Today is our third sermon going through the second half of Romans 8. The past two weeks—and this theme is continued today—has to do with questions of suffering. Why is life so hard? Why is this world so messed up? What is God doing about this broken world? Paul is teaching that we should expect to suffer in this world, but with the hope of glorious healing and joy in the age to come that is incomparably greater than our afflictions. So that raises the question: It’s wonderful that we have the hope of heaven, but what sort of help does God give us today? Should we expect God to deliver us from our troubles today, or should we expect this life to be miserable with only the hope of heaven to encourage us?

Before we get to Romans 8, I will take several minutes to give a mental framework that has been very helpful to me over the years in looking at this question, and will set the stage for today’s text.

Can anyone guess which topic Jesus taught about more than any other?

It’s the Kingdom of God (KOG), sometimes also called the kingdom of heaven. There are over 110 references to the kingdom in the gospels. And then about 35 in the rest of the NT.

At the time of Jesus, the Jewish people believed history was divided into two eras: this present evil age and the age to come, the KOG. The present evil age is subject to darkness, death, and decay. But because of prophecies in the OT, the Jews were expecting a messiah who would be a political and military leader and would defeat all the forces of darkness, and usher in the KOG, an age of prosperity, peace and justice.

Here’s Tim Keller’s definition of the KOG that I really like

The KOG is the healing, renewing exercise of the ruling power of God.

Jesus came preaching, “The KOG is at hand; the healing, renewing exercise of the ruling power of God is coming now. The time is fulfilled.” Some people got excited that He could be the messiah. He did miracles to corroborate his proclamation and demonstrate that the KOG was breaking into this world and overthrowing the kingdom of darkness. Here are two examples of this:

Matthew 9:35Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness.

Here it says He proclaimed the gospel (good news) of the kingdom, and then he healed every disease to prove that KOG was indeed at hand.

Matthew 12:28 [after Jesus cast out a demon from a man, he said]“If I drive out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.”

So His miracles and His driving out demons were evidence that He indeed was the messiah who would establish the KOG and set people free from the curse of sin.

But He also confused people, because it became apparent that he was not interested in being a political or military leader. Sometimes he spoke of the KOG as a present reality, and sometimes he

spoke of it as a future age. He was giving people a foretaste and sign of the healing, renewing exercise of the power of God, but he wasn’t completely getting rid of sin and suffering yet. He wasn’t overthrowing the wicked rule of the Romans over the Jews. He raised three people from the dead (that we know of) but left thousands of others in the grave. Those he healed got sick again and died. Contrary to the Jewish expectation, Jesus would come twice rather than only once: the first coming of the Messiah was to procure our salvation and demonstrate its healing power. He will come again to consummate our salvation. He was raised from the dead to show that He had power even over death, the ultimate curse of sin, and as a sign and guarantee that we someday will also be raised victorious over sin and death.

So the KOG is already but not yet. It’s already here, setting us free from the curse of sin to a degree. God does heal in this age sometimes, he does deliver us from our troubles sometimes. But not always. We don’t have the full manifestation of the KOG yet. It hasn’t been consummated. It’s already here, but not yet here in its fullness. Already but not yet. Sometimes we experience the already of the KOG, sometimes we experience the not yet. That’s why we pray, “Your kingdom come.”

Paul described this foretaste with the metaphor of a deposit three times in his letters. Here is one of them:

Eph 3:13-14 When you believed, you were marked in [Christ] with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory.

The HS is a deposit, a down payment. Let’s say you are buying a car for a million shillings, but you have only ten thousand shillings right now. You would sign the contract with the seller, agreeing to pay him a million shillings, and then hand him ten thousand as a deposit. It’s a way of guaranteeing that you will pay the rest of the money later. Paul says the HS is a deposit guaranteeing us our inheritance in heaven. We don’t have the full blessings of the KOG yet. We have only a foretaste.

In heaven, we will have complete physical healing and emotional healing. Here, through the Spirit, we get only a measure of physical and emotional healing. In heaven, we will have perfect peace, perfect joy, perfect freedom, perfect love—both receiving and giving love. Here, through the Spirit, we get only a measure of peace, joy, freedom, and love. In heaven we will have complete victory over sin. Here, through the Spirit, we get only a measure of victory over sin. In heaven, we will fully know God. Here, through the Spirit, we know God to a degree. In heaven we will be completely delivered from our troubles and our sorrows. Here, through the Spirit, we get only a measure of deliverance from our troubles and sorrows.

So the important question is: how big is that measure that we receive in this life? How big is the deposit? Is it 1%? 10%? 50%? There are some passages that emphasize the “already” of the KOG: we should pray expectantly because God does deliver, He does provide, He does heal, He does intervene, in miraculous ways, in this life, in response to our prayers. But there are other passages, like the one we are looking at today, that emphasize the “not-yet” of the KOG.

Last week, we talked about the problem of evil: how can you reconcile the massive amount of evil and suffering in this world with a God who is completely powerful, loving, wise, and just? And our passage last week was about how all of creation is in bondage to futility and frustration, corruption and decay, because of the curse of sin. And thus, creation groans, longing to be set free from the curse, longing for the day where God will heal and restore the world to the way it’s supposed to be. We talked about how Paul describes our groaning as birth pains: even though childbirth is difficult and painful and exhausting, it’s also filled with hope, because the pains of childbirth will come to an end, and be replaced with the overwhelming joy of what they are producing. Today’s passage talks about how we as Christians groan and the Holy Spirit groans. The title of this message is:

We groan with hope because of the already-but-not-yet nature of the KOG.

Romans 8:23-2523 Not only creation, but even we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. For who hopes for what they already have? 25 But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

When it says in V 23 we have the firstfruits of the Spirit, this is a different metaphor getting at the same idea we talked about earlier: the Holy Spirit as a deposit and foretaste of what is to come. So if we have the foretaste of the Spirit, why does Paul say, “even we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly”? When the gospel comes to us, it comes with spectacularly good news. Your sins are forgiven because of Christ, so you are delivered from the curse of sin:

Galatians 3:13Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.

Doesn’t that mean we shouldn’t be afflicted with futility, corruption, and groaning anymore? The curse has been lifted because Christ absorbed the curse and paid our penalty, right? Paul says: we have been positionally set free from the curse, but we still suffer under the brokenness of this world until we die. We get only a small foretaste of the deliverance in this life. Even we who have the Holy Spirit, even we who have been adopted as God’s children, even we groan, waiting for the redemption of this decaying body and this corrupted world.

Why does Paul say at the end of V 23 that we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies? Haven’t we already been adopted and redeemed? Yes, legally and positionally, but we have not yet received the full benefits. There are aspects of our salvation which have transacted in the past, but there are other aspects that are being worked into our lives right now, and there are other aspects we will not receive until we die or Jesus returns.

We have been legally adopted by God, but the full manifestation of that son-ship is not yet a reality. V 23 says that when this happens, our body will be redeemed, set free from corruption and decay. We already have the redemption of our soul, but we are waiting for the redemption of our body.

The NT puts quite a lot of emphasis on the fact that we will be bodily resurrected after Jesus returns, just like He was. We will receive new glorified bodies. Why this emphasis? It’s because so

much of our misery in this world is caused by the weakness of our body. Sickness, injury, and disability are a huge cause of hardship. Growing old and dying is usually quite unpleasant. Many people are unhappy because of various shortcomings located in their body, like they aren’t as talented as they want to be: whether it’s lack of athletic talent or musical talent or artistic talent or intelligence or charm, most of us are plagued by limitations and failures we wish we didn’t have. Many people are not happy with their physical appearance: They think they are too tall or too short, too skinny or too not skinny, not strong enough, not pretty enough; people don’t like their hair because it’s too curly or too straight, or don’t like its color. Many people try to look younger, in some cultures. On and on it goes.

We will receive glorified bodies that are no longer limited by weakness and all these things that we don’t like about ourselves. We will finally be able to do amazing things that we have always longed to be able to do. You’ll have a trillion years to develop world-class piano skills, or whatever else you want.

And glorification means complete rest and deliverance from our sin nature. Won’t that be great, to be able to perfectly obey God without any struggle? But in the meantime, we groan because every day is a battle. The Bible uses the metaphor of fighting to describe our lives. It says there is a war going on inside of each one of us, between the Spirit, which wants righteousness, and our flesh, which wants to sin. But not only is there a battle inside each of us, there’s a battle that we are fighting outside of us, against the world and the devil. We fight to spread the Kingdom of God and set people free from the kingdom of darkness, but Satan is opposing us and trying to destroy us. It’s war and struggle until the day we die. That’s one of the reasons we get so exhausted. But we look forward to resting—no more struggle—when we get rid of this disease-prone, sin-prone body.

Notice that the word “hope” appears five times in V 24-25. The word for “hope” used the NT has an important difference with the English word for “hope.” We generally use the word to mean something that we are not sure of, like “I hope I get to see that new Tom Cruz movie. He is so handsome.” We say that if we wish to see it but aren’t sure if we will. But the NT idea of hope is something we are sure of; it’s the aspect of our faith that is trusting in the future promises of God. Our hope is not wishful thinking. It's a confident assurance. We are confident that the Lord will carry on to completion the good work He began in us.

However, Paul is emphasizing the not-yet of the Kingdom by saying we don’t have it yet. We don’t see it yet.

24 Hope that is seen is no hope at all. For who hopes for what they already have? 25 But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

This means that the healing, renewing exercise of the power of God is something that we hope for, but we often do not see it in this life. Paul is warning against the false conclusion that because we’ve been saved, therefore our groaning with decaying bodies and a corrupted world is over. It is in hope that we have been saved, hoping for what we do not yet have. We walk by faith, not by sight, Paul says elsewhere.

So: How can we groan and hope without losing heart? Paul tells us to wait, wait. Our passage last week said that the creation is waiting with eager longing. Our passage today says two times that

we wait. V 23 says we wait eagerly; V 25 says we wait patiently. It is very important but very difficult to balance the tension between waiting eagerly yet patiently. Waiting eagerly means “I want it; I want it; I want it.” Waiting patiently means, “I am content to wait; it’s OK if God doesn’t answer my prayer, if God leaves me in my suffering; I know I will receive complete deliverance from my struggles when I die.”

When you wait eagerly but patiently, with NT hope, with confident assurance, it gives you strength to persevere. Waiting is not easy. Waiting means you want something and it’s not happening. If God always answered our prayers quickly and just like we wanted, there would be no need for waiting.

This leads us to the next section of our passage:

Romans 8:26-2826 In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through groans too deep for words. 27 And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God. 28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

We won’t be looking in detail at the amazingly wonderful promise in V 28 until next week, but it’s the anchor and foundation of the entire passage: that God is working all things, even painful things, for our good.

V 26 says we do not know what we ought to pray for. Why is this? It’s because we spend so much of our lives perplexed. We typically have no idea what God is up to and how He will work things out. It’s because we don't know what's good for us, but God does. It’s because if we had our choice, we'd pray that we never had any suffering and that we'd always be healed of everything and that all of our hardships would go away immediately. It’s because when we are suffering, and we pray for deliverance, sometimes God will glorify His name by intervening quickly and delivering us from our troubles, but sometimes He glorifies His name by leaving us in our troubles and giving us the strength to endure. And we usually don’t know which of these God plans to do.

So we groan as we pray, not knowing what He plans to do with our pain. And we groan because even if we are trusting God, the pain of this broken world can be overwhelming at times. Sometimes all we can do is cry out for help because we do not know in what form the help should come. We should pray both for miraculous intervention to deliver us from our struggles and for miraculous strength to endure if He doesn’t deliver us. Then we leave it in God’s loving hands, trusting that He will do what’s best for us, whether we see Him work or He seems silent.

How do we know when to stop asking for deliverance and only ask for the strength to endure and the grace to trust his goodness? Paul faced this problem in his own experience. In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul describes how God gave him a thorn in the flesh, which he called a “messenger of Satan to torment me”. We don’t know what sort of affliction it was, but he says that he prayed three times for its removal. However, then God told Paul to stop asking for Him to remove it, because He wasn’t going to take away the affliction. Instead, the Lord gave Paul the assurance that His grace

would be sufficient and His power would be manifested, not in healing, but in Paul’s patient endurance through suffering.

Jesus told two parables to teach us to keep praying and not give up: the Parable of the Persistent Widow and the Parable of the Persistent Neighbor. So I would say: Keep praying for deliverance from your troubles unless God, like He did with Paul’s thorn in the flesh, tells you to stop because He’s not going to deliver you. Sometimes it might become obvious from circumstances that God will not deliver and heal in this life, like when a loved one is old and suffering from advanced dementia—God certainly could heal someone with this, but I’ve never heard of it.

