(Originally written the Sunday after my last Harvest post went up. Edited/finished in early December.)

There is a certain irony and beauty to the fact that as soon as I write a lament on Job, a thorny thing born of my experience with the supposed silence of God, that the next time I enter His house to first worship through song at the church where I was baptized and raised, and then pray in community at the Wesley, I am confronted with His voice. It has been a long time since I have sung the words of the contemporary worship songs I know so well with such a stirring in my heart. It has been a long time since I have heard the voice of God so clearly. I have before, and I will hear it again. Today I have heard it.

As God is silent in the book of Job until the moment that He speaks up, as God calls Job to once again offer his worship to the Most High, so it was for me.

These passages of Romans were some of those contained in our prayer book at The Wesley:

“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” (Romans 5:3-5)

“The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.” (Romans 8:16-17)

Passages and sentiments like these had been frustrating to me, and still are. I didn’t, and still don’t, want to hear that suffering is for good. But the cycle of Romans 5 complicates my dismissal of that idea, and illuminates its truth.

Suffering produces endurance, which we desperately need, and which humans are actually remarkably good at when necessary. Physically, when compared to other animals, we humans are built not for sprinting, but for endurance. Built to walk and walk and keep walking and keep moving forward even as our flesh fails. We endure the unendurable. We survive. We live on.

Endurance then produces character, and character then produces hope. I had never thought of it in that order. I thought you needed hope to endure through suffering, and to some extent that’s true. But actually… the lived experience of hope comes after. To feel the loss of hope in the midst of suffering is natural, even if we always have the Father with us and in us, poured into our hearts even if we can’t feel it. That hope does not put us to shame. Hope can never put us to shame, even if sometimes it feels that way when God is overwhelmingly silent.

Bringing us to the second passage, Paul says we are God’s children, but he does not stop there. We are heirs. Heirs of God, and fellow-heirs with Christ. I had never given much thought to that distinction before reading Henri Nouwen’s Return of the Prodigal Son, in which Nouwen argues that as heirs of the Father, we Christians are to take on the responsibility, the care, the love, the sacrifice of the Father in the Prodigal Son story—God the Father. Quite the mantle to bear. As young as I am, I know that is out of my reach now, but becoming an adult and an heir to my own earthly parents and grandparents has been on my mind as well. In my road to maturity both emotional and spiritual, learning to truly be an heir is starting to become crucial. And in the case of God the Father and Christ the Son, what we have to inherit is unconditional love in the midst of suffering and rejection.

Paul is clear here—we must suffer with Christ. Suffering is part of the human condition in this fallen world. It is unjust. And it seems that a just God ought to intervene, rather than be so achingly silent.

As I sat in the Wesley chapel, meditating on what became the words above, I looked up at the stained glass window at the front. It pictures Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying to the Father that He might take away the suffering that Jesus is about to endure.

But God does not.

The Father is seemingly silent as His Son weeps tears of blood.

The Father is silent, because through Jesus’s suffering, the veil between holy and unholy will be torn in two, and now here we stand, able to receive the forgiveness of the Father as a gift. His love poured into our hearts.

I looked up at the depiction of Jesus, praying a prayer a little like the one I had prayed. “Take away my suffering, take away the suffering of those I love.” I took off my glasses to wipe the tears from my face and saw something new. Light streamed through the stained glass. It’s a detailed piece of art, with many small pieces. Without my glasses, the blue and red edges turned purple. The green bushes faded into the blue sky. And Jesus’s face blended radiantly with the beam of light that fell on it in an image of the Transfiguration. I could no longer see His face, nor much more than the red of His cloak (like the blood that would mar His body within hours) and the beautiful purple-blue of the night around Him. It was a wholly different and transformed work of art. Through my weak human eyes I saw something new and arrestingly beautiful.

There is weakness in our human understanding. Our vision is blurry. Our flesh is weak. But it is in that weakness that the light of Christ can shine—a rainbow of color mingling and blending with each piece of glass, each person through which that light passes.

We may not be able to see in full, but one day we will. And for now, there is beauty in our lack of understanding. Beauty in our weak eyes.

On Suffering: An Answer: Ashley Palmer

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