Sound of Surviving Blog

I’ve had a few surgeries in my life, some to prune out the bad (brain tumors), and one to fix what was broken. I trusted each of my surgeons greatly, though each surgery was scary and terrifying, that these surgeons would do everything to help me come out of surgery better than I was before. God is kind of like the grand surgeon in all of our lives. He prunes us so that we can be abundant stewards of his word. At my bible study for women with chronic illnesses the other night, we were all talking about how God has used our suffering for something greater.

So why don’t we trust him the way we do these earthly surgeons? Instead, we doubt him and say, “But God, can’t you take this thorn out of my side? Do you have to operate that way?” But I’ve never once questioned my earthly surgeons, saying, “Do you have to go in and remove the tumor? Is that the best way?”  We don’t always see how God is working or understand his plan for us during his reshaping and refining us into who he has called us to be. We cry out to him in the suffering, wondering when we will be set free from our pain, our agony. We doubt not only God, but also how any of the anguish and sorrow we feel could ever be used for good. But God is using these things to not just help us to become what we were made to be, but to help us help others.

Everything that God does in our lives, has a purpose, bigger than anything we could ever imagine. He is pruning us to be able to fulfill that purpose. Perhaps our suffering, our grief, our sorrow, and pain, are not at all what the world sees them as, a deficit, but instead, a superpower. Because of what we have gone through, we can reach the unreachable, the dejected, forgotten, broken people. We can be that beacon of light and a hope to them that Christ was, and still is, to us. We have this superpower, this x-ray vision (if you will) to see them, in their suffering and pain, as God does, to give them this hope, this anchor to hold onto, to pull them up out of the waves. 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 Paul tells us that this exactly what we’re called to do, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”

We can help them run to God, to show his love, and to want to know him more, to want to cling to Jess. Not by convincing them, or telling them to, but by how we live our lives, trusting God always, even in the unbearable. Because we walk alongside of them through their journey, just as Christ walked alongside of us. That is often what I’ve cherished in my own relationship with Christ: even if my condition isn’t healed this side of heaven, I never have to walk this road alone. After all, isn’t that what all of us long for the most, not for someone to come along and solve all of our problems, but to walk alongside us on this road, as we carry on?