The second part of V 26 says: the Spirit himself intercedes for us through groans too deep for words. This is a bit tricky to interpret what Paul means. But here’s what I think makes the most sense. Paul is talking about our groanings which are also the Spirit’s groanings because He inspires and directs them in us. There’s a similar idea back in Romans 8:15, which says that by the Spirit, we cry out “Abba Father.” When we cry out “Abba Father,” it is our heart and our mouth that is saying it, but it’s also the Spirit in us that is directing and inspiring it.

Likewise, V 26 says this is how the Spirit helps us in our weakness as we pray. He helps us by giving us a preeminent desire that Christ be honored in our lives, in sickness and in health, in poverty and in prosperity, in life and in death—even when we have weakness that leaves us confused as to how this should happen.

V 27 says the Father searches our heart and hears this groaning, and that the Spirit intercedes for us in accordance with God’s will. The Father hears the Spirit’s clear intention that things work out in a way that will bring the most glory to God and the most good to His children.

Why is this important? Because it means that in the very moment of some of our deepest pain, our groanings are the very work of God's Spirit FOR us and not against us. Have you ever suffered because of the confusion of not knowing God’s will and not understanding how He was working in a situation and wondering why He wasn’t taking away the pain? Here Paul encourages us by saying that our weakness in this world includes some ignorance about what the will of God is and how to pray. But no matter what, God is for us, which Paul explains in detail later in the chapter.

The Spirit takes our stumbling, bumbling expressions of need and brings them before God in a form consistent with His will. And God responds graciously and meets our needs. Not always as we were hoping, but always for our good. So let us humbly run to our merciful Father in prayer and plead for help in time of need.

Luke 22:42 [Jesus was praying in the garden right before he was arrested. He was in anguish because he knew the staggering immensity of the pain that was coming]“Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.”

This is an amazing example of accepting God’s plan, whether or not He takes away the pain. It’s a good thing for us to pray for God to deliver us from our trials, but to also end our prayers with “yet not my will, but yours be done.” We leave it in God’s loving hands. What a gracious and merciful Father we have. He has planned for all our weakness, and nothing can separate us from his love!

Some of you know David and Tammy Preston, who used to live here and attend ICF. A couple years ago, David had a stroke that severely impaired his movement and his speech. He was doing physiotherapy and slowly getting better. At the point where his condition wasn’t improving much anymore, and they were coming to terms with the fact that he might not fully recover. Tammy sent out an email to friends that said this (and I have her permission to share this):

It's beginning to feel like 2018 will be less about striving and more about accepting. The tension is real as we find balance between accepting where things are and hoping for what might still be. We know the Lord can and will do what He wants in our story, and we in no way limit His power and authority.

That is well said: when God isn’t answering our prayers, the tension is finding balance between accepting where things are and hoping for what might still be, trusting in the sovereign goodness and wisdom of the Lord—the tension between the already and the not yet of His kingdom.

So: let’s return to the important question I asked earlier: If Christians get a measure of joy, peace, freedom, love, victory, healing, and deliverance in this life, how big is that measure? How big is the deposit of our future inheritance? Is it 1%? 10%? 50%? Different Christians have answered this very differently through the years. Some NT passages emphasize the “already”. Some, like the one we looked at today, emphasize the not yet. I have thought a lot about this question over the years. It has caused me a lot of confusion and doubt at times. And I still don’t have the answer.

If you think of the answers to this question falling onto a spectrum: On the one end of the spectrum, you have Christians who expect almost nothing from God in terms of answer to prayer; they figure that life is miserable, but at least they have the hope of heaven. On the other end of the spectrum is the prosperity gospel with their name-it-and-claim-it theology: the idea that if you live rightly and pray with enough faith, God is obligated to answer your prayers and deliver you from all troubles in this life, giving you health and wealth, because you are child of the King. They heap guilt upon people who aren’t healed because they supposedly don’t have enough faith. They make the mistake of trying to force into this age what God has reserved for the next.

Both of these ends of the spectrum are unbiblical. We should be somewhere in the middle: praying with expectation for God to answer—maybe quickly, maybe slowly—trusting that God is with us and for us, that He is wielding His unstoppable power for His glory and the wellbeing of His children. But also knowing that the Lord has good reasons to sometimes not answer our prayers, and to leave us in our troubles; then our response should be to humbly accept the answer “no” and faithfully endure the suffering with God’s strength—to pray “not my will, but yours be done.” Our job is to wait eagerly but patiently.

Some Christians regularly experience remarkable answers to prayer. Others don’t. I wish I could give you more of a definite answer and a three-step formula to experience more miraculous deliverance in this life; but I can’t. The Bible doesn’t give it to us.

So here’s the way I think of it: Seek the “already” of the KOG, but be content and accept when God’s answer is “not yet.” Seek the already, and patiently accept the not yet.

Whether you are praying for physical healing, financial help, protection from enemies, victory over sin, clear guidance for the future, relational healing, or the salvation of loved ones: Seek the already, and patiently accept the not yet.

Silent reflection:

Think of a situation that you are currently going through that is difficult.

How can you pray and hope for God to work for the “already” of the kingdom of God in this situation?

How can you pray and trust in God’s sovereign goodness and wisdom if He answers “not yet”?

Homework: study the topic of waiting on God patiently.

We only touched on it briefly today, but it’s extremely helpful and important: waiting on the Lord.

If you are interested in how this truth applies to physical healing, read or listen to the sermon “Christ and Cancer” by John Piper. It’s on the same passage we looked at today and is a brilliant exposition of the theology of healing.

********************not used.I’ll close with one more thought about physical healing because health problems are such a major source of hardship: John Piper preached a sermon on the topic of physical healing from our passage in Romans 8. The sermon is titled “Christ and Cancer.” Here are his six biblical truths on sickness and healing, which are a fantastic summary of how we might apply today’s message:

1. In this age, all creation, including our bodies, has been subjected to futility and enslaved to corruption.2. There is an age coming when all the children of God, who have endured to the end in faith, will be delivered from all futility and corruption, spiritually and physically—set free from all pain and sickness. 3. Jesus Christ came and died to purchase our redemption, demonstrate the character of that redemption as both spiritual and physical, and give us a foretaste of it now. 4. God controls who gets sick and who gets well, and all his decisions are for the good of his children even if they may be very painful and long-lasting.5. We should pray for God’s help, both to heal and to strengthen faith while we are unhealed.6. We should always trust in the power and love of God, even in the darkest hour of suffering.**They had arrived in Burma 17 months after their marriage, when Adoniram was 24, and Ann was 23 years old. In less than 14 years since their arrival in Burma, Judson had buried his dear wife Ann, and all of their children. Eventually, 2 of Judson's wives (he remarried) and 7 of his 13 children, along with several colleagues died there.

But at Judson's death, when he was 61, Burma had 63 Christian churches, and 7000 converts to faith in Jesus Christ.

Patrick Johnstone, in "Operation World", p 462, estimates that Myanmar (Burma's new name)Baptist Convention has 3700 congregations today, with estimates of 617,781 members and 1,900,000 affiliates.

Adoniram Judson died in 1850, and during his last days he reportedly said:

"I have had such views of the loving condescension of Christ and the glories of Heaven, as I believe are seldom granted to mortal men. Oh the Love of Christ! It is the secret of life's inspiration and the source of Heaven's bliss. Oh, the love of Jesus! We cannot understand it now, but what a beautiful study of eternity!"

Adoniram Judson once said"

"The Future is as bright as the Promises of God", or as another source quoted him, "The Prospects are as bright as the Promises of God"

Adoniram Judson, as well as the great majority of historic Christian missionaries had a deep belief in the Sovereignty of God, and held to the historic "Doctrines of Grace", as is evident in this quote:

"If I had not felt certain that every additional trial was ordered by infinite love and mercy, I could not have survived my accumulated sufferings."

**Ps 38:8-9I am feeble and utterly crushed; I groan in anguish of heart.9 All my longings lie open before you, Lord; my groaning is not hidden from you.**Rom 12:12Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.**Talk about JTB’s questioning of Jesus. Why was he languishing in prison?**[2 cor 5:17] We are already new, but not completely.**Paul wasn’t always sure of God’s will. He wanted to go to Spain but didn’t. In Phil 1 he said he couldn’t decide if he wanted to die or stay on eartch.**What are the reasons that a person groans? [get audience participation]

Here are my top three reasons that a person groans:- Pain (either physical pain or emotional)- Frustration and disappointment [refer back to story of me groaning loudly when I dropped the laundry detergent]- Hard work and effort [demonstrate picking up something heavy]

These are all fitting descriptions of why we groan in this world. We experience pain, we experience frustration and disappointment, and we work hard.**V 18, which we looked at two weeks ago, says we’ll be glorified with Christ and share in His glory. We are on the road to glory. This is the goal of our salvation. We are saved to be brought to full glory. God is not done with me yet, and He’s not done with you yet. We're going to manifest, to a lesser degree, the glories of God Himself. We currently long for this glory. We try to elevate ourselves educationally or with self-improvement. We seek honor and respect from others. We are often driven by pride and envy to rise above others. But we are never satisfied. In Romans 3, Paul said we all sin and fall short of the glory of God. But someday this yearning for glory will be fulfilled. God will not stop this work of salvation at any point short of our entire perfection. This is not the end. [phil 1:6]**Heb 11:13All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. **2 Cor 4:7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. 8 We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; 9 persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. 10 We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. 11 For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. 12 So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.**2 Cor 5:1-5For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. 2 Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, 3 because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. 4 For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. 5 Now the one who has fashioned us for this very purpose is God, who has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.**1 Cor 15: describe new body, old body is called a seed, compare the glory of a seed and the flower**God is always at work, even in the most horrendous evil and suffering. Verse about hair falling from head, God is always at work.**Superchick Lyrics"Beauty From Pain"

The lights go out all around meOne last candle to keep out the night

And then the darkness surrounds meI know I'm alive but I feel like I've diedAnd all that's left is to accept that it's overMy dreams ran like sand through the fists that I madeI try to keep warm but I just grow colderI feel like I'm slipping away

After all this has passed, I still will remainAfter I've cried my last, there'll be beauty from painThough it won't be today, someday I'll hope againAnd there'll be beauty from painYou will bring beauty from my pain

My whole world is the pain inside meThe best I can do is just get through the dayWhen life before is only a memoryI'll wonder why God lets me walk through this placeAnd though I can't understand why this happenedI know that I will when I look back somedayAnd see how you've brought beauty from ashesAnd made me as gold purified through these flames

Here I am at the end of me (at the end of me)Tryin' to hold to what I can't see (to what I can't see)I forgot how to hopeThis night's been so longI cling to Your promiseThere will be a dawn**Third Day Lyrics"Cry Out To Jesus"

To everyone who's lost someone they loveLong before it was their timeYou feel like the days you had were not enoughWhen you said goodbyeAnd to all of the people with burdens and painsKeeping you back from your lifeYou believe that there's nothing and there is no oneWho can make it right

There is hope for the helplessRest for the wearyLove for the broken heartThere is grace and forgivenessMercy and healingHe'll meet you wherever you are

Cry out to Jesus, Cry out to Jesus

For the marriage that's struggling just to hang onThey lost all of their faith in loveThey've done all they can to make it right againStill it's not enoughFor the ones who can't break the addictions and chainsYou try to give up but you come back againJust remember that you're not alone in your shameAnd your suffering

When you're lonelyAnd it feels like the whole world is falling on youYou just reach out, you just cry out to JesusCry to JesusTo the widow who suffers from being aloneWiping the tears from her eyesFor the children around the world without a homeSay a prayer tonight**MercyMe Lyrics"Bring The Rain"

I can count a million timesPeople asking me how ICan praise You with all that I've gone throughThe question just amazes meCan circumstances possiblyChange who I forever am in YouMaybe since my life was changedLong before these rainy daysIt's never really ever crossed my mindTo turn my back on you, oh LordMy only shelter from the stormBut instead I draw closer through these timesSo I pray

Bring me joy, bring me peaceBring the chance to be freeBring me anything that brings You gloryAnd I know there'll be daysWhen this life brings me painBut if that's what it takes to praise YouJesus, bring the rain

I am Yours regardless ofThe clouds that may loom above

Because You are much greater than my painYou who made a way for meBy suffering Your destinySo tell me what's a little rainSo I pray

Holy, holy, holyIs the Lord God Almighty**Mandisa – What Scars are For lyrics

These scars aren’t prettyBut they’re a part of meAnd will not ever fade awayThese marks tell a storyOf me down in the valleyAnd how You reached in with Your graceAnd healed me

They remind me of Your faithfulnessAnd all You brought me throughThey teach me that my brokennessIs something You can useThey show me where I’ve beenAnd that I’m not there any moreThat’s what scars, that’s what scars are forWhat scars are for

Erase, rewindWish I could every timeThe hurt, the pain cuts so deepBut when I’m weakYou’re strong, and in Your power I can carry onAnd my scars say that You won’t ever leave

I see it on the crossThe nails You took for meScars can change the worldScars can set me free**JJ Heller – Your Hands lyrics

