Suffering 1: Suffering Exposes the Illusion of Control

About a month ago, I visited Anonymous. As many of you know, she has been living with cancer for the past twenty-one years and is now receiving hospice care at the home of her daughter and son-in-law.

We talked for quite some time. We shared parts of our lives and remembered some of the things we had learned together in this very class. As we were preparing to leave, she said something I was not expecting: “I thank God for this cancer.”

I had never heard anyone say anything like that. We often thank God for healing, deliverance, and answered prayers. But I had never heard someone thank God for the very illness she had endured for more than two decades.

I told Anon that her words surprised me, and then I went home. But her words came home with me.

They stayed in my mind and began leading me through one question after another. Why do good people suffer? Why does God sometimes prevent suffering and, at other times, allow it to remain? Is suffering ever necessary for our spiritual growth? And if it is not removed, what can it do within us?

I am still circling these questions. I do not have simple answers. But Anon’s words unsettled something in me. I could not dismiss them, and I could not stop thinking about what she had discovered through twenty-one years of suffering.

At the same time, I had been reading the New Testament during my daily devotions. As I read Paul, Peter, John, and the book of Acts, I began to notice something I could no longer overlook. The people through whom God performed miracles were not themselves spared from suffering. These Spirit-led messengers healed the sick, opened prison doors, proclaimed the gospel with power, and witnessed extraordinary acts of God. Yet they also experienced rejection, persecution, imprisonment, grief, sickness, and death.

They could bring healing to others, yet they were not always healed. They could witness deliverance, yet they were not always delivered. They were filled with the Spirit, deeply loved by God, and faithful to their calling, yet they still suffered.

So Anon’s words left me with questions that I want us to explore together:

• What can suffering do to us? 
• If God is not the cause of every suffering, what does He do when we suffer?

I am certainly not the first person to ask these questions. Many people have wrestled with them, and many have offered explanations. I have read some of those explanations. Some make sense in my mind but not in my heart. Some make sense in my heart but not in my mind, maybe because those answers are unique to their experiences and to the communities that they associate with. Maybe I needed to wrestle with these questions for myself, in light of my own experiences and the lives of the people with whom I share faith and community. I was not looking for a neat answer. I was trying to find an understanding of suffering that could remain honest in the presence of people like Anon.

One morning, while I was reading the book of Acts, I came across a passage that made me deeply uncomfortable.

Acts 12: ¹About that time King Herod Agrippa began to persecute some believers in the church. ² He had the apostle James (John’s brother) killed with a sword. ³ When Herod saw how much this pleased the Jewish people, he also arrested Peter. (This took place during the Passover celebration.) ⁴ Then he imprisoned him, placing him under the guard of four squads of four soldiers each. Herod intended to bring Peter out for public trial after the Passover. ⁵ But while Peter was in prison, the church prayed very earnestly for him. ⁶ The night before Peter was to be placed on trial, he was asleep, fastened with two chains between two soldiers. Others stood guard at the prison gate. ⁷ Suddenly, there was a bright light in the cell, and an angel of the Lord stood before Peter. The angel struck him on the side to awaken him and said, “Quick! Get up!” And the chains fell off his wrists. ⁸ Then the angel told him, “Get dressed and put on your sandals.” And he did. “Now put on your coat and follow me,” the angel ordered. ⁹ So Peter left the cell, following the angel. But all the time he thought it was a vision. He didn’t realize it was actually happening. ¹⁰ They passed the first and second guard posts and came to the iron gate leading to the city, and this opened for them all by itself. So they passed through and started walking down the street, and then the angel suddenly left him. ¹¹ Peter finally came to his senses. “It’s really true!” he said. “The Lord has sent his angel and saved me from Herod and from what the Jewish leaders had planned to do to me!”

In the past, whenever I read this passage, I focused entirely on Peter’s miraculous rescue and barely noticed James. But this time, I could not look past the way Luke places these two events, with their completely different outcomes, side by side. Why did Luke present them together like this? What are we meant to see in the contrast?

James was one of the twelve disciples. He had walked with Jesus and was part of the close circle of Peter, James, and John. He had seen the Transfiguration of Jesus. He had witnessed the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. He seemed to have so much more to offer the growing church and the work of the gospel. Yet his life ends here, recorded in a single sentence. 

Immediately after recording James’s death, Luke turns to Peter’s imprisonment and miraculous rescue.

Within the same chapter, under the same ruler, two apostles who followed the same Jesus experience completely different outcomes.

James is killed, but Peter is rescued.

