Finding Hope in Suffering Through BeautyНамуна

To Wrestle Is Righteous

This world is a broken place, and we are broken within it. 

This is the hard and devastating word I have learned through long years of mental illness, the word that comes to each of us born into terrifying and lovely existence. In a world wrecked by sin, our pain is the crucible in which we will work out our faith. No human story is exempt from grief. There is no faith without the wild ache of impossible questions. To wrestle with God—to grip him like Jacob with hungering, angry hands—is the work of every person born into a fallen world. But the way we wrestle will shape the whole of our story, and Beauty tells us what we are wrestling for. 

I never knew, until I was immersed in suffering, struggle was intimately part of devotion. I thought that wrestling with God meant I was doing something mightily wrong. I was shocked by my suffering, because I hadn’t reckoned with the real fallenness of the world, and I wonder if my shock is a common one in the modern Christian world. I think we God lovers are often bewildered by personal disaster, troubled by the reality that being saved doesn’t mean we’ll never suffer. We haven’t really come to terms with the fact that the first part of our story is a tragedy. We forget what it means for the world to be fallen and for us to be profoundly frail, and when suffering comes - and oh, it does, to godly souls and innocent children, the evil and the good alike—we are outraged and bewildered. We stand in danger of abandoning the very faith whose power is based on divine love overcoming death because we didn’t think we really had to die in the first place. 

The gospel is good news: oh yes, it is the single radiant fact that can heal the world. But it’s a truth invading the rocky and troubled soil of the fallen cosmos. If we have not grasped that God’s goodness comes to us in the darkness, not just that of the general world but of our shattered and faulty selves, that he is our comfort when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death—not just a death outside us in the headlines but the one we taste as intimate terror—we have not understood what it means to follow and love the crucified Christ, the suffering servant, the wounded God whose very life was required for the healing of the devastated world. 

What false things have you believed about God?

What are the deepest struggles you bear in your faith?

What does it mean to you to understand that struggle and sorrow can be part of your faith, part of loving God well, and being honest before him?