So, in the midst of processing The Shack and all the billions ways God was using it to intersect my life, this note caught my attention on a friend's wall. It is brilliant. It captured a lot of my present and recent experiences with God, Brokenness, Pain and Redemption that I have yet found words to express publicly. I bolded the parts that really resonated with me.
From Sam Kruvand:
"Caveat: While I have some remarks to make about this phenomenon which swept the world of popular fiction called “The Shack”, I’d like to delineate some recent thoughts I’ve had on suffering, and wed them with some of the larger themes I found in Wm. Young’s bestseller. I’d only ask for your attention and your input should you choose to “speak”, as we engage this discussion.
By now you have probably realized (if you’ve read any of my past posts) that I’m not much concerned with length. Indeed, if more than 5 minutes of your time in our Attention Deficit generation would be rather spent jumping to the next wall or scanning the newsfeed, by all means carry on. Not everyone enjoys reading my style or content, and for that I am entirely sympathetic.
Secondly, I try to remain as real as possible which means I don’t hold much back. I have found that in community, growth, and communication, the open honesty policy is of chief importance. For this entry, however, I have held some things for reasons “which reason knows not”. If you have questions, I’ll gladly answer them in person.
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“Don’t worry, everything is going to be ok. God only gives us as much as we can handle”
I know I speak for many when I say that I’ve heard this statement before. Whether it be from well meaning church goers or the spiritually superstitious, it seems to be a common thread in the mainstream of modern American Christianity.
When I look at scripture in light of this popular “inference”, however, I simply can’t find the support -At least, not the sort that would make sense of the above wording. I’ll come back to that. For even before scripture, my own experiences have taught me otherwise, which I am thankful for.
In a culture where spirituality has been politicized and politics spiritualized, the garbled messages from media and modern Christian thought must be sifted through a filter, and that filter must be unwavering in the word of God, that which has and will outlast all the ideas of our day. (Isaiah 40:8)
One of the benefits of the historical scholar (which I am not, but which C.S. Lewis praised) is that he or she may gain the perspective of having lived in many places and times, so to speak, and may see with more clarity the duplicity of the imitations we hail as original and brilliant – from the political to the spiritual. But that statement must suffice for now because this reflection will not be concerned primarily with it. (See Lewis’ Weight of Glory, p.58) May we see with that same clarity as we look into the issue of suffering and the “great cataract of nonsense” that pours forth from our present age.
“Bend, not break . . .” You can never be too careful, play it safe, avoid those harmful endeavors, stay away from the emotions and the heart, avoid the vulnerable places, take the safe road, etc. etc. I think we’ve heard it all before. No matter what area of life we are progressing in, there seems to be a common goal of comfort and contentment. Death is the number one evil, and following whatever makes you happy is what’s important. Careful to avoid serious entanglements! Always seek to bend, not break.
These are messages we receive as a whole in this society. They permeate our lives. Kevin Teasley said it well, relating it back to the context of Christianity,
“We want gradual, escalating glory, and diminishing pain”And he was right. What a poignant deduction. I think when we are honest with ourselves, we find these desires at the core, often jousting with our love for God and those desires to be changed and used by Him.
The process of breaking and the events which set my mind thinking down this line of thought have revealed that I am, in many ways, all about that comfort and contentment. I think it is natural that we should want these things. And I’m not saying they are altogether bad. But what I see in statements like the above (that God only gives us what we can bear), and what creeps into our theology I think, are lies from the present age that we are too often deceived by.
In truth, I see a good principle in the thought. That principle lies primarily with the character of God. 1 Corinthians 10:13 “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And the Lord is faithful, He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.”
On the surface it may seem like the first verse from Corinthians supports the original inference, namely, that God never gives us more than we can handle. However, the context (most often from my experience) in which that statement is exhausted, has little to do with temptation and everything to do with those factors that no one can help (except for, presumably, God). To name a few - the accidental death, the unfortunate bankruptcy, the uncanny disease or the poor timing of famines and floods (famines and floods may sound a bit archaic to some of us, but let us be reminded that most of the world’s population hovers in and out of poverty, and still relies heavily upon agriculture and the whims of storm and sea). Even when personal negligence is absent, some of the best and the brightest are crippled by life’s burdens, apart from temptation. All the nice guys finish last . . . well, sometimes they do.