My mind instinctively began comparing the two. Was Peter somehow more worthy of being rescued? Was James somehow less worthy? But I quickly realized that this could not explain what happened. Nothing in the passage suggests that Peter was more faithful, more valuable, or more deserving than James.

And I do not want to make the Bible say something it does not say.

The passage never explains why James died or why Peter was rescued. That silence prevents me from offering an easy explanation for either outcome. But even though the passage does not tell me why these things happened, it does show me something about control.

No one in this story controls the outcome.

James cannot stop Herod from taking his life. Peter cannot free himself from his chains. The church can pray for Peter, but it cannot enter the prison, overpower the guards, or command what God must do. Even Herod, who seems to possess all the power, discovers that sixteen soldiers, two chains, and a locked iron gate cannot guarantee the outcome he wants.

Everyone who appears to have control eventually discovers its limits.

Then what is the point of praying?

Sometimes we treat prayer as another instrument of control. We may imagine that if we pray long enough or with enough faith, we can persuade God to produce the outcome we want.

But perhaps the church in Acts 12 was beginning to see prayer differently. They had already lost James, one of Jesus’ closest disciples, and now Peter was about to be taken from them as well. They had no power over Herod, no access to Peter, and no way to determine what would happen next.

Perhaps they prayed not because they were in control, but because they had reached the end of their control. They could not determine Peter’s future, so they placed Peter, and their own helplessness, before God.

This is what makes the story so unsettling.

The early church had witnessed extraordinary acts of God. They had seen the Holy Spirit descend at Pentecost like tongues of fire. They had seen the sick healed, prison doors opened, and even the dead restored to life. Again and again, God had intervened in ways no human being could explain or accomplish.

If I had been a member of that church, I might have begun to see a predictable pattern: when God’s people are threatened, God intervenes; when they pray, a miracle follows; when they are faithful, they are protected.

But the same book of Acts also tells us that Stephen was stoned, believers were driven from their homes, James was killed, and Peter was imprisoned. The church that witnessed extraordinary miracles also experienced terrible suffering.

The miracles showed them that God had the power to intervene. Their suffering showed them that His power could not be turned into a predictable formula.

Peter’s rescue did not mean that faithful believers would always be rescued. James’s death did not mean that God had abandoned those who were not. The presence of God could not be measured only by whether the prison door opened.

Perhaps suffering confronted the early church with something that miracles alone could not teach. God’s power was real, but it was not theirs to control. Faith was not the ability to guarantee an outcome. It was dependence upon God when the outcome remained beyond them.

Seasons of peace can allow us to believe that life is under our control. Because nothing has interrupted our plans, we assume that our planning is what keeps everything together. But suffering exposes how fragile that confidence can be.

We may then discover that what we called control was sometimes only the temporary absence of something beyond our control.

Perhaps this is one of the first things suffering exposes: we are not as much in control as we imagine.

That does not mean our choices are meaningless. We should still plan wisely, seek treatment, pray earnestly, and do everything within our power to protect life and relieve suffering. We have responsibility, and our actions matter.

But responsibility is not the same as control.

We can make wise decisions without being able to guarantee their results. We can influence circumstances without possessing the outcome. We can take every reasonable precaution and still encounter something we never expected and could not prevent.

Much of the time, life allows us to forget that distinction. When our plans succeed, our bodies remain healthy, and the people we love are safe, it is easy to believe that we have secured these things for ourselves. We call it control, when sometimes it is simply that nothing beyond our control has interrupted us yet.

Then suffering enters.

A diagnosis is given. A relationship ends. A loved one dies. A carefully planned future changes overnight. Suddenly, the limits that were always there become impossible to ignore.

In this chaotic world, suffering pulls back the curtain. It shows us that our lives are more fragile, uncertain, and dependent than we wanted to believe.

But if that were the only thing suffering revealed, it could leave us with nothing but helplessness.

Acts 12 seems to place another possibility beside it.

I cannot say with certainty everything Luke intended by placing the death of James and the rescue of Peter next to each other. But perhaps the two stories belong together because neither story, by itself, tells us everything we need to know.

If we read only Peter’s story, we might conclude that God’s presence is always demonstrated by rescue. Pray faithfully, and the chains will fall. Trust God, and the prison door will open.

But James prevents us from making that conclusion.

And if we read only James’s story, we might conclude that suffering means God is absent, powerless, or unconcerned.

But Peter’s rescue prevents us from making that conclusion too.

Together, these stories refuse to let us reduce faith to an outcome. God may deliver us from suffering, but deliverance is not the only evidence of His presence. The prison door may open, or it may remain closed. Faith cannot rest entirely upon predicting which outcome God will allow.

