Tag: Suffering

Day 12 :: Living Stone of LOVE

Join us for the 12 Day YMCA Devotion Series – LIVING STONES: LEAD, CARE AND SERVE LIKE JESUS

How can we be ‘like Living Stones’ used by God to strengthen the presence of Christ where we lead?

Recently, 24 YMCA leaders with the OnPrinciple program visited 12 places throughout the Holy Land where Jesus taught about how to live and lead in God’s kingdom.

From this experience comes 12 spiritual leadership principles – or Living Stones – (inspired by 1Peter 2:4-5) that Christ-followers can embody as we are being built up to lead, care and serve everyone, like Jesus.

by Tim Hallman, Christian Emphasis Director with the YMCA of Greater Fort Wayne

“It’s so dark and loud, I can’t believe how intense and crowded it is up here” I whispered to myself as a few of my friends squeezed through the dense throng with me in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher at the end of the Via Dolorosa.

We were in the Old City of Jerusalem trying to see the eleventh and twelfth stations of the cross, where Christ is depicted as being nailed to the cross and then dying on it.

Standing there in the dim candlelight and swirling incense, I wondered what it would have been like for the Lord’s beloved disciples and family as they tried to see him on the cross.

Bewildered? Terrified? Heart-broken? Wondering: “How could this happen?” “Why did this happen?”

We’ve all had our own moments of dark grief, loud confusion, and intense fear; there is no escaping suffering in this world, it is all around us in spirit, mind, and body.

Kierkegaard comments that when we suffer patiently this is not specifically Christian, freely choosing to suffer, though, is.

Jesus willing and freely chose to suffer and die on the cross – it is both our salvation from sin and an example to us on how to sacrificially lead and love.

Especially as Christian leaders, we imitate Christ Jesus when we follow his example of practical compassion to those who are suffering and thirsty for loving help – organizing and inspiring from start to finish.

The work that God gave Jesus to do was triumphantly completed on the cross, and our Lord was faithful to the finish, which included suffering at the hands of those he loved and was sent to save.

When Christians lead with sacrificial love, when we choose to suffer from others, we are allowed to share in word and deed the Good News of Christ Jesus and what he finished on the cross.

What is the sacrificial work God has given you to finish in your community, with your friends and family, in your congregation or workplace?

What has Christ been calling you to finish, to complete, to bring to an end for those in your midst who need a drink of hope and forgiveness?

May the suffering and compassionate Jesus be an example to you in spirit, mind, and body to finish what you started, sustaining you as living stones sacrificially leading, loving, and serving where he has sent you.

“Later, knowing that everything had now been finished, and so that Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, “I am thirsty.”

A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus’ lips.

When he had received the drink, Jesus said, “It is finished.”

With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.”

Gospel according to John, 19.28-30 NIV

This YMCA devotion series brought to you by onPrinciple – click here to learn more about it – a new leadership development program to strengthen the presence of Christ in the YMCA

Click here for the entire devotion series as a downloadable PDF booklet.

Click here to access entire devotion series on YouVersion

Christian Leadership & Hope Amidst Choas

A brief reflection on the difficulty of Christian leadership, of sustaining hope while caught up in the chaotic whirlwinds of life these days, inspired by the life and writings of Henri Nouwen, who writes: a Christian leader is a man of hope amidst chaos, a woman whose strength in the final analysis is based neither on self-confidence derived from his personality nor on her specific expectations for the future, but on a promise given by Christ Jesus.

Indeed the paradox of Christian leadership is that the way out is the way in, that only by entering into communion with the suffering Christ and the chaos of hurting humanity in your midst, can hope and any sense of relief be found.

adapted from Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer, p77

In the YMCA, in the church, in the community, there is a great need for leaders who can sustain hope, goodness and solidarity amidst the upheavals, violence and even abuse throughout the world.

But it gets tiring, there is too much information to process, too many people to help, too much complexity and ambiguity in each situation. How to do what is right, how to make a difference for the better, how to help heal when so much is uncertain, shaky and even dark?

Henri Nouwen’s little book The Wounded Healer, is a continual fount of wisdom and encouragement in these difficult days of leading and serving.

May these quotes from his chapter on “Ministry To A Hopeless Man: Waiting For Tomorrow” provide some needed perspective on how to be a Christian leader of hope amidst chaos.

For hope makes it possible to look beyond the fulfillment of urgent wishes and pressing desires and offers a vision beyond human suffering and death.

Nouwen, Wounded Healer, 76

A Christian leader is a man of hope amidst chaos, a woman whose strength in the final analysis is based neither on self-confidence derived from his personality nor on her specific expectations for the future, but on a promise given by Christ Jesus.