I have unanswered prayersI have trouble I wish wasn't thereAnd I have asked a thousand waysThat you would take my pain awayYou would take my pain away

I am trying to understandHow to walk this weary landMake straight the paths that crooked lieOh Lord, before these feet of mineOh Lord, before these feet of mine

When my world is shaking, heaven standsWhen my heart is breakingI never leave your hands

When you walked upon the earthYou healed the broken, lost and hurtI know you hate to see me cryOne day you will set all things rightYeah, one day you will set all things right

When my world is shaking, heaven standsWhen my heart is breakingI never leave your hands

Your hands that shaped the worldAre holding meThey hold me stillYour hands that shaped the worldAre holding meThey hold me still

When my world is shaking, heaven standsWhen my heart is breakingI never leave youWhen my world is shaking, heaven standsWhen my heart is breakingI never leaveI never leave your hands**Footprints poem**Piper sermon where he says one of his most important jobs as a pastor is giving people a solid theology of suffering, so that when the trials come—and they will—people can stand firm.**Sermon from good Friday…through suffering into glory**Writing a different narrative with the facts at hand.https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/tag/storytelling**

I will close with one more thought from Paul. He wrote 2 Timothy from prison. It was the last letter he wrote, shortly before he was executed. 2 Tim 4:6-86 I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time for my departure is near. 7 I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. 8 Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.This is a tremendous inspiration. At the end of his life, Paul could say “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith,” because he knew that the Lord would reward him when he dies. He knew, despite his terrible afflictions, that it was worth it. I want to be able to say the same thing. What about you? At the end of your life, no matter what it costs, will be able to say, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith?” You will if you fix your gaze upon your incomparable future glory.**Talk about being a soldier, how they endure hardship rather than comfort.**Hope that you will eventually win gives you the motivation to keep going. This is true on a sports team. This is true in war. Winston Churchill helped England to not give us by assuring them they would win WW2.**If you are a sports fan and your team is losing bad, you’ll be filled with unhappiness. If you already know the outcome and that they eventually come back to win, being down 3 goals doesn’t bother you.**[Should I explain that most translations of the bible don’t have the word providence? The NIV uses it once:Job 10:12You gave me life and showed me kindness, and in your providence watched over my spirit.ESV:your care has preserved my spirit.The Hebrew word translated providence or care has the idea of oversight.**CS Lewis quote about heaven getting better page after page.**Asleep at the wheel**Lady who said “God is with me and God is working in my situation because things are getting better.”**Talk about resilience. Demonstrate a Nerf ball vs an aluminum can.** “Providence” is a word that is not found in most translations of the Bible, but it is a concept that is central to the Bible from start to finish. Providence combines many different attributes of God:

Omniscience Wisdom Sovereign power Love

Faithfulness Justice Righteousness

Here’s my definition:Providence = God’s absolute sovereign governance—in accordance with his perfect, loving, wise, just plan—over all the affairs of this world, from the smallest detail like the number of hairs on our head, to the biggest events like wars and natural disasters.God desires to fortify our hope in His providence through Romans 8.** Come quickly Lord. **Look at lyrics to song “Jesus, firm foundation”.**Benefits of suffering:

- Tests/purifies our faith- Builds character- Brokenness and closeness with God- Weakness/humility (2 cor 12)- Glorifies God- Makes us able to comfort others (2 Cor 1)- Rely on God instead of ourselves 2 Cor 1:9

**************************I am pasting below the contents of the Suffering section of Notes.doc and highlighting things that could be good:

I walked a mile with Pleasure; She chattered all the way, But left me none the wiser For all she had to say. I walked a mile with Sorrow And ne’er a word said she; But oh, the things I learned from her When Sorrow walked with me! —ROBERT BROWNING HAMILTON **Wrote a song of praise after his dad died:https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/a-song-for-the-suffering-with-john-piper**Here are my strategies for remaining joyful in adversity:

- Have a growth mindset (hardships aren’t bad but an opportunity for growth)- Successful people fail- God is in control; Rom 8:28 “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him,

who have been called according to his purpose.” James 1:2-4 “ 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. 4 Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”

- Resilience: get knocked down and keep getting back up- Avoid self-pity- Don’t rehearse your pain, leave it behind. Don’t turtle. - Idolatry: if we can’t leave behind sadness/anger/etc, it could be evidence of an idol.- Time heals sadness- Give thanks in all circumstances- I read an article about how self-focus tends to make us less happy: When you are regularly focusing on

yourself, you’ll notice any dissatisfaction, anxiety, or general malaise that you might not have otherwise. By bringing your attention to these negative emotions, you amplify them.

**Rob Bell tells a story in Nooma video #1: their family is having a vacation at a secluded lakehouse. He decides to go on a hike around the lake with his 1-year old son in a backpack carrier. Halfway around the lake, it starts to rain. The rain turns into a downpour with thunder, lightning and wind. His son stars to cry at the top of his lungs. Rob decides to transfer his son to his arms, hold him tight, and talk to him the rest of the way home. The rest of the way home, he repeatedly says: “I love you; I am holding you tight; you are safe with me; I know the way home and I promise I will get you home safe and sound; you are safe with me; I know it’s scary and unpleasant, but everything is going to be OK.” That is what God does to us: he holds us tight and tells us those things in His word.**https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/mandisa/heiswithyou.html**How to comfort someone in grief:http://paradoxuganda.blogspot.co.ke/2018/01/walking-with-suffering-some-thoughts.html****Point about halfway down about creating a redemptive narrative about our adversity:https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_will_the_theme_of_your_life_be_this_year**I read a book When God doesn't make sense by James Dobson. It has lots of good stuff. I took notes in a doc with that name.**Carl Jung, the renowned psychologist:“The difference between a good life and a bad life is how well you walk through the fire.”**Harold S. Kushner:Our responding to life's unfairness with sympathy and with righteous indignation, God's compassion and God's anger working through us, may be the surest proof of all of God's reality. **Stanley Prepared, Part 3_The problem of evil and suffering – This is a good talk. He recommends a book for those that are having trouble believing in God because of pain: https://www.amazon.com/Grace-Disguised-Soul-Grows-through/dp/0310258952. If a non-believer brings up this problem, you can ask “How many books” have you read on this subject? Because there have been hundreds of books written on reconciling the Christian God with suffering. You can also ask “If you could push a button and remove everything bad in the world, would you do it?” The problem with such a button is that it would remove all the people. The reason that, when we understand this, we wouldn’t push the button is the same reason God doesn’t remove all the bad from the world. He is patient with us (2 Pet 3:9). God is as disturbed as us (even more) by injustice. He had a funny part where he talks about bad spray (instead of bug spray) where we want to spray stuff we don’t like to get rid of it. But we want to control the can. We don’t want someone to spray us. The fact that all of us have a sense of justice (ought and ought not) proves that there’s a God. He talks about CS Lewis’ conversion. Everyone realizes the world is broken. Christians believe that this broken world is not the final world. The best possible world is not a world of robots who can’t sin, but one where they can sin and freely choose not to. This is love. He tells a story about his young daughter who touched a cigarette lighter and got a bad burn. He didn’t have to tell her to not touch it again. She learned the hard way. God is teaching us the hard way not to sin. In the next world, we will not sin because we’ve learned better. Our current world is the best way possible to get to the best possible world. He talks about Rom 8, all creation groaning. The reason we know the world is broken is because there’s a vestige of God’s image in us. The Christian answers to the problem of pain are not completely satisfying because there’s enough of God’s image in us that we will never be satisfied in this broken world. Our dissatisfaction points to God’s existence and His image in us. He tells the story of a friend in Swaziland that works with desperately poor and sick people. She ends all of her letters with this verse: Come, Lord Jesus (Rev 22:20, the second to last verse in the Bible). We are doing all we can to push back evil and suffering. But we realize our ultimate hope isn’t just in making small gains now, but in a new world where people have learned to choose rightly. Evil and suffering are not evidence of the absence of God; they are evidence of the fact that we know things aren’t right, and they ought to be better, and that God isn’t done yet. God isn’t going to use bad spray to get rid of everything evil including us; he’s going to reform us. **These Strange Ashes (1975) covers Elizabeth Elliot’s first year in missions, spent in language study with an Ecuadorian tribe. She’s frank about loneliness, doubts, and struggles with self-discipline. After the death of her friend Maruja, she writes that she “could not escape the thought that it was God who had failed.” Later, when her language informant dies, she starts questioning her own calling.

**Haddon Robinson:I have a formula: Pain + time + insight = change.Sometimes people go through pain over a period of time, but that doesn't change them. But pain and time plus insight will, and that's where [God’s truth] comes in.**Paul Tripp:The Personal Comfort vs. Personal Holiness Mentality: What captures our hearts is the craving for a life that is comfortable, pleasurable, predictable, and problem free. We tend to judge God’s goodness based on how well life is working for us rather than on his zeal to make good on his redemptive promises to us.**Story about counting it all joy:I had opened my laptop to fix something inside, using a youtube video as a guide. I did fix the thing I was trying to fix, but also broke something else. I took it to a computer shop, and they had trouble fixing it. It took them many hours over two days to fix it. I called them a couple times a day because my computer is very precious to me, and I use it all the time. Every time I talked to the guy at the shop, he explained to me that they were having problems fixing it and couldn’t find the right part. Over these two days, I was very worried and stressed, plus I was angry at myself for breaking it in the first place. At one point, I realized I needed to count it all joy and meditate on the fact that God was in control and had a good plan in mind. I felt peace instead of anger, stress, worry. But a few minutes later, the negative emotions returned. This happened quite a few times over the two days: when I counted it joy, I felt peace, but the negative emotions would return. But the more I did this, the longer the peace would remain before the negative emotions were there. I wish I could train myself to look at every single hardship through the lens of God’s truth.**The song “The Anchor Holds” by Ray Boltzhttp://lawrencechewning.com/custom.html**Screwtape Letters:Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause [the Devil’s cause] is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending to do our Enemy’s will [God’s will], looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.**Old hymn (When the morning comes) about suffering and not understanding until we get to heaven:https://hymnary.org/text/trials_dark_on_every_hand**From a pastor who sums up important lessons after 40 years of ministry (https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/what-i-wish-id-known-reflections-on-nearly-40-years-of-pastoral-ministry):I wish I'd known how deeply and incessantly many (most?) people suffer. Having been raised in a truly functional family in which everyone knew Christ and loved one another, I was largely oblivious to the pain endured by most people who've never known that blessing. For too many years I naively assumed that if I wasn't hurting, neither were they. I wish I'd realized the pulpit isn't a place to hide from the problems and pain of one's congregation; it's a place to address, commiserate with, and apply God's Word to them.**Paradox Uganda: after talking about all sorts of terrible and tragic stuff, wrote this:Yet in that very place of shaking, of breaking, we pray for the grace to cling to the truth that all shall be well.  One who is good, fiercely so, writes the end to this story.**The paragraph below was in an email from Heidi L, a dear friend, and so meaningful I had to share it with you.When I would talk to my South Sudanese friends about my mom and her deterioration, when they would ask how she was doing, after I would tell them, their response, that rang in my head and heart for the whole time she was sick and after she died, was “Rabuuna fi.” Literally translates to something like “Our Lord Is in”…”fi" can mean "is here" AND "is there” so it always was a kind of “I AM” statement for me…Our Lord Is. He is with you, He is with your dad, He is everything you need and everything your dad needs your mom needs Caleb needs Luke needs…He Is.**"There is a passage of the New Testament, namely the present one in John 9, which addresses this very issue," writes NT Wright in his commentary on the healing of the man who had been blind since birth. "Jesus' disciples are Jews.