This is where I began to see the difference between transactional faith and relational faith.

Transactional faith quietly says:

If I obey God, He will protect me.
If I pray faithfully, He will give me the outcome I ask for.
If I do my part, God is obligated to do His.

It turns faith into an agreement in which my obedience, prayer, or goodness purchases security. When the desired outcome comes, I believe the relationship is working. When it does not, I begin to wonder whether God has failed me, whether I have failed God, or whether the relationship was ever real.

Relational faith is different.

Relational faith still prays. It still asks for healing, deliverance, and opened doors. It does not become passive or pretend that suffering does not hurt. But it does not treat prayer as leverage or obedience as payment.

Relational faith says:

I will bring my desires honestly before God. I will ask Him to intervene. But even when I cannot control the outcome or understand His silence, I will continue to seek His presence.

This does not mean that suffering automatically brings us closer to God. Suffering can confuse us, wound us, and even make God feel distant. But suffering can strip away the illusion that faith gives us control. And when that illusion is removed, we may begin to discover a relationship with God that does not depend entirely upon circumstances going our way.

Perhaps that is what suffering can make possible. When we can no longer hold life together, we may begin to understand that faith is not our ability to control what happens. It is learning that, whatever happens, we are not abandoned within it.

And that brings me back to Anonymous.

She did not say that cancer was good. She did not say that twenty-one years of illness had been easy. She said, “I thank God for this cancer. If it were not for this, I would not have had this clarity, this understanding, or this appreciation of God.”

Only Anon can fully explain what those words mean after living through what she has endured. We should never take her testimony and turn it into something we impose upon another suffering person. We should never tell someone else that they ought to be grateful for their pain.

But we can listen to what Anon has discovered within her own suffering.

Cancer took away much that she could not control. Yet somewhere within that experience, she came to see God with greater clarity. The suffering did not give her control over her life. It revealed the continual presence of the Almighty she had come to value more deeply than before.

Perhaps that is why her words have remained with me.

She was not describing a faith that had mastered suffering. She was describing a relationship with God that suffering had not been able to take away.

Anon’s words made me hear Psalm 23 differently. 

Psalm 23:4 Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

David does not say, “Because You are my shepherd, I will never enter the valley of death.” Instead, He says, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” and then gives the reason for his confidence: “You are with me.”

I confess that I would rather have the promise of avoiding the valley of death. I still want God to change the circumstances, and I will keep asking Him to. But Anon’s words invite me to consider something I am still learning: when I cannot control what happens, I have not necessarily lost what matters most.

I may still have questions. I may still be afraid. But can I begin to say, even there, “You are with me and Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me ”?

Discussion questions:

1. How does reading James’s death alongside Peter’s rescue change the way we understand answered prayer?
2. When suffering disrupts our lives, how can we distinguish losing trust in God from losing an expectation we had about God?
3. What surprises or unsettles you about Anon’s gratitude in her suffering?

David: I go back to my Daoist and process-theological thinking. To me, if you consider God as Goodness with a capital G, God is a presence that exerts a power in the world, and it is a power for good in general. It ensures that creation continues, whereas evil, of course, is destructive. If goodness did not prevail, then we wouldn’t be here. It’s as simple as that.

Whether you or I personally would be here is, frankly, rather a matter of chance, in the same way, I think, as with James and Peter. Which one of those outcomes occurred, I’m not at all sure you can put down to prayer or to special favor from God. But you can put Peter’s survival down to the general prevalence of goodness. So goodness prevails in general, in my view, but not necessarily in particular.

By keeping faith in the whole concept of goodness itself—in other words, in God—we are helping to perpetuate it. It may be a waste of time, all this prayer and so on, from an individual or personal perspective, but it’s not at all a waste of time from the perspective of humanity as a whole. That’s how I reconcile these kinds of stories. I draw again upon my Taoist leanings, which say, “Go with the flow. The Way knows what it’s doing. Let it do what it does.” That’s goodness prevailing. Then there is this notion in process theology of God being both a being and a becoming. By praying and by doing good things ourselves, we are helping to perpetuate God, or to make God become. So that’s my two cents.

Carolyn: It keeps coming back to me, the story of when the Lord sent the disciples out to minister. They were ready to go on the road, put it that way, and when they came back, they were full of enthusiasm and told the Lord about it. Then there is that phrase, “O ye of little faith.” It has always brought questions to mind.

Kiran, what you have said today has helped a lot. I have been with people who keep saying, “If I only had the faith. If only….” I’m sure many of you have, too. I can remember my father-in-law. We flew in and walked through the door, and there was my mother-in-law on a bed right in front of him. He kept saying, “I just don’t have the faith. I’ve tried….” It is difficult to find peace and joy and allow the Lord to be God.