This promise not only made Abraham travel to unknown territory; it not only inspired Moses to lead his people out of slavery; it is also the guiding motive for any Christian who keeps leading in hope towards new life even in the face of chaos, corruption and death

adapted from Nouwen, Wounded Healer, 76

Leadership is not called Christian because it is permeated with optimism against all the odds of life, but because it is grounded in the historic Christ-event which is understood as a definitive breach in the deterministic chain of human trial and error, and as a dramatic affirmation that there is light in the other side of darkness.

Nouwen, Wounded Healer, 76

Every attempt to attach this hope to visible symptoms in our surroundings becomes a temptation when it prevents us from realization that promises, not concrete successes, are the basis of Christian leadership.

Many ministers, priests, and Christian workers have become disillusioned, bitter, and even hostile when years of hard work bear no fruit, when little change is accomplished.

Building a vocation on the expectations of concrete results, however conceived, is like building a house on sand instead of on solid rock and even takes away the ability to accept successes as free gifts.

Hope prevents us from clinging to what we have and frees us to move away from the safe place and enter the unknown and fearful territory.

It is an act of discipleship in which we follow the hard road of Christ, who enters death with nothing but bare hop.

Nouwen, Wounded Healer, 76-77

…it has become clear that Christian leadership is accomplished only through service.

This service requires the willingness to enter into a situation, with all the human vulnerabilities a human has to share with one another.

This is a painful and self-denying experience, but an experience which can lead a woman out of her prison of confusion, a man from his chains of fear.

adapted from Nouwen, Wounded Healer, 77

For me, in navigating changes in my home, the constant changes in my work, the turmoil of our culture and violence throughout the nation and world, it is easy to despair, to give in to the belief that it is all cause and effect, that the forces out there are too powerful, there is not much we can do about “it” and we are just pawns, and that we are only standing in shifting sand when we try to make a difference for the better.

These quotes of Nouwen are timely, disturbing, and refreshing- it may not alter the reality “out there” but I am encouraged in my spirit, to trust in the presence of the suffering and strong Christ, who is with me, with us, and at work to restore and reconcile all things, in his time and way.

In whatever way I am called to lead, care and serve, I am striving to be attuned to Christ’s brilliant, persevering, and merciful work in the world he loves and holds together.

This is a way my hope as a Christian leader is sustained amidst the suffering and chaos within and around me.

Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?

This post is personal for me, not abstract; it’s a way for me to work out in my heart how to find meaning in the suffering of life. May Christ Jesus be a guide for you in bringing good out of the pain, for all.

A man reveals to me that his father died too soon, while the son was yet a young elementary student.

That absence, that pain, it is still felt after forty plus years.

If God is so good, why would he take his father away? His father was a good man; he was loved, he was needed.

Why would God take him and not someone doing wicked evil things in the world?

The common question is: why does God let bad things happen to good people.

If God is so good, why would he let something bad happen to someone, something bad that he could prevent.

Since God is all-powerful and only good, you would think that God would intervene more often, keeping really bad things from happening to undeserving people.

Do children ever deserve to be assaulted or forced into horrid slave labor? You get the point.

So why does God let bad things happen to good people?

When I try to articulate an answer to that question, there is not an easy, simple response.

Should God intervene every-time somebody does something bad to an undeserving person?

If not every time, how often?

Which conditions should be automatic-interventions?

God can’t intervene every time, and even if he could, he wouldn’t; a miracle by definition makes it a rarity.

That God does intervene at times is something to be thankful for, though often it prompts resentment by those who wish it for themselves in their own plight and not for another.

So God can’t win.

If he lets people abide by the free-will he grants them, then he gets blamed for not over-riding free-will more often when it is abused.

If God has not granted man free-will, then we can fairly blame God for letting bad things happen to good people, because God is directing all of our thoughts and actions, since we have no free-will.

So: does God “let” bad things happen to good people?

Is it as if God is standing by a river watching a child fall in, doing nothing when he could do something to save the drowning, screaming boy?

Is that the implication?

That God watches atrocities happen, letting them happen when he could flick his finger and kill the perpetrators and save the innocent victims?

Is God able but not willing?

This is all very philosophical and at this point not very Christian.

A Christian reflection on this topic must include the story of Jesus Christ.

It doesn’t do us much good to ask hypothetical questions about what God can and cannot do if we do not focus on what Jesus Christ does and says.

Scripture teaches us that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh; when we see Jesus we see the Father.

Jesus Christ is the one who creates, sustains, redeems and restores Creation and all within it.

Thus, the real question: Does Jesus Christ let bad things happen to good people?

Well, what do the Gospels tell us about Jesus responding to the bad things that happen to good people?

Take for example, Jesus Christ himself.

