How do we respond to suffering?
Faith Matters resources to accompany your Come Follow Me study: August 10-16
I can trust God in all circumstances.
And so while Job never came to any answers or explanations, he did find peace. And he found peace because he was brave enough to ask God the hardest question of all: Why? Why is a question you will also ask someday. When your house falls down, when your fields burn, when your children are taken from you without warning or explanation, when your life becomes a whirlwind, you will sit in stunned horror on a seat of ashes, and you will look up towards the hidden places of heaven and cry, “Why?” And you will be a little afraid to ask it because it is scary to ask a question you don’t know the answer to. And it is even scarier to ask a question that might not have an answer at all.
But you will still ask. Because the world God has made is very beautiful, and very, very messy. It holds so much — joy and evil, goodness and suffering. It is enough to break you. But it is precious to God. And so are you. And that might not feel like an answer. And maybe it isn’t. But I can promise you this: it is true.
Jesus Christ is my Redeemer.
The faith needed is not trust that, in the end, all our suffering will have been for some unknown but foreordained good. Instead, faith in God is a trust that, in spite of our suffering, he can bring us (and anyone else who desires to do so) to live with him. Trying to tame suffering by making it something explicable tempts us to forget that God himself lives in a world where there is suffering. Suffering and evil disrupt the good, but he responds by repairing the breaks they create.
—James Faulconer, “In Suffering, Love”
“When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”
Anyone who's in pain gets to interpret that pain any way they want. If people in pain say, this is happening for a reason, that's fine. Let the person in pain say whatever they want. That's how I feel. —Melissa Inoyue, Sacred Struggle
Imagine the devastation. The complete horror. The shock of losing not just one child but all of them, all at once. Job staggered out into the street. He fell onto his knees. He tore his clothes and shaved his head and screamed, “God! I do not understand! How could you let this happen to me?”
And you probably don’t understand either, because how could God let something so terrible happen to someone so completely innocent? How is that right or helpful or loving? And those are very good questions. And you are right to ask them. But the purpose of this story is not to give you an answer. Its purpose is to ask. To really, truly, sincerely ask how is this possible? Why do cars crash, wars start, bodies break, earths quake? How can this happen? And why?
Theology does not prevent all hurt and anguish. No knowledge of theology can remove all pain, weakness, or nausea from all terminal cancer. Nor can it fill an empty stomach. What sound theology can do is to help those who believe it to make some sense of the suffering, of themselves, and of God, such sense that they can proceed with a measure of hope, courage, compassion, and understanding of themselves even in anguish.
There is no single theology of suffering in our Church, one framework uniform in all respects in the minds of all leaders and all other members. Though we may share the same scripture, the same revelation, prophets, and belief that God and Christ are real, we have various frameworks for putting them together and for seeing suffering, either our own or someone else’s. One person thinks God sends suffering to teach us or to test us. Another thinks God or Satan can affect only our response to the suffering, and some think it is Satan who is causing the suffering. Others think there should be no suffering at all if we are righteous and certainly no misunderstanding at all about why it is happening. These are only a few of the varieties of LDS belief about the origins of suffering, and however contradictory they be, each can be supported by fragments of scripture.
—Francine Bennion, “A Latter-day Saint Theology of Suffering”
Similarly, being able to satisfactorily answer the problem as posed by Hume would ultimately mean erasing suffering rationally. That may seem strange to say, but consider: implicitly, each attempt to rationally answer the question “Why?” is an attempt to show how the existence of evil can be reconciled with God’s existence and our own. It is an attempt to integrate the existence of evil with the existence of all that is, creating a rational whole of them by making sense of their coexistence.
But it is evil to make sense of evil. Evil and suffering do not make sense. Their existence cannot be reconciled with what is good. It is evil to make a place in the world for them, to explain them, to tame them, to no longer be horrified by them.
—James Faulconer, “In Suffering, Love”
The fate of Job’s friends, who attracted God’s displeasure, shows how it is possible to miss the mark—to sin—even while attempting to champion God through our perception of His ways.
—Philip Barlow, “The Only True and Living Church?”
God’s perspective is greater than mine.
And as God spoke, Job could see the world as if looking through God’s own eyes. Oceans blooming, rivers pulsing like veins through the earth, A morning breaking like glass across the sky. An angel’s voice stretching over the mountains, squadrons of stars marching to time, growing, bursting into brilliance, and disappearing into less than nothing. Monsters swimming the depths of the ocean, living unseen lives in the mysterious dark. Rhinos running, dragons flying, dinosaurs falling through ages into the earth, their bones rising again in sandboxes.