I admire what Anonymous said. She has been able to do this, and I’m so thankful that she shared it with us, because it means a lot. All of us someday, if we haven’t already, will either be with people going through the valley of the shadow of death or will go through it ourselves. We want so much to be part of answered prayer. I don’t have all the answers; I have a lot of questions. But the Lord often answered with questions, so that’s it.

Don: I believe it’s in the book of Romans that Paul talks about our not knowing how to pray, and that the Spirit prays for us because we don’t know how to pray. I’m struck by the fact that this is really what Kiran was saying: what we don’t know about prayer is how to evaluate the outcome of prayer. It’s not that we don’t know how to say the things we need to say. That’s not the issue. The issue is what outcome we are expecting from prayer, and that may be what we need to readjust our thinking about.

Before the class started, we were talking about two members of the class who had things happen that appeared to be miraculous. Kiran was able to get authorization for his green card, and David found a home for his dogs. Is God interested in your dogs? Is God interested in your green card? Is it important at all to be able to say that God was involved in this decision or worked on my behalf? I don’t know. I’m not suggesting that He wasn’t. I just don’t know whether, again, the issue of prayer is to recalibrate our expectation of the outcome more than it is what we have to say.

C-J: You’re right. You can’t just land on one or the other. It’s something that, as we mature, I think floats in the back of our consciousness. But I believe that if we can take a piece from what David was saying—release it to God, see God in all things, and recognize that nothing is wasted in God in terms of who is on the stage with us on any given day—we can begin to look differently even at the things that are most traumatic.

I was watching a series on Amazon Prime, and the goal in the story was to create a drug that would take people who had experienced profound trauma during war and change the chemistry of the brain so that they could find peace again. But in the end, it all went sideways. It actually caused them to lose all capacity within their brains, and they were hollowed out. The closing thought, more or less, was: What if, instead of trying to act like God and create a chemical that will restore the brain to health, we reframe the experience into gratitude? It used the idea of somebody learning how to make a cake. It’s all lopsided and doesn’t look like the beautiful birthday cake you would expect, with candles and everything else. Instead of being disappointed in it, we are grateful that we have cake at all.

I thought about that in terms of a community I once lived in, where one of the cottage mothers had the tattoo on her wrist from being in a concentration camp. She hardly ever spoke. She walked with this quiet dignity and was just a quiet, gentle soul whose presence healed you, because she had found what David was talking about—the ability to let go and let God, and yet to grow in that space and find purpose for her life there. There was a comfort for the girls in that community in realizing, “If she could get through that, I can get through this.”

So I think that relationship we have with God, as we mature—and some people get it very young, through childhood diseases, trauma, losing a home or family through tornadoes, and all kinds of things—is not a relationship with God based on what they expect from God. This ability to find peace in all things is a very special gift that I think God gives to people as a witness. Carolyn and I were talking one day about the loss of her babies and how God used her as a witness: more than simply surviving, you can see God’s hand in all things. When she talked to other women who had also lost their babies, her experience became a testimony. Everywhere we go, if we allow ourselves to be that testimony of a relationship, God can use it and does. Amen.

Don: Do you think it’s important to be able to identify God’s action on your behalf in your life? Is that something that is necessary for the believer?

C-J: No, I think it’s intuitive. I really do think it’s intuitive. We all have a testimony about where God showed up and transformed what could have been tragic, but I think the beauty of God is that we don’t really have to tell our story. We can walk our story in silence. Great things can be done.

David: I would, to some extent, challenge the question, “Can we see God in our lives?” To me, what’s more important is simply to see God in life. It doesn’t necessarily have to be our lives. We may be born at the bottom of the barrel, and it isn’t very good down there. But it is still possible to be aware of and to see God, and to have faith that, in the end, you will receive God’s grace. We don’t really know what that is, but we know it will be good. Apart from that, we’re in God’s hands.

Again, when Jesus taught the Lord’s Prayer, it’s simple. The first words are, “Thy will be done, Thy kingdom come.” That’s what we need to have faith in. “Give us this day our daily bread,” I don’t think means “Make sure we have enough to go and feed the family at McDonald’s.” I think the daily bread is faith, and with enough faith we will get through the day spiritually.

So, seeing God at work in our lives is simply simply seeing goodness at play. We saw it in a couple who took our dogs when they were desperately in need of a new home. God was active there, but it was just chance that it affected our lives. To me, true joy is in seeing that Goodness is active, that there is a God.