Yet they, and the Pharisees in verse 34, assume there is indeed a connection between present disability and previous sin. . . Thinking like this is a way of trying to hold on to a belief in God's justice. If something in the world seems 'unfair', but if you believe in a God who is both all-powerful, all-loving, and all-fair, one way of getting round the problem is to say that it only seems 'unfair', but actually isn't. There was after all some secret sin being punished. This is a comfortable sort of thing to believe if you happen to be well-off, well fed and healthy in body and mind. Jesus firmly resists any such analysis of how the world is ordered. The world is stranger than that, and darker than that, and the light of God's powerful loving justice shines more brightly than that. But to understand it all, we have to be prepared to dismantle some of our cherished assumptions and to let God remake them in a different way. We have to stop thinking of the world as a kind of moral slot-machine, where people put in a coin (a good act, say, or an evil one) and get out a particular result (a reward or a punishment). . . No: something much stranger, at once more mysterious and more hopeful, is going on . The chaos and misery of this present world is, it seems, the raw material out of which the loving, wise, and just God is making his new creation."**Piper quote: I don’t know of any human being that said, “I learned the deepest lessons about God when things were going well.” I’ve never heard that come out of anybody’s mouth. “I learned the deepest lessons about communing with God when I was having a good vacation.” It’s never, ever been said that I know of. But rather at bedsides and at gravesides and when kids are running away and you want them back. Then you start to realize, “Do I love or do I not love?” **Piper quote: We had a baby die forty hours into its life last week. The young parents have sat in Bethlehem on the front left pew for two years absorbing a vision of a great God. Their grandparents, the grandparents of the baby, their parents, have been in the church for fifteen plus years. And as they saw that the baby was brain dead, had a little dedication service while it lived, pulled the plug, watched the baby die at 10:30 in the evening, they were deeply rooted in the sovereign goodness of God. And the mother said, “God, I don’t know why you took my baby. I don’t like it that you took my baby. But I am putting all my eggs in the God is good basket and you are sovereign. The Lord gives. The Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”**Keller - Paul_and_the_Thorn in the flesh - The word “torment” is not the best translation of this word. A better word is used in some translations “buffet.” We don’t use that word too much anymore except when we eat a buffet dinner. If you are always discouraged or never discouraged, there is something wrong with you. If you’re never discouraged, you just don’t care. The context is that Paul is trying to establish his authority over and against some other guys who claimed to be super apostles. Paul is usually eloquent, but in this passage he seems to be at a loss for words how to explain what he’s trying to say, because he wants to boast in order to prove his authority, but he knows that he should be humble instead of boastful. Paul says he hates talking about this vision he had. He talks about David Martin Lloyd Jones, who had a vision of God and never told anyone about it. Keller says it’s common for people not to talk about these experiences. Keller doesn’t talk about the thorn until 23:00. For the Christian, strength and weakness are always together. Our hearts will take any success, any good thing, and will use it for self-justification and exaltation. When we have experiences of God, like Paul, we say, “I am hot stuff, I’ve been to heaven.” It was wise of Paul to not tell us what the thorn was because we can generalize his experience to whatever we are going through. Keller shares of a turning point in his life where he had been failing a lot and it occurred to him that God loved him just as much—it was based on God’s goodness, not on his own goodness. God is our shield; whenever pain comes into our life, God has let it through for a good reason and is shielding you from something worse. Paul’s thorn is a messenger from Satan. Just like emails have attachments, our hardships have messages attached to them (e.g. you are a failure, God doesn’t love you). God also has a message: my power is made perfect in weakness. When hardship comes, do we listen to God’s message or Satan’s message? If you are single and are getting rejected by the opposite sex, there’s a message from Satan that says you are worthless. God’s message: you are worthy because of my grace, not by what he thinks of you. Once you believe in God’s message, and your sense of self-worth is not determined by your love life, you become a person of power. Which message you listen to will determine whose purposes are realized in your life. Jonathan Edwards (I could not find this quote online): “The Bible does not teach Christians are safe from evil things. The Bible says Christians are safe from the evil of all things.”**Video on the pottery that is broken and put back together:http://www.wimp.com/what-the-japanese-art-of-kintsugi-can-teach-us-about-life/http://www.wimp.com/embracingdamage/**Joshua Ryan Butler:

The Bible is not a cotton candy book; it deals with the hard and gritty realities of our world, the trauma and tragedies that plague our evening news. And the God it proclaims is wild and untamed, with a relentless, furious love that will stop at nothing to bring back his broken creation.**From “The Practice of the Presence of God”:God knows very well what we need and that all He does is for our good. If we knew how much He loves us, we would always be ready to face life - both its pleasures and its troubles. You know, the difficulties of life do not have to be unbearable. It is the way that we look at them - through faith or unbelief. We must be convinced that our Father is full of love for us and that He only permits trials to come our way for our own good. Let us occupy ourselves entirely in knowing God. The more we know Him, the more we will desire to know Him. As love increases with knowledge, the more we know God, the more we will truly love Him. And we will learn to love Him equally in times of distress or in times of great joy…Faith gave Brother Lawrence a firm hope in God's goodness, confidence in His providence, and the ability to completely abandon himself into God's hands. He never worried about what would become of him; rather, he threw himself into the arms of infinite mercy. The more desperate things appeared to him, the more he hoped - like a rock beaten by the waves of the sea and yet settling itself more firmly in the midst of the tempest. This is why he said that the greatest glory one can give to God is to entirely mistrust one's own strength, relying completely on God's protection. This constitutes a sincere recognition of one's weakness and a true confession of the omnipotence of the Creator. Brother Lawrence saw nothing but the plan of God in everything that happened to him. Because he loved the will of the Lord so much, he was able to bring his own will into total submission to it. This kept him in continuous peace. Even when told of some great evil in the world, He would simply raise his heart to God, trusting that He would work it to the good of the general order. Even when asked what he would answer if God gave him the choice of living or dying and going to heaven immediately, Brother Lawrence said that he would leave the choice to God, because he had nothing else to do but wait until God showed him His will…Another characteristic of Brother Lawrence was an extraordinary firmness, which in another walk of life would have been called fearlessness. It revealed a magnanimous soul, elevated above the fear and the hope of all that was not God. He coveted nothing; nothing astonished him; he feared nothing. This stability of his soul came from the same source as all his other virtues. He had an exalted concept of God which made him think of Him as sovereign Justice and infinite Goodness. He was confident that God would not deceive him and that He would do him only good, because he was resolved never to displease Him and to do everything possible out of love for Him.

**I was talking to a woman at ICF who had been going through some very painful circumstances, but things had turned around and started getting better. She told me something like “I know God is with me and working in this painful time because He’s delivered me and brought me to a better place.” I thought to myself “That’s how you know that God is with you and is working in your circumstance? What if things didn’t turn around for good? What if God allowed you to languish in the painful struggle for years? Would that be evidence that He wasn’t with you and loving you?”**Bryan Chapell says:With the rest of the nation I listened for the reports of the rescuers’ progress as they fought rock, equipment failure, and time to rescue eighteen- month-old Jessica McClure from a well shaft in Midland, Texas. Left alone for a few minutes in her aunt’s backyard on a bright October day, the little girl had playfully dangled her feet over an innocent-appearing, eight-inch opening in the ground. When she tried to stand up, she fell into the darkness. With one leg up and the other down, Jessica was wedged in the narrow shaft above the water but twenty-two feet below the ground. Rescuers drilled a twenty-nine-foot vertical shaft parallel to the well and then bored a five- foot-long horizontal tunnel through solid rock to reach her. It took far more time than any had anticipated—fifty-eight hours. Medical personnel grew increasingly alarmed and warned that dehydration and shock were becoming greater dangers than the entrapment itself. Finally, rescuers reached Jessica, but they could not pull her out. The way her body was wedged in the shaft foiled their efforts. The health technicians conferred, checked the little girl’s vital signs one more time, and then gave these awful orders: “Pull hard! She does not have more time. You may have to break her to save her.” When the rescuers pulled the last time, Jessica came free without additional injury. But when I heard the instructions of the medical technicians to the rescuers, I could not help but relate them to a sermon I was writing. I was explaining how God so desires the salvation of his children that he will even allow them to experience hurt that will convince them of their need of him. As cruel as this providence may seem, it actually expresses a great love because God, who knows that no one’s hours on this earth are unlimited, is willing to break us to save us. I believed deeply in what I was saying, but I recognized that the words seemed hollow—dry doctrine that might communicate an uncaring

attitude for those who were experiencing such trials or for those with unsaved loved ones who might have to experience the same. **A boy was at the doctor’s office and needed to get a shot (injection). The boy was scared of the pain. The doctor said, “This may hurt, but I won’t do anything to harm you.”**This is a quote from a letter from a friend that had been going through a difficult and confusing time: God loves me and us so much that He is continuing to disrupt my life and shake me away from my idols and toward Himself and to give more clarity about who He has made me to be and what following Him in the coming years should look like. **I heard a podcast story by a guy named Jack Lincoln. He was Mormon, but almost everything in his story is the same as us. He grew up with lots of faith. At one point, an elder prayed for him and laid hands on him and said Jack had the gift of healing. Jack had a son that was severely autistic. He had faith to pray for his son’s healing. He didn’t doubt at all. He prayed and prayed, and his son was never healed. Jack talked to different people he respected in his church, and they all told him that God had given him this hardship as a test. Someone said: This is not a test to see if you have enough faith to heal your son, but it’s a test to see if you have enough faith to continue to love a God who would do this to your son. Jack eventually left the faith altogether. He said, “My God was a God who loved me, not someone who would play with my son like that. And as I started questioning things, all the beliefs, all the things that had made me who I am, fell through my fingertips, and I felt lost. Was God there for me all those times? Obviously not. If you follow the Christian beliefs, every Christian believes that God is unchanging. So if he’s going to be this [cruel] right now, He was all along. He wasn’t there for me.”**“We may not be able to control everything that happens to us, but we can always control the story we tell around it, and choose to seek beauty even in the ugliest situations.” – Jo Harvey, “Rewriting The Story Of My Addiction,” TEDxUniversityofNevada**Rafiki in the Lion King says: “The past hurts, but you can either run from it or learn from it.”**Stanley - SeeTheWorld_Part5_ThroughtheEyesofaLion see suffering through God's eyes – This isn’t too deep but is simple and effective. He tells the story of his five-year-old daughter dying. He talks about heaven and 2 Cor 4:16-18, keeping our eyes on what is not seen.**Stanley - Bad Boys of Easter, Part 3 thief on the cross that converts – Most of this sermon is describing Jesus’ crucifixion and how the thief converts. But there is some at the end and beginning about how people turn away from God because of the pain in their lives. The message is to be like the thief: reach out to God in the midst of your pain.**Beck Weathers is they guy who was left for dead on Everest and somehow survived. It damaged his vision. He lost toes. He lost fingers on one hand and up to his wrist on the other from frostbite. He said: “It turned out to be maybe the best thing that has happened to me in the last 20 years. It saved my marriage. It saved my relationship with my kids. And I live much more in the present. I am much more at peace. If I knew every bit of pain, even bit of loss, I’d do it again in the heartbeat.” Once we get to heaven, I think we’ll look back at our pain and be able to say the same thing.**John Piper on how he wants to be able to empathize with those that are suffering:Whether or not a pastor succeeds in this depends partly on the measure of his own life experience. It is hard if you have never walked through anything horrible to get inside the skin of those who have experienced something horrible, which is why pastors should never begrudge their own suffering. God knows what he is doing in creating shepherds that can empathize with sheep. And it depends on the Spirit-given powers of imagination to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, because you never really are in their exact situation. There is something unique about every suffering, and you can’t be in it all, but you can plead with the Holy Spirit for the miracle to try to get into the head and the heart of those who are suffering.**Steve Norman:Paul risked his wellbeing and personal safety to go to the mat for those he loves. So Paul's list of horrible experiences (2 Cor 12) isn't a tirade about the nature of evil, the miscarriage of justice, or a quest for self-vindication. It's a celebration of a bold love that embraces suffering for the glory of God and the good of others. …Suffering is constant reality for preachers: in the world, in the church, in our own lives. Our instinct is to avoid it at every turn, insulating

ourselves and those with love from the anguish. But Scripture reminds us that self-protection is rooted in fear. Redemptive suffering is firmly anchored in faith and love.**Charlie Dates, in an article on the lament Psalms:life, even when shrouded in despair and lament, ought to find its way to the place of praise. The journey of faith moves toward praise of God. **Keon Johnson, talking about workouts with UVA football being hard: "We know every day is going to be tough, so you have to bring the mindset that it's going to hurt sometimes and you have to fight through it, and it's going to help in the long run."**We often praise God when good things happen to us but not when we suffer:"Hallelujah! God is great. Our God is Faithful." This is how Deputy President William Ruto reacted after the International Criminal Court (ICC) declared a mistrial in the case facing him and former radio journalist Joshua arap Sang.**Analogy for God suffering with us: In Hobbit, when Bilbo goes down to the bottom of the Misty Mountain, Golemn is there (a miserable creature who wants to eat him). When you descend into the depths of despair, the lowest/darkest place of life, you don’t find a miserable creature waiting to devour you; you find a Savior there to assure you that He understands because He’s been there. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Even if no one else understands your pain, Jesus does. In heaven, He’s still the Lamb who was slain, still has marks of suffering, still bearing our grief. His cry “why have you forsaken” is not the last words of the gospel because of vindication and deliverance for Jesus and for us. It’s not the last words for us either because God will have us follow Christ’s footsteps. Just like God brought Him through apparent God-forsakenness to victory, God will eventually give us vindication/deliverance/victory over suffering, even if He has to bring us through death to get there.**On September 2, 1945 the documents of surrender officially ending World War II were signed by the Japanese and designated representatives of allied nations. General Douglas MacArthur officiated the ceremony aboard the USS Missouri and was the last to sign on behalf of the United States. MacArthur, flanked by his military colleagues, took his Parker fountain pen and simply signed his first name "Douglas." He then passed the pen to General Wainwright, who signed "Mac." MacArthur then handed the pen to General Percival, who signed "Arthur." This unusual procedure was MacArthur's way of honoring the two United States generals who had suffered severe persecution as prisoners of war. They had persevered, and now they were allowed to share in the glory of victory. In Romans 8:17 Paul describes the future of those who persevere in the spiritual battles we fight this side of heaven. He calls them joint-heirs. Those who share in the sufferings of Christ will also share in his glory.**From a talk by Terry Warner:How can we ever throw off these bands and chains [of greed and anger and conflict] and make things better in this world? May I suggest again: in Jesus’ way. Rather than resisting evil, He suffered. Rather than compromise, He suffered. Rather than rejecting any of us—though every possible provocation to do so was laid upon Him—He suffered. He outlasted all these provocations. He conquered the forcefulness of force. He defeated all the pressures that push humanity toward enmity and discord. He absorbed the terrible poison of vengeance into Himself and metabolized it by His love. He broke the grip of death. **Lyrics of song about how this world is broken:http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/rascalflatts/itsnotsupposedtogolikethat.html**In an article by Kate Bowler, who was battling cancer, about God and suffering and healing and why the prosperity gospel isn’t true. She summarized everything with this statement: Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.**Article on the glory of the cross, the path the victory leads through suffering (the weird thing is that if you open this from google search, you can read the whole thing, but if you open it directly, it only lets you see a preview):http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/october/glory-of-cross.html**Brenda Salter McNeil tells the story of a diverse group of Christians who traveled across the United States visiting some of the places known for their racist past. McNeil writes: One of the stops on the trip is a museum with a collection of graphic photographs documenting the horrific lynchings of black people in America … Looking at photo after photo of young black men hanging from trees, or

