Finding Hope in Suffering Through BeautyНамуна

Becoming a Saint

In the book of Job, that great drama aching with all the questions and arguments of suffering, one of Job’s friends asks what he thinks is an obvious question: “If you are righteous, what do you give to Him [God]?” (Job 35:7 NASB). The friend meant this to put Job in his place because, of course, he assumed that Job ought to know that we can “give” nothing to the God who is the Maker of us and everything we see. But in the drama of Job, the question is profoundly revealing: the whole book of Job is shaped by the idea that Job actually does offer something to God by his continuing righteousness in the face of his pain. His faithfulness, his fierce refusal to curse God, though he does not know it then, is a mighty and devastating answer to the Satan figure in the story, who taunted God with the claim that no one is righteous for nothing. With all his visible blessings removed, with all evidence of God’s love stripped away, he has to decide whether he will continue to fear God, not for what God gives him, but for who he truly believes God to be. 

Job, wrestling with both fidelity and grief, becomes the model for the kind of worshipper God desires, the kind of people God makes us in Christ: not merely servants who believe as long as they’re paid but children who love because they trust that their Father is good. 

I’ve thought often of Job in the midst of my OCD, for I too have deeply sensed that my pain was the space in which I was invited to a faith far deeper and sweeter than any I had yet known. Not because God willed my pain or needed it to make me mature. Not because it was necessary or required. But because I had the chance to engage with the radical goodness of God, a force so real in the lives of those who love him that it can take the very devastation that Satan intended to be the destruction and end of faith and transform it into a life irradiated by the kind of love that cannot be broken by darkness. 

My suffering is where I have most keenly understood what it means to be called a saint. 

That word: we hear it as the exception to workaday humanity. We hear it as an extreme state to be reached only by effort or grit or some given thing we haven’t yet figured out how to offer. Yet this is the identity to which we who love God and wrestle to know him in a fallen world are called, and I believe our suffering is often the space where we actually discover this fact. Our brokenness marks the moment our resources fail. But sainthood was never a matter of our great strength. Sainthood grows, like a baby hidden in the womb, in the space we make for God’s goodness to fill and transform our darkness; it begins when we refuse, Job-like, to curse God, and instead prepare for his arrival amidst our anguish. Sainthood is the simple process by which the life of God so illumines and fills the empty places of our sorrowing hearts that we are filled up brimful with him: his goodness directing our actions, forming our words, quieting our anguish, driving our compassion until we begin to resemble the whole and healed creations we will fully become in the new world ahead. 

And that is a beauty more potent than any other the world has known. 

How has suffering shaped your idea of yourself?

How has suffering shaped your relationship to and with God?

What would it mean to be a saint, specifically for you?