But we run a race that doesn’t end here, and the determining factors of failure and success are simply not of this world.
Philippians 1:6 “…he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
This second reference gives us confidence that we are not merely left wandering after facing great challenges, but being drawn to the completion of something greater.
Jesus Christ himself reminds us that we must pick up our crosses daily and follow Him. He said himself that we will find trouble in this world.
Suffering often viewed in a sacred and positive light by the Word, much in contrast to the way we look at it culturally. If you scan any of the following, I think you may be surprised to see scripture’s take on it.
1 Peter 3:17,4:13,16
Romans 5:2-5, 8:17,18
Acts 5:41
2 Timothy 1:8
Philippians 3:10
These references not only speak of good things that come from our trials or sufferings, but also exhort us in them.
But I bring all these references about suffering forward to put this next thought in perspective.I would suggest that we must be broken completely – a rendering of our whole hearts is necessary before anything else can be achieved. There are times when we must break, not bend. For God does not want our words and our actions even as much as He wants our hearts, partially because from the heart all these things will flow. Also, it is the core of our being, not the outer shell of our existence. Forbid that we make the error of the Pharisees, lest we be like white washed tombs (Matthew 23:27). Isaiah 29:13 in paraphrase, “they honor me with their lips but their hearts are far from me.” It is tragic to think that our cultural appetites might distort our attitude toward the Savior.
One of my favorite artists, founder of the International Arts Movement (IAM) and working from New York City, Makoto Fujimura, says it this way
“In order to find hope, even in the midst of the broken and torn fragments of relationships, in order to begin to journey into the heart of the divide, we must first wrestle with the deeper issues of faith. We must be willing to be broken ourselves into prismatic shards by the Master Artist, God, so that Christ’s light can be refracted in us.”
But we think we’ve pinned God down. We’ve made Him irrelevant; He’s just the cranky old moralist in the sky, waiting to lower the proverbial “boom”- To the modernist, a comic tragedy. Comic because of the ridiculous chaos of life, and tragic because He of course doesn’t exist – and that’s true, this god isn’t real. But in his arrogance, man has suggested that he is the measure of all things, replacing God. He has attempted to climb out of his mortal cage (most likely due to the inklings within all of us that suggest we were made for much more than this) and declare his own greatness. But compared to the Maker, to the one who cannot be confined by a mere poem or a vast planet, whose glory exceeds the sun rising and the deep of space – I daresay we are the comic tragedy -Comic because of our asinine persistence; tragic because we are thus alienated.
Agreeing with some of the sentiments of the Shack, truly, God is not simply another priority. If He’s competing on a list for our attention, then He will never remain on top because of our nature, by definition. But if He is the source from which our priorities flow, if He is the mainstay in our ever-shifting world of needs and desires, a life well lived will be the beautiful evidence. That all things would flow from His life in us; that grace would move us to Him and lead us to look at others before ourselves. Yet the timing of that grace eludes our human understanding, and probably for good reason. But before I get in over my head (probably too late, ha) let me bring the focus back to what’s at stake here – our own security in what we “think” is true. Our human nature is to desire control, an afterthought (or perhaps forethought) of seeking knowledge in the garden from that forbidden tree. To be given what we can handle serves as a measure of comfort to our humanity, because we don’t like the realms of uncertainty. We largely distrust authority as it is, but to be told that our lives rest not in our own hands but in the hands of one much more powerful and elusive than we could even know is downright frightening. It may evoke such a response that we simply can’t handle the truth of it. Ah, we begin to break, even from the implication of the thought. Yet, we forget a powerful truth that functions alongside this one, and that is God’s goodness. Thus the question is not whether we believe God will only give us what we can handle (as I hope you see at this point, is incredibly false) but whether we trust in His goodness in the thick of tragedy and sometimes, despair.
For those who have not read the Shack, let me briefly (ha) fill you in. Mack is an older man whose little girl Missy was abducted and murdered four years before the book takes place. The book is largely about a fantastic meeting with God in which God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are characterized, and has a complex and powerful message about forgiveness. For anyone who has experienced the darker sides of life, it is a journey through some of the ugliest and raw emotions -ugly because of their faithlessness and raw because of their pain. I would be lying if I said I didn’t deal with my own tears in the first seventy pages, and then some. There is this thing called timing, and God’s is perfect. Reading the Shack was the final blow to make me break, and so I did. It was, what I like to call, “more than I bargained for”. And while I have a great love for that book, I have some serious reservations about it as well. And it was a difficult journey for my own heart. But those are conversations for another time. What I’m interested in here is the Brokenness. This is something cherished by the follower of Christ – for it is brokenness that leads us to true repentance; it is in being torn down that we may be rebuilt; it is in dying that we may be reborn.