mothers hanging with their children, with white people often looking on in celebration, was intensely disturbing for the group. Most of the members couldn't speak. They got back on the bus in complete silence. There was palpable tension. Finally, the white members broke the silence. Understandably, they were eager to defend themselves and put some distance between themselves and the immense brutality of what they had just witnessed. They hadn't committed these terrible crimes, after all, and it was all such a long time ago. Then a black student stood up, in obvious pain and yet still calm, collected and quiet, and announced her conviction that all white people are evil. Shouting and disagreement erupted, and it was unclear how the group would be able to move forward from this experience. Finally, a white female student stood up and said, "I don't know what to do with what I just saw. I can't fix your pain, and I can't take it away, but I can see it. And I will work the rest of my life to fight for you and for your children so they won't experience it." She started to weep, and her mascara streaked down her cheeks, leaving dark trails. The bus was silent, and then one of the group leaders said aloud, "She's crying black tears." She was indeed crying black tears. The black students on that bus now felt that someone identified with their pain and the experience of their people, and it was a profound moment of identification for all of them. **Brene Brown on returning to faith in mid-life because her life was full of pain: “I went back to church, thinking that it would be like an epidural, like it would take the pain away…Faith and church was not an epidural for me at all; it was like a midwife who just stood next to me saying ‘Push, it’s supposed to hurt a little bit.’… I believe God is love. And it makes total sense to me that Jesus would have to be the Son of God because people would want love to be like unicorns and rainbows. And so then you send Jesus and people go, “Oh my God, love is hard, love is sacrifice, love is eating with the sick, love is trouble, love is rebellious.” And so I was listening to a Leonard Cohen song and it said “Love is not a victory march; It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah.” And to me, that makes sense. I got it… Love is not easy. Love is not like hearts and bows. Love is very controversial… In order for forgiveness to really happen, something has to die... Whether it’s your expectations of a person, there has to be a death for forgiveness to happen… In all of these faith communities where forgiveness is easy and love is easy, there’s not enough blood on the floor to make sense of that… I thought faith would say “I’ll take away the pain the discomfort.” But what it ended up saying is “I’ll sit with you in it.” I never thought until I found it that would be enough, but it’s perfect. I don’t feel alone in it anymore… [talks about childhood] We had a horrible loss in our neighborhood growing up. A boy died in an accident in his home and the mom was diagnosed with cancer shortly thereafter. And at the funeral they said something like “This is not a time to grieve, that’s selfish, this is a time to celebrate because this child is with God.” And that just pissed me off. I just couldn’t even make sense of that. And then on the way home my mom said, “I just want to be really clear with you that this is not a time to celebrate. If you are sad, that’s OK. Because be assured that God is grieving today too. God is weeping too.” I was like, “that changes everything.” I just think for me, it’s just about being with you. And it can’t take away the pain, and when set that up as the parameter, that does not work. Jesus wept. Love weeps. **"I studied to be a priest and that turned out to be a disaster. I tried working on a farm, they didn't like me. I worked on a boat, it sank ! " - Robert Munsch ( Children's Author of over 40 million sold books )**ffd_20150812 Finding Hope Through Family Tragedy – Shares his story. They had an unhappy family where the parents fought a lot and the father was a bit abusive. In HS he turned to alcohol and girls to try to find happiness. When his brother was in HS, he died in a drunk driving accident. He became a Christian and his life was transformed for the better. **mark_talbot_disability_conference, Longing for Wholeness Chronic Suffering and Christian Hope.mp3This is a good talk. A couple salient points… He spends time talking about how disability is bad, refuting what some people say that no one is really disabled because we are all messed up in one way or another. He spends quite a while proving the point that God is responsible for our suffering, for evil. He says this is important because if you don’t believe this, you’ll start to believe that when you suffer, you have fallen out of God’s hand, we are no longer taken care of by his love, that he can’t help us. One of the reasons that God allows so much suffering is to show how bad sin is, to pronounce a sentence on sin: the curses of Gen 3 declare that creation will be broken. God disciplines us for our good; the way that he punishes a son is different than the way he punishes an enemy. He punishes us as a child with no wrath because Jesus took the wrath. Our suffering makes clear makes clear the heinousness and seriousness of sin. All the sufferings of life are like a funeral procession where we are lamenting sin and death. Reads a few verses from Ps 119 about how God brings us his mercy through afflictions. Rom 8, good will overcome and compensate for our suffering. There are goods that cannot exist without evil. Courage won’t exist without danger and fear. In heaven it won’t just be the case that there is so much good to make us forget evil. We will be able to see how

God brought good from the evil, how the suffering achieves glory. We will see how we have a greater good than we could have had without the suffering. He learns from Psalms of lament: The Psalmist never complains about God to others; they complain to God; they keep their relationship with God going, trusting in him. A couple times in his talk (e.g. 57:47), he’d be reading scripture or making an important point, and he’d interject “listen to this” to get the listener’s attention.**Popular comedian and talk show host Stephen Colbert is Catholic. During a recent interview with GQ magazine, he revealed that his parents and 10 siblings are all Catholics, and they have been taught earlier on to give thanks to everything that comes into their lives, including suffering. So when his father and two brothers lost their lives in a plane crash when he was just 10 years old, Colbert had to rely on his faith in order to overcome that ordeal. Excerpts from article:He lifted his arms as if to take in the office, the people working and laughing outside his door, the city and the sky, all of it. “And the world,” he said. “It's so…lovely. I'm very grateful to be alive, even though I know a lot of dead people.” The urge to be grateful, he said, is not a function of his faith. It's not “the Gospel tells us” and therefore we give thanks. It is what he has always felt: grateful to be alive. “And so that act, that impulse to be grateful, wants an object. That object I call God. Now, that could be many things. I was raised in a Catholic tradition. I'll start there. That's my context for my existence, is that I am here to know God, love God, serve God, that we might be happy with each other in this world and with Him in the next—the catechism. That makes a lot of sense to me. I got that from my mom. And my dad. And my siblings.” He was tracing an arc on the table with his fingers and speaking with such deliberation and care. “I was left alone a lot after Dad and the boys died.... And it was just me and Mom for a long time,” he said. “And by her example am I not bitter. By her example. She was not. Broken, yes. Bitter, no.” Maybe, he said, she had to be that for him. He has said this before—that even in those days of unremitting grief, she drew on her faith that the only way to not be swallowed by sorrow, to in fact recognize that our sorrow is inseparable from our joy, is to always understand our suffering, ourselves, in the light of eternity. What is this in the light of eternity? Imagine being a parent so filled with your own pain, and yet still being able to pass that on to your son. “It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.” I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.” “It's not the same thing as wanting it to have happened,” he said. “But you can't change everything about the world. You certainly can't change things that have already happened.” The next thing he said I wrote on a slip of paper in his office and have carried it around with me since. It's our choice, whether to hate something in our lives or to love every moment of them, even the parts that bring us pain. “At every moment, we are volunteers.”**“The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”― M. Scott Peck **Rudy Giuliani was the mayor of NYC and was running for the senate when he found out that he had cancer, so he decided not to run. He said: “When you have cancer, it forces you to confront your limits. It forces you to confront your mortality. You begin to realize that you’re not a superman; you’re just a human being.”**We were chatting with the Wegners and their son Joel piped up with an astute comment:Our problems aren’t just from our hardships but from our responses to our hardships.**God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. While what we call “our own life” remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make “our own life” less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness? (CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 96–97)**

CS Lewis asked, “What do people mean when they say ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never even been to a dentist?”(A Grief Observed [1966], 36)**When his wife Joy’s cancer was taking its toll, CS Lewis wrote to a friend, “We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us. We are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be” (Letters of C. S. Lewis [Harcourt, 1966], 477).**Rob Bell, Drops Like Stars – He tells a story about a man he knows with two sons. Both of the sons wives were expecting a baby. One of the sons’ babies was born stillborn. All the family gathered in the hospital to grieve. Their baby was born fine (across the hall from the other room) in the hospital. All the family gathered to celebrate. In the same hallway in the same year. We live in this hallway, going back and forth between the rooms of joy and grief. Talks about story of prodigal son (has some funny lines). The older son’s conception of the father is that the father hasn’t given him enough or been generous. The father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.’ God is generous to us, but we don’t see it. Have you ever watched a movie that, instead of ending on a happy note, leaves things unresolved? The story of the prodigal son ends unresolved; we don’t know if the older brother enters the party. All of us have things in life that don’t end well, that are unresolved. Many people have wrestled with the question of why there’s so much suffering. If we set aside the “why” question, and ask: What now? The art of disruption. He reads the college application question: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/i-am-a-dynamic-figure/. It’s interesting not just because of the content, but because it’s on a college application, which is very serious. (gives more examples of unexpected things.) We all have a nice plan for how we expect life to go. When a disruption comes, some sort of suffering, the tomorrow that we were planning on isn’t there anymore. We say things like, “I never would have imagined that would happen.” Most people, when they talk about key points of change in their life history, talk about suffering and disruptions, and how it forced them to imagine a whole new tomorrow. It’s brutal and gut wrenching, but within it are all these latent seeds of creativity and imagination. You had to come up with a whole new tomorrow because the one you were planning is gone. In the movie Old School, Will Ferrell plays a guy that should be having a happy middle class life, but realizes he is profoundly bored. At one point he talks about having a busy Saturday going to Home Depot to get wallpaper and flooring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZYsoEwWNK0. None of us wants to have devastating suffering. But some of us have the despair created by no suffering, by boredom. This could be called death by wallpaper and flooring. Talks about Scot Robinson, who was a famous, wealthy person in New York, but was bored. Then he quit and gave his life to helping poor people around the world. If we don’t find some suffering and do something about it, we might become miserable. Talks for a bit about how we all have a façade where we say we are fine but aren’t. Suffering has a way of making us honest, the art of honesty. It can expose the emptiness inside of us that we’ve been ignoring. The art of elimination: Great artists understand that it’s not just how much you can cram into a piece, but knowing what must be taken away. He gives some examples and quotes. Nike swoosh is simple. He gives everyone a bar of soap under their seat. He tells story of a night where he invited some artist friends over, and they all carved bars of soap. It’s about carving away stuff. They got at something that was in there the whole time. When people find out they have a life-ending illness, they don’t say things like, “I’m finally going to trim those hedges.” They talk about family and friends. They use words like “forgive” and “legacy”. They are able to distinguish between what matters and what doesn’t. Suffering helps us remove the superfluous clutter, so we can get at the endless possibilities that have been in there the whole time. The art of solidarity: He says he sprained his wrist. It wasn’t that big of a deal, but it opened him up to be much more compassionate toward others with physical ailments. What is it about suffering that creates a sort of solidarity that wealth and health can never create? This especially applies to common suffering. Two people that meet each other that have suffered in the same way have an instant bond that two people with similar successes wouldn’t. At 1:13:45, he asks people to stand up who have been affected by cancer. He asks people what they are feeling (people say out loud things like “I’m not alone”). In every city, when he does this, there’s a feeling of unity among total strangers. It’s not the same feeling as if he said, “Everyone who owns a Toyota, stand up.” If you show me two dads with very little in common (e.g. from different ends of the political spectrum), who each has a daughter with an eating disorder, they will have a bond that transcends all of their differences. Gives a couple more examples. Suffering unites us in profound ways that nothing else can. He asks someone in the audience if they have a necklace with a cross. He holds up the cross while he’s talking for the next while. The cross is a sign of the brutal reign of the Roman empire, who created peace by saying, “Caesar is Lord” or you die. Jesus introduced the world to a whole new kind of peace that didn’t come through coercive violence but through sacrificial love. His resurrection was a vindication that this was in fact the way of God. At the heart of the Christian story is the insistence that God is not distant and indifferent, but that He’s somehow present right in the midst of the worst kind of suffering a human can endure. We call this divine-in-flesh the incarnation, God in the flesh. We can get angry with God and say things like, “If only you walked a mile in my shoes.” The cross is God’s way of saying, “I have.” The cross is God’s way of saying, “I know how you feel.” The ultimate act of solidarity. (1:30:00) He asks everyone to write on their index card, with their non-writing hand, “I

