How can I respond to suffering? How can I practice forgiveness in healing, healthy ways?
Faith Matters resources to accompany your Come Follow Me study: March 16-22
“God sent me before you to preserve you.” Heavenly Father sent Jesus Christ to save me.
Like someone invited to the delivery suite, we are also called to stay awake and watch the suffering of the body of Christ. The suffering of His physical body is finished, but the suffering of His metaphorical body—the suffering of His children—continues today. Paul taught, "Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular" (1 Cor. 12:27). As members of the body of Christ, we will not sleep through our own deliverance this time. How do we learn to stay awake for the suffering of the body of Christ? We can start by acknowledging the pains that exist among members of our church community.
—Christopher John Bissett, “Awakening to the Suffering Body of Christ”
Forgiveness brings healing.
18. Band of brothers (Genesis 35-45)
Genesis 45:4 And Joseph said unto his brethren, Come near to me, I pray you. And they came near. And he said, I am Joseph your brother. (KJV)
Chad Ford: 70x7
Our conversation with Chad moved from the personal to the global—from tensions in families and faith communities to the devastating conflicts we see on the world stage. And through all of it, Chad points back to Jesus as a radical model for how to live, engage, and help transform the world around us. Chad offers a vision of Christianity rooted in Jesus’ ministry of reconciliation—not in dominance or defensiveness, but in the slow, often difficult work of restoring wholeness. He helped us see that the peace Jesus offers isn’t always the peace we want—but it’s the peace we need. And when the way forward feels impossible, he reminds us that part of discipleship is learning to make a way out of no way.
Matthew Potts: Rethinking Forgiveness
In June 2015, a white supremacist entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and murdered 9 members of the church during a Bible study. During the first court hearing, a number of family members of victims said that they forgave the murderer, Dylann Roof. This act of forgiveness shocked many people. Some people were shocked by witnessing such an act of Christian charity. Others were shocked because they thought expressing forgiveness for such an act, especially so quickly, was wrong, and was only perpetuating the violence on the community under attack.
In his new book, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account, Harvard minister Matthew Potts draws upon this event and others to explore the deep complexity and transformative power of forgiveness. As he shares in today’s conversation with Zach Davis, forgiveness is less about settling debts of harm and more about learning to move forward in new life, even if our wounds never fully heal.
When the teacher known as Jesus of Nazereth was teaching at the temple in Jerusalem, Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd.
“Teacher,” they said to Jesus, “this woman was caught in the act of adultery. The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?” They were trying to trap Jesus into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger. They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust. When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman. Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, “Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?” “No, Lord,” she said. And Jesus said, “Neither do I. Go and sin no more.” (John 8:4-11)
This is the pattern of forgiveness—when the demands for justice are answered with mercy. The same pattern applies to self-forgiveness. We have all three parts of the story within us: the woman (or self), the accusers (justice), and the Teacher (divine mercy). When we learn to quiet the accusers in our minds, we allow the inner Teacher to respond with love for the self. This is what it means to fulfill the law. The law asks what is right. The Teacher fulfills the law by responding with what is needed, and invites his followers to walk the same path. Until we’re ready for that path, may we take courage knowing that the Teacher is kneeling in the dirt next to us, waiting until we meet his divine gaze and through his love transform into new beings.
—Haymitch St. Stephen, “Something Sharp”
I can show love and forgiveness to my family.
In its simple form, the answer is the same for everyone, regardless of religious affiliation or disaffiliation: The answer is love. As the Carmelite nun Teresa of Ávila wrote, the spiritual path consists of two parts: loving God and loving each other. And how do we know we are on this path? “The most reliable sign that we are following both of these teachings,” writes Teresa, “is that we are loving each other.” That’s the path. No one’s above it.
But the path is complicated because the outcome of our love cannot be predetermined. Sometimes we love and the other person never returns to the fold. Sometimes we love and we are changed. And sometimes we love and the person returns to religion, but not in the way we may have envisioned.
“[Love] does not insist on its own way,” writes the apostle Paul.
—Jon Ogden, “Love Does Not Insist On Its Own Way”
The Lord helps me through priesthood blessings.