Paul says this, 2 Corinthians 12:10 “That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
He had his strength taken, that He would rely on the strength of the Living God. That is how I define brokenness; the complete absence of our own strength.
But I think it is brushed under the rug too often when we “play church” sometimes. Brokenness is not a fun process. And since we tend to flee, as already stated, in our society and as humans, from those things which cause us discomfort, we face difficult words from the Gospel. But let us not change the Gospel to mold our own god; we must be molded by Him, if any real work of restoration is to be done.
Ya’ll, this is no easy thing. To say that our hearts are required, and that our center, our timid, selfish, greedy natures are what God is truly after, is a bit frightening. But dying to oneself (as we are called to do by scripture) will of course require a bit of pain and discomfort, perhaps more than just a bit. The way we’ve always been (and we really, really don’t like change (intrinsically) will not be an easy transformation. It is not, most often, the flicking of a switch, or the simple clarification that a single retreat, message, or seminar may bring. I’ve said before and I’ll reiterate – we are in process – thus, all of this takes time - and persistence that we, of ourselves, do not have.
Ergo, the wording in the statement, in my opinion ought to read, rather than God giving us as much as we can handle – that God seems to give us more than we can handle, and in so doing draws us back to himself. When our eyes are locked on ourselves (here I draw from extensive selfishness) it will only be from being overwhelmed that they are turned to God. And one could argue that the breaking either softens your heart to the one who heals, or hardens it to the world and all its madness. This would also explain the polarity of responses that humans have to suffering. But let me cap this with the words of a man far wiser than myself, and I’ll see if I can’t wrap up what I’m trying to say.
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” – C.S. Lewis
Do I like this? Emphatically, NO. Breaking is a part of that “lost art of living” which I would rather not come to terms with, because it can be terrible. But those things which we are thankful for that we can never see in the “midst of it all” have taught me to reluctantly submit, often tearful and frustrated from the process. I have come to see that the most growth blooms in those deserts, and to be cherished more than the escape of “momentary and light affliction” are those rare glimpses we get of God’s heart when we die to ourselves. The words of Paul are also some comfort (no small measure indeed) as he writes to the Romans 8:18 “I consider our present sufferings are not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed in us”. Ah, but to hope in what we can neither see nor entirely understand tries us at times. Yes, it does. But how wonderful hope is, renewed to the weary soul that has been displaced and bewildered by the chaos and sin of life.
Some of you may be thinking, now Sam, “isn’t this all just a bit too technical, I mean, c’mon, chill out, it’s not that big of a deal, just a few minor words”. And in the past, I might have agreed with you, but I have come to learn this principle: Often our gravest errors are in those details. Next time you encounter the child who has just lost his parents to divorce, or the man pondering the gun because he’s gone bankrupt, or the perhaps the Mack whose daughter has been abducted, or maybe the student who can’t make ends meet because she works two jobs and still can’t provide . . . I would gently ask you to count your words carefully, and remember that we serve a God who treats us as we are, in the words of Dr. Ravi Zacharias: Brittle clay in His tender hands. We just may forgive the backstabbers, the liars, the murderers and thieves, (and be forgiven ourselves), but I daresay we must be broken first, for we have stubborn and proud hearts that are too easily hardened. So let us check our attitudes toward suffering and hardship, and let us count with Paul that there is strength in our weakness, lest we forget that clay pots must be broken in order to be reformed.
You know, I suppose that any sort of message that speaks about the importance of suffering or the reality of our own “lostness” and true need for Christ will not be inherently popular. On the surface, I don’t even like it, and I’m the one writing in this case! I also suppose, as stated earlier, that any message outlasting the attention span of its readers will suffer from the same neglect.
But strive with me as we engage in these difficult subjects – let us ask God for the eyes to see and to read of His word, and find what His wisdom has to say. May the flow of His grace not cease to carry us in our many errors."
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