Reinhard: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” To me, there are two kinds of evil that happen in our lives. I think there is internal evil—perhaps all this suffering through illnesses and other things that happen in our bodies—and external evil that comes from outside us, such as the persecution that happened to the disciples.

In this particular event, God saved Peter for His purpose, to spread the gospel. This was early in the growth of the church, at the beginning of its ministry. If James wasn’t saved, it was God’s prerogative. We saw that John the Baptist also didn’t make it. And, of course, the disciples died tragic deaths, except John, who went to Patmos and wrote Revelation. We as humans inherited the curse through Adam and Eve after the Fall, so we will die in one way or another.

But I think the thing we need to remember is that God has a remedy for us as Christians. That’s why it’s good that we discuss this in the class—to remind ourselves of our position and what we need to do in life to move on until the time God calls us. I believe in faith. We always discuss faith and, of course, the Lord’s Prayer: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” So we still have to ask God. As Christians, I think we have to put into God’s hands what He wants for our lives, because, all in all, we need to remain faithful to Him until the end.

Even during Jesus’ time, when the disciples performed miracles, Jesus told them to rejoice that their names were written in heaven. In this life, we have to go through all kinds of experiences that may bring us closer to God. We may also do things that are not according to His will, but as Christians we have to remain faithful and keep going with what we have and what we need to do in this life, because in the end the crown of God is prepared for us. We have to remain faithful, no matter how long we live on this earth.

God gives us grace and gives us the opportunity to live on this earth and to do His will. I think that is good enough for us—to know Him and worship Him. That is the great asset we have, knowing that someday we are going to see Him face to face. That is the hope we need in order to remain strong in Him. I think that is the consolation we have: someday there is a reward that we are going to have at the end.

David: I would agree with that, and I think it’s worth being reminded that while James died, Peter only received a temporary reprieve. He too died eventually. God did not save Peter for all time.

So the question that Kiran so ably posed and drew out in this discussion today is: Why should there be a difference between Peter and James? I wonder if there really is a difference. They both died eventually. We’re all going to die. Presumably, both of them would have been saying the Lord’s Prayer every day, and it’s not a question of Peter’s prayer being answered and James’s prayer not being answered. They were both answered in the affirmative, because for them God’s kingdom surely did come, God’s will was done, and they had their spiritual daily bread as long as they needed it.

Kiran: Do we have to see God in everything? My logical mind constantly says, “This could be chance. This could simply be the natural expectation of what happens when you do this thing.” It keeps arguing with me. But there are certain things that I see—or, in another way, I should say that God allows me to see—that give me some indication that He is behind it.

Two weeks before submitting my application, I saw in a group that a guy with a similar background to mine, in some respects slightly better than mine, and with the same lawyer, was not getting his green card. Then I’m getting mine. Why did I have to see that? When I saw it, it had a huge emotional effect on my mind. I grappled with fear and despair, and then I had to pray and write about it. Sometimes, when I feel that way, I journal about it. Two weeks after that, I submitted the application, and two weeks later I got it. So sometimes, somehow, God gives a kind of proof that He is behind these things, and sometimes He is silent.

What I think I’m learning to see is that there was one way I used to think God was in everything. When I got a parking place in a city, I used to say, “God gave me the parking place.” Now I see it differently. I think, “Well, I don’t deserve what I get, but there is no unmistakable doubt that this came to me because of God’s grace.” I still can’t clearly explain, with the proper language, how I feel that way. But I do see God in these little things, and He makes sure that I understand He is behind it. Whether it is a good thing or a bad thing, He is there.

Carolyn: I see God every day, all the time. But where it also comes to me is when I have to find words to talk to somebody else. When the Lord looked at the disciples and said, “If you had the faith of a mustard seed,” as small as that is, it gives me doubt, because I feel that I don’t have a handle on it. I don’t have the words.

I’m very grateful that I have a Lord who has allowed me to know He loves me, and I just have to leave it there. But it’s very hard when somebody is looking at me with tears in their eyes and wanting to know, “Where does that faith come from? I want it now,” just as you wanted your green card, and just as all those people were praying and great things happened. I think there is a dimension of emotion and knowledge, and of what we take upon ourselves.

For me, it has to be, “I just give it all to You, Lord. That’s up to You, and I thank You for what You’re doing right now.” I have no other answer for it. As I said, inside myself I know where I am, but it’s really hard. You guys are in the trenches when you meet people every day, as pastors and theologians, and I admire all of you for your background and knowledge. But it’s so personal. When the Lord said, “Go and make yourselves fishers of men,” these are the hard questions.

Don: Well, there’s a lot to ponder, Kiran. Thank you for your essay.

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