Invest your suffering: unexpected intimacy with a loving God

Mags Moss | July 2015 - Highfields Book of the Month
By Paul Mallard - (2013) Nottingham: Inter Varsity Press

What a blessing this book is!  It is a book that deals honestly and carefully with the painful and perplexing experience of suffering.  Paul Mallard writes as a pastor who is experiencing the immediacy of his wife, Edrie’s, debilitating illness.  

New into the ministry and also bringing up a young family, this sudden gear-change in life seems overwhelming.  Every normal activity becomes more burdensome and every difficulty accentuated.  At times, despite great support and love from the church, they feel torn apart with anxiety and abandoned.  Suffering, whether our own or others’, causes us to cry out for reasons, to look for purpose, to seek hope.   How do you come to terms with the unfathomable, the unbearable, how do you learn to live with loss, how do you bear to look on, as the one you love suffers?

This book is the fruit of the Mallards' suffering, their questioning, their sorrow, and their dialogues with God.  Paul begins each chapter with the context of their suffering, what’s happening to Edrie and how they have to adapt.  In exploring the Bible’s teaching he unfolds the lessons they have learned.  Can we really come to terms with our pain and make sense of it in the context of our faith?  Most certainly!  There are lessons that the author has learned and he shares them with us.  He says “I learned these great verities at the foot of the cross during days of trial and nights of pain”.  

He tells us that we must guard our hearts because suffering can make us bitter and turn away from God, but it can also deepen our love and understanding of truth.  God has set his love on us, he disciplines us as a Father, he wants us to be more like his Son, he refines our character to be more like His, "the fire of the furnace is proof of intentional grace and deliberate mercy".

If we are willing, suffering increases our dependence on God, our distress and questioning draws us closer to Him; it humbles us and sweetens our fellowship with Him.   It fixes in us the truths of the gospel, "it is suffering that seals them in our hearts.  It is pain that drives us to a deeper understanding."   It develops our family likeness, to be more like Christ.  It does not preclude joy and it gives us a hope, developing our longing for heaven. 

In Ravensbruck, Corrie ten Boom's sister Betsi tells her to tell others about the faithfulness of God: "there is no pit so deep, that God's love is not deeper still….in darkness God's truth shines most clear".   Indeed… "out of the deepest pain has come the strongest conviction of the presence of God and of the love of God". (Elizabeth Elliot).   We may not feel that we have the maturity or strength of character of Corrie ten Boom or Elizabeth Elliot but the reality is, that we trust in the same Heavenly Father who is able to strengthen us to do and withstand all things and nothing can separate us from His love.   The Puritan, John Owen writes – "The greatest sorrow or burden you can lay on the Father – the greatest unkindness you can do him is not to believe that he loves you".   

The "unexpected intimacy" that Mallard describes is undoubtedly true.  Another  Puritan, Samuel Rutherford wrote that "grace grows best in winter" and one gets a real sense of this from the Mallards' experience.  A closeness and utter dependence on God can only come when we "reach the end of our hoarded resources", when we feel our frailties but rejoice in Christ's utter sufficiency.   The book is biblical, real, pastoral and lifts our eyes to Jesus, the ultimate source of our hope and comfort.  We would do well to prepare ourselves for a time of suffering and in reflection learn that, as God has given us grace in past struggles, we have assurance of future grace and we can live for his glory.  This book is an exceptional aid in doing that.  

The author concludes that our great hope is heaven when we will "dance to the music of eternity" and then "we will come to understand the purpose and the value of every sorrow that has ever touched our lives." And though creation (and we) are subject to frustration here, one day we will know all, "therefore we do not lose heart!"   So walk along with the Mallards and learn with them the way of bearing with suffering.  To be reminded again that God is good, that he loves us unconditionally, that his purposes for us are good and that this is all true, even in the midst of our suffering.  And when we know this we can pass on the hope to others.

I'll let Paul Mallard have the last word:
"I like to think that suffering has made me a better pastor and a more sympathetic preacher and a more effective evangelist.  I look out on a congregation knowing that the best thing I can do for them is make much of Jesus and speak well of him.  He has been the great comfort in my darkest days – I know he can be the same for them".