And in this glimpse of eternity, Job saw something else, too. He saw himself, standing there in the eyes of God. He was a piece of the wonder. He was watched and loved and cared for. He was part of this whole crazy story. And he wasn’t just a small part, a footnote to be left out or forgotten. He was right in the very middle of it all, creation tumbling around him.
Job clapped his hands over his eyes. It was too much. And he fell to the earth exhausted. God hadn’t given him an answer. Instead, it was something more like wonder, awe, or reverence. Perhaps you could call it an understanding. Whatever it was, Job knew he could never explain it. There were no words simple or profound enough. And because it couldn’t be explained, it didn’t have to be. And, for the first time since his children died, he felt peace. Not perfect peace. But peace nonetheless. The peace we feel in the middle of a hug, or when we’re tucked into bed. It’s the peace of knowing that whatever happens during the night, we are loved.
Job seems the book of the Bible that takes this quite seriously. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Job. It’s just an amazing, amazing work.
The core of the story is about this guy who’s lost everything. At a certain point when Job hits bottom, he’s alone in the world. His friends aren’t even with him, his wife isn’t with him, his children are gone, and he’s sitting on a pile of ashes scratching his diseased skin with a piece of pottery. God shows up, which is really amazing.
And he expresses awe, and love, and he talks about it being exquisite and awful all at once. By the end, Job is overwhelmed because, as awful as his life is at that moment, he looks at this opportunity he had to see the world from God’s point of view. And it reminds me of a sort of Spinoza-talk about seeing the world under the aspect of eternity. And he’s moved and astounded.
And the sentence that is sometimes translated as repenting seems to me means something else. It’s something like, “I’m comforted.” The big message for me is something like God’s world is astounding—awful, and exquisite, and astounding.
Nature reduces us, humiliates us, pulverizes our ego and our sense of our own centrality. But, enlivened by God’s breath, this becomes nature’s gift, its recompense. Like Job or Moses, as we witness the creation, we discover our nothingness and our newfound and healing significance in the same moment. This does not leave us callous any longer to the suffering of nature or of our fellow beings. Once we become properly yoked with Jesus, we are expanded and become more than our atomistic selves. We become our brother’s keeper and stewards of all of His creations. The natural world brings gifts without price, recompenses of wonder and elation and solace. I know of no more adequate response to such generosity than devoted, compassionate love for every one of His creatures.
—George Handley, “Falling Into Paradise”
Everything begins in hope. All that the Gods voiced, every hopeful “And God . . .” is followed by “. . . and it was good.” What was good was that our Heavenly Parents created a world, and in that world a garden, a garden of hope for a future of fruitfulness and fecundity, of hope for a beginning where love would expand, flow outward to fill the universe, and overflow the bounds of space. And into this garden with infinite hope and love they placed our first parents, and they called it the Plan of Happiness. As premortal beings looking down from the heavens on that beginning, our hearts were filled with boundless, borderless light and love and with immense hope for what it all meant for us. …
Ours may be the most hopeful religion in the world. With its teaching of an embedded premortal hope, with its optimistic theology of the necessity of mortality, with its promise not just of exaltation but of universal resurrection and near universal glorification, and especially with its concept of loving and infinitely patient Heavenly Parents, Mormonism constitutes the ultimate hopeful news that, as Job says, God has set his heart upon us (Job 7:17). Our Parents’ ultimate hope is that we will set our hearts on and return to them—that we will make it home, back to the birthplace of all the hopes that yearn within us.
—Bob Rees, “A Perfect Brightness of Hope”
Good friends uplift and encourage each other.
This, I think, is the most important lesson that we learn from the Book of Job. When Job’s comforters sat with him for seven days and seven nights without saying a word, they gave their full attention to their suffering friend. This is a master class in mourning with those who mourn, which has nothing to do with fixing a problem and everything to do with just paying attention to somebody else’s needs. But as soon as they start talking, they ruin everything. They stop mourning with one who mourns and start trying to explain Job’s pain. And it becomes increasingly clear that they are not focusing on Job’s needs at all. They are trying to comfort themselves. By simply existing, Job has upended their understanding of God and morality, which says that God rewards those who do good things and punishes those who do bad things. In their minds, Job ceases to become a friend to be mourned with and becomes instead a theological problem to solve.
—Michael Austin, “The Sacrament of Attention”