Members from the ward arrived, and the brothers gathered on either side of my father’s bed to anoint him with oil and give him a priesthood blessing. My brother, who had long since distanced himself from the Church, desperately wanted to join the circle even though he knew that he could not place his hands on my father’s head with them. Wordlessly, he took a place at the foot of the bed, knelt down on the hard floor, and gently laid the blankets aside. He placed his hands upon my father’s bare feet and bowed his head to join the mighty prayer of his heart with the elders’ blessing. After the blessing was affirmed with amens, my brother said, “I hope that God heard my prayer, too.”
—Lisa Murphy, “Angels Kept Their Watch”
God can help me find meaning in my trials.
Melissa Inouye: Sacred Struggle
How can struggle be alchemized into connectedness—into Zion—instead of driving us apart? Who gets to assign meaning to struggle? Is there a way to avoid pain in a community, or is it built into the experience?
Indeed, it is probable that my soul could only have opened to this insight in this way, at this moment, precisely because it has been cracked open by the very suffering that has broken me asunder. To be clear, my most foundational theological belief is this: God will never cause or condone suffering. Yet, since we exist as eternal beings in an oppositional universe, this is my secondary and nearly as resolute conviction: Our Heavenly Parents can consecrate suffering they do not cause or condone. Thus, while we are never meant needlessly to remain party to suffering, yet we can always trust that God will raise a phoenix, even from our darkest ashes. That light will make its way into and finally illuminate even what may initially seem to be the loneliest, scariest, and seemingly most impenetrable darkness.
God is light; and light finds a way.
In the meantime, we are not meant to construct a world where suffering ceases so much as we are meant to transform suffering forever into love.
—Tyler Johnson, “This is Grace”
In the Pearl of Great Price, the Lord shows Enoch a vision of “all the doings of the children of men” (Moses 7: 41). The vision is well known for its image of a God who weeps, the Restoration’s response to the question of divine passibility. There is something spiritually sobering about the fact that God’s divine nature does not spare him suffering, that part of what makes him divine is his capacity for suffering. And God’s emotional experience seems contagious to those who draw near him. In Enoch’s vision, there’s a lot of “sorrow, grief, [and] anguish” to go around.2 Indeed, multiple Restoration scriptures depict the cosmos as necessarily suffused with suffering (for example, see 2 Nephi 2:11). Why is this?
One reason may be that suffering eschews the superficial. Consider that God’s weeping over his children’s (mis)use of their agency causes Enoch to weep and stretch forth his arms. We also witness that Enoch’s “heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned; and all eternity shook” (Moses 7: 41). These are powerful, poetic metaphors for spiritual growing pains. Enoch learns in an embodied way that increased light and knowledge come at the cost of suffering (see Ecclesiastes 1:18).
Suffering in this sense has nothing to do with pain for pain’s sake. It is rather more akin to compassion (from the Latin compati, to bear or suffer with). Suffering as I mean it here would combine both (1) Lehi’s reaction to his vision—he “cast himself upon his bed” because he was so “overcome with the Spirit and the things which he had seen” (1 Nephi 1:7), and (2) the pillars of Alma’s covenant community, including a willingness to help others bear their burdens (see Mosiah 18). This is the kind of suffering the Savior referred to when he declared that “all these things shall give [us] experience, and shall be for [our] good” (D&C 122:7), and when he gave the injunction to “succor the weak, lift up the hands which hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees” (D&C 81:5).
—Ryan A Davis, “Hie to Kolob”
What can we do in light of this pain and powerlessness?
We can choose to stay soft, open, and humble to the possibility that we might have something to gain from people whose beliefs differ from our own. That’s love. It’s what Jesus pointed to in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, which he directed to those “who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” In the parable, a Pharisee thanks God that he is “not like other people” while the tax collector bows his head to God and pleads for mercy. The Pharisee is closed off and full of contempt. The tax collector is open and, presumably, full of love.
Love shifts us away from an insistence that we alone are righteous (and therefore always deserve to get our way) toward a realization that there are new paths that can only be discovered through our encounters with each other. In this sense, love integrates each of our gifts into a new way of being together.
—Jon Ogden, “Love Does Not Insist On Its Own Way”