Could we agree that he is the ideal “good person”?

If anyone was undeserving of an unjust “bad thing”, Jesus is the guy.

And how did Jesus respond to the bad things that happened to him?

Did he shake his fist at God? Did he wonder why God was letting this happen?

No and No.

Jesus seems to assume that this world we abide in is bent, broken, corrupted, infected with evil.

Bad things happen to people in this world.

That’s just the way the world has become.

Jesus doesn’t ask God why he lets bad things happen to innocent people.

Jesus seeks to use the bad things that have happened to him as a platform to save the very ones who do the bad things to him.

In Jesus Christ, we don’t see him questioning God, but rather our assumptions about God.

Jesus tells us little about why bad things happen to specific people.

He implies that if something bad happened to you, and you didn’t deserve it, don’t shake your fist at God, but rather seek to forgive the perpetrator, bring about justice if possible, establish peace, and overcome evil with good.

But still I wonder: Why do bad things happen to good people?

There are many theories; but the lived experience of humanity reveals that we live in a world where evil has reached a vast complexity.

Bad people do bad things on purpose; good people do bad things on purpose; bad and good people do bad things by accident.

You get billions of people doing bad things even just once in a while, and you have a recipe for evil on a grandiose, horrific, painful level.

Does God afflict people with diseases and cancers randomly or out of his divine plan?

Jesus says little about the source of the diseases, he points out through his words and actions that God is primarily focused on healing people from their afflictions.

Jesus demonstrated again and again that God has come as a man to bring good things upon us.

God is good, all that he creates is inherently good, he can only do what is good.

He doesn’t afflict us, he comes to restore us; we are already afflicted, he has come to heal us.

Diseases, cancer, health related problems are not doled out by Jesus to people, they are a result of being human in our world.

Everybody has to die of something.

It’s how we live and die that Jesus is most concerned about.

Jesus grieves when people die horrible deaths, he knows what it is like.

He grieves when people live and then die horrible deaths all alone, abandoned, tortured, mocked, and desecrated.

He is opposed to it: the problem is that many of us are not.

Jesus is the head, Christians are supposed to be his body.

Jesus is supposed to be able to get more done in this world by having millions and millions of adherents continuing his work of good news: forgiveness of sins, restoration of the whole person, alignment with the goodwill of God, etc.

Jesus could probably stop more bad things happening to innocent people if more people were committed to the same cause.

The real question is not: why does God/Jesus let bad things happen to good people.

The real question is: why do we let bad things happen to good people?

People suffer and die on this earth. That’s the way of this world.

But it doesn’t have to be the only part of the story we fixate on.

My mother, while a young teenager, lost her mother to cancer. Then in college she lost her father to a heart attack. Then when I was in college she was diagnosed with cancer. And then diabetes. And then one of her sons died of a brain tumor. And then another one of her sons was killed by a drunk driver. Then her husband of 39 years died unexpectedly of brain cancer.

Why do some people have bad things happen to them, things they don’t deserve, and yet they emerge from those experiences still trusting God, even if just by a thread?

The world is so complex, we can’t full know why things happen.

It’s not that God made those things happen.

But God is willing to help bring good out of those bad things.

If God could do something good, he would do it.

So all the bad things that happen, if God could stop each one of them, he would.

But he doesn’t. Because he can’t.

He can’t override our free-will; if he did, we wouldn’t have free-will.

This doesn’t “limit” God, it just states the obvious: you can’t have a square triangle, you can’t have two plus two equalling five: it is not within the realm of reality.

What Jesus has proven God to be is the One committed to the Reconciliation of all things, the Restoration of Creation, the Ground of our Being, the Source of Reality, the Renewal of Humanity, the Rescue of Sinners, the Renovation of our Hearts.

This is what God can do, and in doing so, he is overcoming evil with good.

More could be said on what is the most existential, most complex, most personal experiences of all humanity.

But this post is personal for me, not abstract; it’s a way for me to work out in my heart how to find meaning with Christ in the suffering.

This encouragement from Saint Paul to the Christians going through painful trials in Corinth was read at the funeral for my brother Matt; he was my second brother to die. This text always stuck with me and is a guide for me in striving to have good come out of my suffering:

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who consoles us in all our grief and suffering; with the comfort we ourselves receive from God, we can compassionately care for those in any kind of hardship and tragedy. 

For just as we are in solidarity with Christ Jesus who suffered, so also Christ’s consolation abides and abounds through us.

[St. Paul to the Christians in Corinth, 2/1.2-5, adapted from the NIV]

May you find comfort and consolation, redemption and healing amidst the suffering of your life and those you love, through Christ who suffers with us.

(this post adapted from one originally authored by me in March, 2008)