know how you feel.” He says, “If you have ever been to the funeral of someone you love, lift up your card; make eye contact with someone that is also holding up a card and exchange cards with them.” He does the same thing with “if you have ever suffered the destructive consequences of an addition (yours or someone elses)”. If you have ever stared at a stack of bills and don’t know how you are going to pay… If you’ve ever been betrayed. Often our first reaction when we suffer is: we want answers, and we want them now. That comes from: if I just had a clear-cut explanation of why, that would alleviate this pain that I am holding that I don’t know what to do with. Why did that cell mutate and start to form cancer? Why did the car run off the road? Why did that person start getting so unreasonable and cruel? God usually doesn’t give us answers. But he does give us something else to help the healing, which is presence and solidarity, when you find out you are not alone. That’s why if we are suffering and someone shows up and gives us platitudes like, “just trust in the Lord, he works all things for good,” it can make you feel worse. But the person who just sits with you, holds your hand, and cries with you—their flesh and blood solidarity and presence it what makes the difference. Later you think, “Robert was there with me through the whole thing. It was awful, but I wasn’t alone, and that made all the difference.” That’s why the cross has an enduring resonance across ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. It speaks to us at some sort of deep, profound, primal level. It’s an iconic message to us, God saying, “I know how you feel; you are not alone.” He talks a while about the difference of ownership and possession (I didn’t find this compelling). You can possess something but not own it. He talks about Paul’s sufferings, persecuted by the Jewish leadership. Joke: In those days, religious people who called other people heretics were mean and nasty, unlike today. 2 Cor 6:4-10. Paul had nothing yet possessed everything. He shares a story about visiting Africa and ministering to people that were suffering from Aids. There was a church service of people worshiping God with joy and celebration. You can own lots of stuff but not possess anything much. There are people that are dirt poor and have lived through hell, but they possess everything. Life is not found in ownership but in possession. Sometimes it takes suffering to learn this, to know the difference. He talks about an art experiment where a teacher told some students to make as many pieces as possible in a given time, and some others to take their time and make one great piece. The students making many pieces did better art. “What every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential.” Rob goes to a counsellor. Sometimes he gets into a mood where he’s beating himself up, thinking about his failures and shortcomings. The counsellor reaches into a drawer and gets out a sign that says, “the God who wastes nothing.” Nothing is wasted in the divine economy. You are free to live with the heavy burden of regrets and mistakes, or you can see this as an opportunity to grow and learn. Richard Rohr talks about how in Native American rug weaving, they often will purposefully leave a blemish, like some frayed threads that look like they should be cut off, because they believe the spirit enters through the blemish. Christianity teaches us that it’s in the worst parts of life, when your life is smashed and the future you imagined is no longer possible, that God is present, and not only that, but does his best work, bringing out of the old creation new creation, bringing out of Friday a Sunday, bringing resurrection out of death. When we suffer, this too will shape me. We will become bitter or we will become better. We will shut down or we will open up. We will hold onto our expectations, our plans, our assumptions about how things are supposed to go. Or we will open up to the idea that there’s a new tomorrow, not the one we planned on, and that in that new tomorrow, we might actually be OK. When people live with that kind of trust (God will bring resurrection from this death), it changes everything, and they become better. Abraham Joshua Heschel said: "Above all, remember that the meaning of life is to live it as if it were a work of art. You're not a machine. When you're young, start working on this great work of art called your own existence." He talked earlier about the novel “Absolute Truths” by Susan Howatch, but I didn’t write down notes because I have already in another sermon. Later in the book there’s a woman who doesn’t believe in God, but is a clay sculptor. She says: “But no matter how much the mess and distortion make you want to despair, you can’t abandon the work cause you’re chained to the bloody thing, it’s absolutely woven into your soul and you know you can never rest until you’ve brought truth out of all the distortion and beauty out of all the mess – but it’s agony, agony, agony – while simultaneously being the most wonderful and rewarding experience in the world – and that’s the creative process so few people understand. It involves an indestructible sort of infidelity, an insane sort of hope, an indescribable sort of… well, it’s love isn’t it? There’s no other word for it… and don’t throw Mozart at me… I know he claimed his creative process was no more than a form of automatic writing, but the truth was he sweated and slaved and died young giving birth to all that music. He poured himself out and suffered. That’s the way it is. That’s creation. You can’t create without waste and mess and sheer undiluted slog. You can’t create without pain. It’s all part of the process, it’s in the nature of things. So in the end every major disaster, every tiny error, every wrong turning, every fragment of discarded clay, all the blood, sweat, and tears – everything has meaning. I give it meaning. I reuse, reshape, recast all that goes wrong so that in the end nothing is wasted and nothing is without significance and nothing ceases to be precious to me.” This is a great quote about art but also about life. He tells the story of being at the beach, and having a day that was “ruined” because it was raining. He was standing next to a sliding glass door with his nephew watching the rain hit the deck. His 3-year old nephew kept saying, “Stars, stars, stars.” He asked his sister-in-law why the boy kept saying this. She said it’s because he thinks that when the drop of water hits the ground and splashes, it looks like a star. Rob ends by saying: May you see drops like stars.

*******Joel Thomas shares a story of his dad dying when Joel was 17 years old. His dad, named Glenn, was a godly man; he was Joel’s hero. People in their church told Joel that if he kept praying in faith and praying in Jesus name, his dad would be healed, because that’s what the Bible promises. So Joel prayed a lot, prayed in faith, and prayed in Jesus name, but his dad still died from cancer. So Joel struggled for years with doubt and anger at God, feeling like God had broken His promises. One of the things that helped him to turn around his faith and find healing is a conversation with his mom. They were talking about the night that his dad died. His dad was in a bed in their home and was getting to the point where they knew he would die any day. One evening they gathered around his bed and prayed for him and told him how much they loved him. He couldn’t even talk at this point. They went to bed, and he died during the night. But Joel’s mom stayed up with his dad and sat at his bedside, talking to him. In this conversation years later that brought healing to Joel’s heart, Joel asked his mom, what happened that night after we went to bed? She said that her husband was struggling, trying to hold on to life, because he didn’t want to leave his family. Her last words to her husband were, “Glenn, you have led us and taught us all these years that we don’t have to be afraid of what life brings our way because God is with us. I know you don’t want to leave us, but we’ll be OK, I promise, because God is with us.” Then he took his last breath. Right in the most difficult and painful moment of their lives, the presence of God was enough for those two people to have hope. Not that this made life easy. Their family experienced hardship for many years. Joel’s mom, who had been a stay-at-home mom for two decades, went back to work to support her family and help her kids get through college. But they made it, and saw God continue to support them through the hardship. Somehow Joel’s conversation with his mom, about her last conversation with her husband, was a turning point for Joel to see that God had been with them through the years, that even though God didn’t answer his prayer in the way he wanted, God had not forsaken them.**ffd_20140911 Discovering God in the Midst of Pain and Suffering, talk with Timothy Keller, Part 1 – At one point in the interview, Keller is asked why God allows so much pain and suffering. He bluntly replies, “I don’t know.” The Bible talks a lot about good things that suffering can do in our lives. For example, Augustine said our biggest problem was disordered loves. Suffering means that something valuable to us is threatened or taken away from us. This can force us to turn to God like never before. But there is so much suffering in the world, that we can’t understand everything that God is doing through suffering. What the Bible tells us about the good of suffering can’t justify the extent of it. If there were no evil and suffering, we’d never have some good things like courage and sacrifice. Rom 5:1-5 talks about how suffering leads to hope. What do you hope/rest in, depend on, what do you look to for your significance and security? Suffering helps us to hope in God as other things are stripped away. A doctor who spent half his career in India with the poor and half in the US says that people in India are far better at facing suffering with strength than people in the west. In India people expect it as a normal part of life. In the West we think we should be immune from suffering, that it’s not right or fair; we feel like it’s our birthright to live a life free from troubles. We think science has solved our problems. The book of Job: even though he complained, he never walked away from God, he never stopped talking to God and about God. It’s OK to be honest with God. At the end of the book God vindicates Job and says he did rightly. **ffd_20140911 Discovering God in the Midst of Pain and Suffering, talk with Timothy Keller, Part 2 – We have to get to the point that we will obey God even if he isn’t giving us all the benefits we want. Then we know we are actually serving him and not using him to get want we want. Suffering helps this happen. Satan asks God, “Does Job serve God for nothing? [i.e. Job is only serving you because you have given him good things, but he’ll turn his back if you take them away]”. Every world view has to explain suffering. One thing that is unique about the Christian view is that God became one of us to become vulnerable to suffering himself. God says: suffering matters so much to me that I am willing to endure it in order to end it. He understands our pain so he can be our high priest. Christianity, unlike other religions, doesn’t teach you go off into a spiritual bliss that is a consolation for our troubles here. It teaches that we will receive the restoration of the life we’ve lost here. This is guaranteed by the resurrection. Religions that teach karma say there’s no unjust suffering (e.g. reincarnation, you are paying for what you’ve done in the past). Christianity admits and affirms the existence of unjust suffering: good people suffer while bad people prosper. But God will make all things right in the long run. Even though we don’t totally understand suffering, it must be the case that it will somehow bring more glory to God in the long run. If you have a dream that your family is murdered and then wake up to see it’s not true, you can love them and appreciate them even more. Having lost creation and getting it back, the history of evil will be like a bad dream, the power of the future glory will be more real than the evil of the past. So the fact that the current evil makes the future glory better is the ultimate defeat/overturning of evil. If the evil enhances the future joy and glory, then it’s contributing to its own demise. There are many different kinds of suffering. Our response: there is a core that is the same for various things and then there are differences (e.g. forgiving if you’ve been betrayed is different than dealing with the fear of not having enough money). The core that is always the same is faithful perseverance and trust. Martin Loyd Jones wrote a book called “Spiritual depression,

causes and cures”. There’s a chapter called “In God’s gymnasium.” The Greek word used in Heb 12 for God disciplining/training us has the same root where we get the word gymnasium. As you do an exercise (e.g. lifting weights), you feel like you are getting weaker. But it’s actually working the body in a way that in the long run it will be stronger. The important thing, if you are working out, is to go through it, submit to the process (and the wisdom of others that have gone through it before). The core of our response to suffering is to stay faithful; Don’t stop reading the Bible, praying, fellowshipping, obeying, **Andy Stanley In The Meantime, Part 2 - Accept adversity as a gift from God, Pauls thorn in the flesh, it gives us comfort to know that God is with us, unanswered prayer, God has a higher purpose, his promise is that his grace is sufficient, **Andy Stanley In The Meantime, Part 3 - Phil 4, contentment, Paul stayed faithful to God while he was in prison and wrote letters that ended up changing the world, we have no idea what God may be up to through your faithfulness, what hangs in the balance, **Andy Jones In The Meantime, Part 4 – the other Andy tells his family story, they have two kids both with autism, he wondered if God was mad at him, John 9 man born blind, this happened that the works of God might be displayed, focus on what’s right rather than what’s wrong, His view has switched from seeing autism as a curse to a blessing, God is present here, God can bring something beautiful from the worst situations.**Andy Stanley In The Meantime, Part 5 – James 1, count it all joy when you suffer, let perseverance finish its work and leads to maturity, God is honored by persevering faith even when life is terrible, it’s easy to believe when things are going well, there’s a bigger plan, God will use what he doesn’t remove.**Andy Stanley In The Meantime, Part 6 – The fellowship of suffering, those that have suffered are uniquely qualified to comfort those that are suffering. 2 Cor 2 “[God] comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.” The “so that” in that verse gives a purpose in suffering. We can endure suffering when we feel like there’s a good reason. One of those reasons is: God comforts us so we can comfort others. It brings purpose to our pain. Here are detailed notes I took when I was preaching on a similar subject. One of the difficult things about being a pastor is that people come to you in times of pain. You are expected to know what to do in the midst of tragedy and loss, and there’s nothing really you can do. You’re expected to have answers to questions, but all of us have the same questions. There’s no quick fix or easy answers. The fellowship of suffering: There is a natural bond between those that have suffered deeply and similarly. Two people could meet for the first time, and if they find out they’ve had a similar tragedy, they can immediately experience intimacy. If you haven’t suffered like that, you can try to give words of comfort to a friend, but it’s not the same as when it comes from someone that has gone through that. There’s a thing that happens that transcends education or color of skin or age. Those who have suffered are uniquely qualified to comfort those who are suffering. When someone who’s been there sits down and offers comfort to someone that is still there, something very powerful takes place. Comfort from those that have been comforted is life giving to those who need comfort. When someone is in the midst of terrible pain, they are thinking, “I’m never going to be happy again, there’s no purpose to this, life is not going to turn out the way I was planning, I don’t know how I can go on.” When they are connected to someone that has been there, that has survived it, there is a transfer of hope that is so powerful, almost tangible, beyond just empathy or sharing a Bible verse. Andy Stanley, as a pastor has seen this many times, where he’s trying to comfort someone in pain, and not having much of an effect. And then someone walks in the room that everyone knows has been there, and they have an effect much more powerful than the pastor who shares a verse and says a prayer. Giving comfort is also life-giving to the comforter as well. When you have come through a very dark place, and you are able to encourage someone who is going through it, (here is someone that is facing what I faced), it is life giving because in that moment when you look back on that horrible time you went through, or maybe you are still going through, suddenly there is purpose, a sense that something good can come from this. You bring a sense of credibility and authority that no amount of bible knowledge can bring. It brings purpose to the pain. Andy talks about how the writers of the NT have credibility because they suffered a lot; talks about other places in 2 Cor where Paul describes his suffering. Yet Paul describes God as comfort and compassion (V 3). V 4 “so that”: we want it to say “so that we can be delivered from whatever is afflicting us.” But God often just gives us comfort instead of changing our circumstance. I’d rather him change it instead of comfort me in it. God comforts us so we can comfort others. The sufferings of Christ (V 5) don’t just mean suffering on the cross, but everything he experienced: he got hot/cold/lonely/abandoned/betrayed. Our capacity to comfort is determined by the degree to which we’ve suffered. We can walk into the room and be the person that says, “I know what you feel, but let me assure you, there is life on the other side. Do not give up hope.” These are great verses to remember because all of us at certain times of life will go through seasons of terrible pain. If you remember

