God does. Jesus does. Suffering doesn't have to define us any longer. Hope can. Hope wins.

We think (and here I'm flat-out stealing from my systematic theology prof) that we know suffering because we experience the pain of it. And from that experience of suffering, we question God's existence and his character.

But actually, quite the opposite is true. We don't know about suffering. Where it comes from, why it exists, how it came to be. We know it stinks, we feel its effects, but we don't know how much we are or aren't allowed to experience in God's providence. We don't know if things could be better or worse. We don't know much about suffering at all, actually.

In the Christian story, we are invited to be agnostic about suffering. And we are invited to be confident in the character and love of God.

The Christian story invites us to boldly yet humbly hold onto the fact that we do know God. We know God and his character because he has made it known in Jesus Christ. God who takes on all our pain, all our shame, all our brokenness and dies for you and for me. That's the character and nature of God. He has made himself known.

And the invitation to all of us is to tie our stories with God's story. We are invited to have all our pain, all our suffering ultimately and finally redeemed--in this life, and/or in the next.

Suffering With My Thoughts on Suffering, Part 1

Last night on campus, the UNC Christian Apologetics Club hosted a debate on the problem of suffering between UNC's own Bart Ehrman and Dinesh D'Souza, a Christian who's written lots of books and was a part of the Reagan administration.

Since I wasn't invited to be a part of the platform (apparently you had to have your own Wiki page) I figured I'd spout off here to my little blog/Facebook family.

First, in spite of what many well-intentioned Christians try to say, the Christian story doesn't give an answer to where suffering comes from. Before creation, in God's "history," somehow something that wasn't good or loving was introduced.

We get hints that angels rebelled, but what is rebellion? How did that concept come to be when there was just God and angels hanging out?

What we get in the Scriptures is the story that picks up when God decides to create. And what we get is a good God who creates a good creation and puts good people who bear his image in this idyllic location.

And God says to them--go and enjoy! Play, explore, enjoy one another, enjoy me, have lots of sex, do whatever you want and enjoy all of this creation. Just this one thing, this one tree in all of this vast paradise that you need to avoid. Eat of that tree, you'll die.

Of course, that's what happens. And so suffering results. Five thousand years of human history tell our story of suffering and pain and brokenness. Of people suffering and inflicting suffering on one another.

And so suffering, contrary to at least one opinion, is not God's problem. It is emphatically our problem. Humans suffer. God does not. We introduced suffering into a good creation. And we bear the scars and experience the consequences.

Suffering is our problem, not God's. Unless God chooses to enter into the situation, we are stuck in suffering without hope for redemption.

But the Christian story is this: when we were dead in our suffering, God did not leave us there. He rolls up his sleeves, and enters into our junk. God chooses to make our problem his problem. He enters into our suffering, takes it on himself, and he conquers and redeems it.

That's the good news. That's the God of the Christian story.

Parenting, Playgrounds, and Megaphones

Okay, so I've only been at this parenting thing for about five and a half years. But at this point I think that there are two things that I can't do too much of:

1. I can't tell my kids that I love them too often.

2. I can't over-do consistency in boundaries. That is, I cannot be too consistent in how I enforce the limits that we have (wisely, I hope) placed on our children. This consistency in holding to the boundaries we've put in place is actually just concrete iteration of point number one.

To this point, I would say that I'm much better at telling my kids that I love them and much too inconsistent at holding to consistent limits and boundaries. Which is to say that I'm much better at telling my kids that I love them than I am at demonstrating it.

Someone recently told me about a study of playgrounds. Kids who played in playgrounds with no fences tended to only use a small portion of the space allotted. Kids who played in playgrounds with fences tended to use the entire space more fully.

Communicating what and where boundaries are and holding to them is a blessing to kids. It's also a blessing to us grown-ups...which why it's part of God's goodness that he gives us firm boundaries.

When we violate those boundaries, it usually results in pain. Pain is God's rumble strips to alert us to having crossed over and outside of a boundary put in place for our good. To quote C.S. Lewis, "pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

So I'm growing in being more consistent in holding to the boundaries that we've put in place for our kids. It's an important part of how I love on them.

And I've got a growing gratitude and joy for the boundaries that have been put in place by my Father who loves me way more than I can ever hope or imagine.

Beautiful Pain

At the end of the Bible is a little enigmatic book called Revelation. The various attempts at pulling together all that transpires and what it all means have filled many books that have sold many copies (including, alas, the Left Behind series).

But the main actor in the book is clear. It's Jesus. And he appears in many and various forms throughout the book. But the way that he's introduced is a sort of "North Star" towards understanding his character and power as John wants to describe and talk about it throughout the book: he is the lamb who was slain.

The fact that Jesus is resurrected with a glorified body that still bears the marks of his crucifixion has been a source of rich meditation throughout the life of the church. And so here, perhaps, we land at our resting place as we think about pain and as we approach Christmas.

Christians worship the Lamb who was slain, the suffering Servant, the Savior who suffers on behalf of and in place of his people. And the marks of his pain and suffering are not erased when he is perfected but rather are a source of endless worship and celebration. Wounds, glorified. Pain that is not erased but rather gathered in with the eternal beauty and wonder and power and purposes of God.