them, they will be life giving because it gives a specific purpose for your pain, and this might be the first thing you can hold onto to believe that there’s a reason. This might be baby step #1 in answering the question, why did God allow, why didn’t he answer your prayer. He introduces that he’s going to give real-life examples: these are the kinds of stories that remind us that these aren’t just words on a page; this is a real dynamic that really works and makes a big difference; it brings purpose to our pain. Andy then (30:00) gives examples of people he knows who have suffered and gone on to help others. These are people that say “I’m not going to bury my sorrows or waste my sorrows; I am going to leverage my pain for the sake of others for whom I am uniquely qualified to step in and say, I’ve been there, I understand that, and there’s life on the other side.” This will instill purpose in your pain and give life to your soul. This truth will carry you through your times of pain. **God uses interruptions, detours, and adverse circumstances to advance his kingdom:http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/sermons/christs-purpose-in-evangelism**In Paul’s last letter, he says: The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and will bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom. (2 Tim 4:18). Considering the terrible things that Paul went through (beatings, imprisonment, etc.), his definition of “rescue” must be different than mine. When I read verses about God keeping us safe from harm, I don’t know how to believe it since horrible things happen to believers. Maybe it’s talking about harm in a spiritual sense.**Helmut Thielicke was a German theologian. He was in Stutgart during WW2, when Stutgart got bombed. His family packed up all their belongings in a cart/wagon and were trying to move to a different city. They were headed to the train station, when a drawer containing all their china dishes opened up, and it all fell out onto the road and smashed. He jumped down and picked up what could be salvaged, and then kicked the broken pieces off the road. A couple minutes later, there was a huge bomb explosion on the road several hundred meters in front of them. Recounting the event, he said: If it had not been for our mishap with the china, we would have probably been at exactly that spot when the bomb exploded. Sometimes the Lord smashes our valuables in order to preserve our life. **Clay Scroggins talked about a friend of his who has debilitating neck pain. He asked some Christian friends to gather and pray for him. Before they prayed, one of them asked, “What do you think God is trying to teach you through this pain?” He didn’t like the question. But he thought about it later and said that the question changed everything for him. He started thinking about it in terms of looking for the blessing in the pain. He realized that God was using it to shape his character. But he never would have realized it if he hadn’t started looking at it through the lens of “what is God teaching me through this”.**Sheri Rose Shepherd was an author and speaker, doing conferences about how to raise godly sons. She and her husband got separated, and her son (19 years old) was so hurt that he left the faith and got into drugs/alcohol. Her 7-year old son would fall asleep at night crying, asking, “Why doesn’t God answer our prayers for our family.” Sheri felt completely abandoned by God; she was doing what she felt like God called her to do, and her life was completely falling apart; she felt like God wasn’t protecting her and honoring her obedience. It was embarrassing. She felt like God said to her: you need to obey me and trust me no matter what; you need to lay down your dream of having a perfect little life and perfect little family; I gave my life for you and I don’t owe you anything more, but that should be enough for you to follow me; you can’t control other people and their choices; you can only control yourself and you have to answer to God some day. She kept her faith. She felt like she needed to faithfully lay one stone upon another from the wreckage of her life and carry on. She told her son that. A few months later, he said to her: if you are going to follow Christ when no prayers are answered, with God doing nothing else for you, then so am I. He turned his life back to Christ and went into full time ministry. Her husband also saw it, and it convinced him to turn things around and work on their marriage, and they got back together.**“Every loss is a mini-death. Throughout life we experience many mini-deaths—all preparing us for the final one” – Carol O’Connor**All the following are from Paradox Uganda:We look for slivers of redemption in our deepest pain, believing that the ache signals a place where we feel the cross, and therefore where the cross is creating the all-things-new of the Kingdom.**One can not doubt evil when conversing with a skeletal teenage AIDS patient, when touching the wounds of a baby who will never walk.  And so we reach for faith as the evidence of all that is not seen, of redemptive endings and no more tears.  And some days, faith feels like a distant stretch.  But the very clear not-rightness of these cases raises the stakes.  Evil can not have the final say.  Holding on to love.

**Talking about Jesus’ dedication when he was a baby:This is the scene where Simeon recognizes the infant Jesus as a light for revelation for all people. Then more ominously, he predicts that Jesus will bring division, opposition, a decision point for many, a way of revealing their hearts. And lastly, he says to Mary, a sword will pierce your own soul too. Is that not the way of this life, as a mother, a pilgrim, a struggler? You see redemption coming, but a sword pierces your soul. Because redemption is not a theoretical concept. It is a process that is still unfolding the world over, and it involves people we love, and a piercing ache….This two-month Lent, let us be alert to the hidden work of God. To impossible situations turning out well. To celebration and hope, to open doors and new life. The transition from fasting to celebration is prayer. In our weakness, we ask. Consider a Lent this year, a season of abstaining from something good for the purpose of growing in deeper awareness of depending on God's power to resurrect us. A sword will pierce our souls, but we pray that the holy pain will heal, that the scar will be a reminder of glory. **Comparing peace to a river:I used to feel like a failure that I couldn’t banish that fear altogether – that I never felt “perfectly” peaceful – but I don’t feel that way any more. I’m learning to greet that sort of fear respectfully without bowing before it. I’m learning to use it as a reminder to turn toward gratitude rather than worry. And I’ve stopped expecting peace to look like the pristine silence that follows a midnight snowfall. I’m coming to appreciate a different sort of peace instead – a peace that pushes forward, rich with mud, swelling and splashing and alive with the music of water meeting rock.Peace like a river.**The Israelites are hungry. And God sends food, in the form of a seed-like dusting of flour that can be made into bread, with a flavor of honey. When the people walk out the first morning and see this substance spread over the landscape, they say "What is it"? Which sounds like "manna" in Hebrew I suppose, because that is how the food gets its name. Manna is a skeptical question. It was not immediately obvious to the wandering hungry Israelites that this was food. It wasn't the answer to prayer that they expected. Provision, obscured. I wonder how often I look at God's mercy and say, "What is it"? How often I fail to recognize the good in what God sends? As we enter our second year at Kijabe there are still losses and questions that have not fully settled in my heart… Sometimes I get tired of always feeling like I'm catching up, not quite where I should be. Is this provision, this constant tension of more to know and do than I can manage? We lost the baby's mother. Is this provision, daily exposure to heartache? Jesus, of course, is the real manna. The real provision. And the real "what-is-it" as He consistently defies expectations. He wasn't recognized as God's gift when He was alive, and many of us stumble over they way he diverges from what we hoped God would do…In 2012 I know we will be sustained by the daily freshness of God's mercies, however challenging they are to recognize. Praying we will all taste of the goodness.** This baby's worth is equal to mine, or the President's, or the richest man alive, so we trust that if God does not heal him now, it is not a matter of being unworthy, but a matter of mercy and a better plan.  **When the Israelites asked for a king, they got one, and all the loss of freedom and distance from God that entailed. He had asked them to be content with His presence, and to be set apart, but they did not accept His risky offer. What was good for the nations was not necessarily right for them, but they wanted what they could see. So I sigh, and admit that what God gives others around me He may not give me, that for us the order of a Kingdom may not be palpable until eternity. That I'd rather have the holy wild disorder of a life of pilgrimage than the security of a settled life where my order becomes a layer of obscuring cloud between me and Reality. Praying that I could pray for what is true to my heart without selling out my soul. And that the toll it takes on four teens would not torpedo them, but rather strengthen them to grasp onto the Presence of a God who leads in obscure and unexpected and disruptive ways.**Our God is a lover of beauty. God THOUGHT of beauty, to begin with. I have no problem with color and style and uniqueness and symmetry and the total art form of the human body. But somehow we've gone further than that, from a balanced attempt to display the glory of who we are, to a paranoid drive to change ourselves into never-aging always-in-style homogenous perfection. **Reading in Joshua again, this post-Bday morning, about Achan, one of those sort of depressing, not-so-inspiring, a-bit-too-violent stories that one might prefer to skip. First steps into the Promised Land and he already refused to burn the loot, and instead hid some for himself, burying it under his tent. Where he could not enjoy it, really, but it made him feel secure. And this made God angry. I could sympathize this time with Achan. Because it's really a matter of faith, burning all the loot. It is a way of saying: God will provide, this is His world, we don't need to grasp.

It's OK to let go of the stuff, to burn, to lighten the load for the journey, because the land ahead is good. Let me release my grip on old papers and baby clothes and favorite books, in faith. Not that those things aren't good, or important, or valuable. But like the Israelites, the extravagance of the burn is a way of saying that we know God is more than all of this.**"I am seeing more and more that we begin to learn what it is to walk by faith when we learn to spread out all that is against us; all our physical weakness, loss of mental power, spiritual inability--all that is against us inwardly and outwardly--as sails to the wind and expect them to be vehicles for the power of Christ to rest upon us. It is so simple and self-evident--but so long in the learning." ( Lilias Trotter, missionary to Algeria. A Blossom in the Desert.)**Read one of my favorite passages in Mark today: the father who brings his convulsing son to the disciples who fail to heal him, and then Jesus gets pulled in. I love the father's heart cry: Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. This paradox of vacillating certainty, accentuated by parental love… The father's faith is gritty, honest, unpolished, real, and desperate. I like that. But it's not the real story: the real story is Jesus who does not let the boy suffer from the failures of others, who breaks in, who asks questions, and who at last authoritatively brings life, who is willing to pay the cost of prayer and fasting to pull this boy out of the fire and water. Let me rest on that Jesus.**She writes about watching a RVC soccer game:Then suddenly, one of the boys went down with a yell, "my knee!".  Play stopped, and I sprinted down and arrived as the coach did.  RK was lying on his side, having planted and cut in defending.  No contact, no mistakes, nothing unusual, but he felt a pop and pain.  And since the same thing happened to his sister in the final game of her senior year, he had a pretty good idea what was happening.  "Not my senior year," he cried out.  But a few seconds later, he raised his hand and said "God I praise you no matter what this is with my knee"…Well, it was his ACL.  This kid is one of the best athletes and nicest all-around godly good guys in the school.  A good friend.  He, along with Jack and one other boy, was one of the three Juniors playing varsity in all sports last year.  He would have been a star and probably a captain in basketball and an important force in rugby again this year.  In other words, an ACL tear with surgery and months of rehab is no small thing in his life… Later his sister wrote to him: “God takes more pleasure in watching you play than even your mom and dad do.  So if He let this happen, it must be for important reasons, because He loves you.”  RK's immediate response and this wisdom from his sister really are a testimony to faith.  When our story takes a turn we don't expect, when we lose something important and dear, when joy seems impossible, that's when real faith shines.  God loves the honest cry of the heart, "NO, please NO" and then the wrestling, grasping, tenacious hold on faith, "I trust you God."  Which brings me back to Sunday School today.  Joseph was the same age as all these boys when his brothers threw him in a pit and sold him into slavery.  Then he was unjustly accused and thrown into prison.  Yet decades later, he is able to look back on his own life story and all the pain and loss, and gain perspective by seeing God's fingerprints.  In Genesis 50:21 he acknowledges that his brothers meant evil, "but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today." We may not live to see the good that is wrested from evil in every aspect of our lives, but we live on the promise that all things are being redeemed.  That God is at work for good, even in what is intended as evil. That busted knees which change life-path-directions do so in a way that will mean life to others, even if it takes years or decades to look back and see…  But then they lead us in faith, and respond with grace, and hold onto God, and we follow them down this hard road of living.  We pray over them from  Rom 8, and wait for the all-things-made-new of redemption in their lives and knees, and ours.**This week we studied John 18 in our team Bible study, the arrest of Jesus in the garden. He asks, twice, "Whom are you seeking?" At first it looks like a rhetorical question, one with an obvious answer, one meant to challenge the guards. But later, in another garden, he asks Mary the same thing (ch 20). Whom are you seeking? And upon further reflection, we see this is the essence of all questions. Whom are you seeking? We are all seeking something, and most of what we seek stems from broken relationship, broken identity, broken purpose. So on the night of all nights, one of Jesus' last questions is this one. And on the morning of all mornings, it is again among the first words from his mouth. Not a sermon on whom we should seek. Not a challenge to the wrongness of His arrest. Not a forceful assertion of the truth. Instead a last chance for change. Jesus poses the question to give Judas, the guards, Mary, us, the space to consider our own hearts. Which, if you think of it, is pretty incredible. God withdraws, covers, suppresses His irrefutable power, in order to give us a moment to ponder and consider. Which, if you think again, is the essence of prayer. God has ordered the universe in such a way that we have to actually think about whom we seek, what we want, and ask for it. Seek it. Instead of just giving and directing, He waits. He listens.

Jesus asks whom we seek . . but he has also just emerged from the human experience of wrestling with the same question himself in the hour before the guards arrive. He has struggled in the garden with a hidden God, been given the dark space in which to search and pour out his own heart to His Father. He has acknowledged God's limitless power and love, he has asked for the cup to pass, but he has also come to terms with his commitment to drink the bitter dregs to the end if it is God's will. He could have sought power, recognition, justice, a quickly-ascendent time-bound kingdom. But instead he sought God, even at the cost of everything. If God the Father wanted Jesus to have that space to choose in prayer, how much more so us. And so every day, over and over, let us take the time to reflect on whom we seek. And if it becomes clear that the answer is God, then let us pour that request to Him too, which is prayer. And as we enter that garden of reflection and asking, over and over, I believe our hearts will gradually become more the type that chooses the cross and the glory of God.**Though my spirit felt like it was ready to boil over from anger at midday, this evening I have returned to the psalms and the sacred sorrows there. It is where we see adversity acknowledged and articulated…and eventually set aside as it is put in perspective. The "vav"—the signal of the switch in gears from lamentation to worship—signifies the heart acknowledgement that everything pales to nothingness compared to the living God. Just wish I could see that big picture a little easier when I'm in the thick of it all…**Whenever we study the topic of home, however, a tension arises for me. There is such a strong theme through the Bible of pilgrimage, that we are strangers, sojourners, travelers, moving through this world where we don't quite belong. When we are reminded of this, there is a two-fold encouragement, to give us patience with all the things that are less than ideal, and giving us a vision of a final destination. On a journey we don't expect everything to be just like home, and we look forward to getting back. We can put up with a lot. But though we are pilgrims and strangers, we also make homes wherever we go, and in their best moments those homes are a foretaste of Heaven. When we sense belonging, when we connect in community, when we surround ourselves with beauty and peace, when we sit down to good food, laughter, and music, these are all glimpses of the true home to which we journey. And so it is legitimate, even honorable, a high-calling this homemaking, to rest our souls and bodies in the early realities of eternity. And that always leaves us with a tension: accepting our foreignness, not just to Uganda but to Earth, while simultaneously entering into the community and creativity of carving out a home. Another paradox, being settled travelers, home-body sojourners. Ready to leave, content to stay. Always weighing how much energy to put into homemaking, and how much to reserve for the inevitable moving, be that across continents or into eternity. We live in transition, all of us, caught between the paradise of Eden and the paradise-to-come of a New Heavens and New Earth. That truth helps my heart obey the command in John 14: let not your hearts be troubled. Transition is not surprising. It is the atmosphere in which we dwell, and we will never completely get past it in this life. Jesus knew that, and He gave us a short picture of the goal, and then lots of promises. God is not just waiting for us to reach Heaven, He has come into time and space, so that there is a constant back and forth as we pray, and the Spirit comes, we believe, and He acts, a shuttling growing connection that sustains us and draws us homeward. **Tells some stories of women that are suffering.John 12 is one of my favorite chapters, and has been a very spiritually significant one in recent years. It opens with Mary pouring perfume on the about-to-die Jesus, an act of devotion and prophecy that his body will soon be prepared for burial. She can't stop the march of tragic events, but she can bear witness. So today, I bear witness to some women and their lives, unable to stop their suffering, but called to testify about it…Our pouring of perfume is more like milk, some nourishment, a prayer, kind words, eye contact, listening. And remembering. And giving witness to the suffering we can't stop.**After describing a day full of Kingdom activities, as well as a swarm of biting ants outside their house:The Kingdom goes forward in outreach, translation, conversions, dedication, health care, schooling . . . but the ants remind us that we're still in enemy territory.**God's path does not skirt death's shadows**After it rained on a birthday party:Rain on a party may not seem like a very noble trial for a missionary. But I think it is a concrete parable of so much of the faith-challenge of life. We are not usually risking death from ebola. We are instead, most days, facing interruption, disappointment, lack of control over plans, worry for our kids, the struggle to make things work out for everyone in the best way. We are, most days, hoping for a bit more sun and sadly soggy when the rain comes instead. Whether it is other people's choices or needs, or mechanical failures, or sicknesses, or corruption, or lack of

supplies, or muddy roads . . .there are many times we look up at the gathering clouds and wonder if we can manage yet another storm. These are the moments when we are called to say: I would not have chosen this rain, Lord, but you see more than I do, deeper and further and longer. So I can only choose to trust that you have not stopped it for good reasons which I may or may not ever understand. Help me to slosh on. In Africa, Scott reminded me, rain is a blessing not an annoyance to party plans. So the prayer may be extended: help me not to just slosh on, but to find Your rainbow to climb through this rain, the splintering spectrum of light which makes even our daily disappointments moments of beauty.** We have lived through too much inexplicable suffering in Uganda to make any prediction that we know God's intentions, except to testify by faith that His actions are motivated, always and in every situation, by love.**It’s frustrating to them that many of the kids who come to the hospital are there because of bad choices by the parents (e.g. incompetence, alcoholism, indifference, etc.). They have disdain for these parents. However…

But isn't that just what Jesus would want? Sure, I'd rather invite the relatively competent, "deserving", one-concrete-medical-issue-only types into the ward, the kind of kid that gets three doses of Quinine and smiles and walks away healthy. The kind of kid that one can feel a sense of accomplishment in helping. Instead Jesus tells the story of filling his feast from the highways and the byways, pulling in those at the margins, those that have messy lives and dysfunctional relationships. Because in reality, that is who we all are. Struggling parents, making bad choices, failing to love and provide, and needing grace. Praying for a byway-scouring heart.**They were watching a documentary of children that are affected by civil wars in Africa in all sorts of terrible ways, sometimes even being forced to fight. A teacher is trying to talk to these kids and help them find healing.

The teacher says: Yes, you are children of war, that is part of your story . . . but it is not the end of your story. And they are wise words for all of us scarred by evil, our own and others. Yes, we are children of war, children of the earth, and that is part of our story . . .but not the end.**The chaplain preached on 2 Cor 12 during orientation, the familiar passage about the thorn in the flesh and God's power in weakness. And his words were once again Spirit-empowered in their appropriateness, echoing the theme we've prayed and meditated on since the Easter season. If the cup can't pass, it must be drunk. If the thorn can't be removed, it must be embraced. Rather than running away from difficulty we are called to move into it, to pass through the deep and the dark, and to emerge to find out that God was with us the entire time, that He designed and orchestrated what feels like death to us in a way that shows His resurrecting power, and actually brings us life. It is another mystery of paradox: moving into trial moves us deeper into God. And so we plod on into another season of loss, another tearing of the heart. We lean forward into the rough path, wishing there was a smooth detour but trusting that we must instead pass right on through the thorns. And hoping for more of God, somehow (for us and for our kids), in the pain of separation.**After describing a bunch of things that are frustrating and difficult:So why stay here? I suppose because we cling to the hope that the school fees we are helping with are gathering a core of children with a new view of the world, a new way of living. Because the infant whose mother bled to death yesterday should not face starvation. Because we've known the elder dancing in worship for a decade and a half and resonate with his joy and leadership. Because we followed (to the best of our ability to discern) that pillar of cloud and fire that leads through wilderness before reaching the promise, that refines and cleanses as we plod along the way. So in spite of roaches, mud, broken bolts, theft, and dependency . . . this is the place, for now, on this earth, that we call home.**One Pastor says:"I wanted faith to work like an epidural; to numb the pain … . As it turned out, my faith ended up being more like a midwife—a nurturing partner who leans into the discomfort with me and whispers 'push' and 'breathe.'"—Brené Brown…We, as pastors, can rarely alleviate the pain of our people—the anguish of broken relationships, failing bodies, injustices—and so we feel ineffectual. But the power of our calling is revealed when we speak to the suffering that comes from the interpretation of pain. If a man in our community cannot find a job, it's painful. In addition to the pain of that reality, if he interprets it as God's neglect, it adds intense suffering. If a woman in our community has lost a child, it's excruciating. If, in addition to the pain of that death, she interprets it as a sign of God's judgement, the suffering becomes unbearable.

In that pain—and the suffering that grew from my interpretation of it—I came across Jesus' words from John 16:Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy. When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.If someone who wasn't in labor experienced the level of pain that labor brings, they could easily assume they were dying. But, when a woman is in labor, she interprets the pain through the lens of her understanding—the pain has purpose, something new is breaking into the world. In that moment, hiding under the covers that Wednesday morning, this insight changed my interpretation of our pain. What if the pain we're experiencing is labor pain as God makes all things new? Although the pain was just as present, my heart grew lighter. We had been interpreting the pain as: God has forgotten us, God hasn't kept his promises, God isn't powerful, God doesn't care. Maybe he doesn't even exist. But now, Jesus' image of a woman in labor gave me a new hope that the pain might have purpose, be productive. This new way to cast my reality alleviated the suffering. And from this insight, my sermon took shape.The sermon recapped several painful moments from the previous year—a shooting in our neighborhood, sickness in our congregation, the Paris attacks. I wanted to name the hard things we all knew and I resisted the temptation to resolve them. I chose to sit with my congregation in their pain and create a safe place for pain to be processed. But we didn't wallow. I turned the corner towards hope by asking: How can we say, "Pain is real AND God is present?" I shared how I was beginning to see with new eyes, to experience the resurrection God can bring from what feels like death. We ended the sermon with a time of reflection to let the community face the pain together, and ask God to heal our interpretation of it. And as they raised their heads from prayer that Sunday, I saw eyes lighten with a new way of seeing the pain. I knew it mirrored the new light in my own eyes. And from that sermon, with permission to both feel the pain and find healing from the suffering, something was unleashed among the artists in my community, birthing music, poetry, and art.**There’s a section in my old sermon about “not yet” of KOG about us not understanding his ways.**I read a book by Elizabeth Elliot where she described her life as a young missionary before she was married to Jim Elliot. She spent a couple years living in very primitive conditions in an Amazon jungle, trying to learn the language of an unreached people group and developing a written form of the language so the Bible could be translated. After her time there was finished, she had a suitcase full of notes on the language and the efforts she had made in translating. Someone else would take the notes and eventually finish the job. She was travelling back to civilization, riding on the back of a large truck. In transit, her suitcase was lost. She was devastated that two years of work were completely down the drain. She kept praying, expecting the suitcase to eventually show up, giving God glory from the incredible answer to prayer. The suitcase never turned up. She was never able to figure out any good that came out of the situation. The only thing she could figure is that God was working on her character and develop perseverance in her, that she could give up her right to understand the ways of God and demand that He treat her well—according to her definition of well.**I was recently reading about a man, Charles Edward White, who was visiting a missionary graveyard in Miango, Nigeria, and noticing that more than half of the graves were for children. He was wondering why missionaries traditionally had many children die on the mission field, and we presume they had many people praying for them and should have been blessed by God because of their sacrifice. His answer: “The only way we can understand the graveyard at Miango is to remember that God also buried his Son in the mission field.” **