This is, I think, a foreshadowing of what you and I have to look forward to. Our pain will become our beauty. This is the full redemption of Christ--his wounds, his slain-ness, is a part of who he always will be, forever. And so it will be with us. But they will mark us not as ones defeated but as ones who have overcome, who have won, who have been made wholly wonder-full.

Your pain will become your beauty. This has been secured for us through the one who was born in order to bear all our pain, all our grief, all our sin on himself. He came to suffer pain, to gather all pain onto himself and to clear the way to the High Country. All we must do is accept this great gift, and then hang on to the end.

Garden-Variety Pain

Blogging about pain these past couple of days has made me think a good bit about this fall. The past several months both personally and professionally have felt like a jumbled mix of frustrations, disappointments, challenges and obstacles.

Individually, each of these wouldn't have been a huge deal. But put them all together and I'm starting to wonder what the crap God's trying to teach me in all of it.

Today I was journaling out my frustrations and praying angry prayers. I always feel somewhat conflicted when I pray this way. I have so much to be thankful for, shouldn't I just be counting my blessings? It would seem in a world full of pain that mine is only a minor pile of frustrations and disappointments mingled with some legitimate sadness.

This is when James saved me.

The New Testament book of James starts this way:

2 Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.

Trials of many kinds. A pastor of mine in Richmond once taught on this passage and he said the way that trials is being described here in the original text is "garden variety" trials. Any kinds of trials.

So today, I complained to God about my piled-up, weed-laden, garden variety trials. And I confessed that I didn't have the faith or courage or patience to "consider it pure joy." I was just frustrated and over it.

I've learned a ton about perseverance and love and faith from my friends Sam and Daniele as they've cared for their daughter Eliza and mourned her death these last several days. But it's good news that I don't have to have someone close to me die to have trials that rate serious ranting...and that God can redeem for my good.

Re: Pain

The other day as I was blogging about how open my friends the Jacksons had been about their struggles with their little girl Eliza, I made this comment:

We hide much of our pain, shame, guilt, and brokenness that needs to be brought out into the light.

I've been thinking about this the past couple of days and I realize that it's clearly a mis-statement. Some of us respond to pain by hiding it. But a quick tour through the blogosphere reveals that this is not always true. There's plenty of pain out there, and plenty of people willing to put it on display.

It seems that there are a couple of equal and opposite errors in regards to how we process our pain. The first is to hide it. The second is to enshrine it. We can become so attached and defined by what the crap has happened to us that our identity can become wrapped up in our pain. I've been hurt, and I'm angry about it, and you can't tell me that I can't be or shouldn't be.

Our tendency towards either of these errors is probably a combination of temperament, culture and family factors.

Jesus encountered people on both ends of the pain-relating spectrum. One woman was so eager to hide that she quickly changed the subject to a politics. One man was so deeply enmeshed in his pain that when Jesus asked him if he wanted to be made well he couldn't answer him.

It would seem that the answer to the important question of what will we do with our pain in many ways dictates what kind of human being we become.

And the Christian answer, it would seem, is a combination of activities all designed to free us from pain becoming our Lord and Master: prayer--honest prayer before God, sharing appropriately in community, asking and extending forgiveness where it is needed, repentance where we sin in response to our pain, walking in obedience as the doctor's prescription for the healing of our souls. Pain makes for a terrible life-orientation. It's a life barely lived.

It is very popular currently to say that pain and suffering is "God's Problem." Nothing could be further from the truth. Suffering is our problem. But the good news about the Christmas story is that God has made it his problem. He comes to get us in the middle of our pain to free us from our pain having the last word on us. He comes to free us from a life barely lived.

That's good news, but it requires decisions on our part. What will you do with your pain?

The Problem of Pain Redeemed

The other morning when my 14-month old girl woke me up at 5:03 a.m, the Lord was good to bring back to mind the passage that I was blogging on last week: "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."

As I was rocking her and hoping against all hope that she'd go back to sleep (she actually did, score one for dad), I considered this passage again.

C.S. Lewis in "The Problem of Pain" says something to the effect that pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Alas, the world somehow, inconceivably, manages to remain silent even in the midst of the pain. Therefore, because the pain "event" does not reach it's desired outcome/purpose, there is a lot of unredeemed pain in the world. There's plenty of pain that does not bear good fruit in people's lives.

It seems to me that the crucial promise that James is making here is that in the life of the daughter or son of the Most High God, all our pain is guaranteed to reach it's mark. But again, we must allow it to do so. We still have a participatory role to play, which is why James bothers to write this, why all the Scripture writers bother to write anything. This is good pastoral advice that frames all our pain in the larger picture of it's intended meaning.

There's lots of un-redeemed pain in the world. For the Christian, even in the face of "many kinds" of trials (from garden-variety to catastrophic), there's no reason why that pain should not bear the fruit of life. We've been given many promises--promises both that the pain will come and that the pain must serve our greater good.