Suffering

A dear missionary friend of mine wrote the below and it was so good I had to share it on every avenue available.  Thomas and Laura Scherer along with their two children serve in Southeast Asia in a village tucked in the jungle.   

Oh! To be like Jesus! Well . . . mostly.

For about two years I’ve been thinking a lot about suffering. That may sound morbid, but life is full of suffering no matter where you live in the world, so I figure I’d like to think well about it. Suffering is so multi-faceted, but one type of suffering I’ve thought about is the suffering believers experience. For a true Jesus follower, suffering is kind of one of the promises/guarantees given to us, repeated over and over.

It’s easy to pick and choose the nice parts of scripture. It’s easy to say, “Make me like Jesus! He was patient, he was loving, he was kind, he was gracious! I want to be like that!” But I’m not prone to say, “He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. I want to be like Jesus in that way!”

Two years ago I was reading a book by Joni Eareckson Tada, and she talked about her suffering. (when that woman talks about suffering I listen!) She talked about how when we suffer, God is so good to use it to conform us to the image of His Son, and we benefit. We also benefit because we know Him better because of the suffering. But what Joni wrote next really stopped me (like I couldn’t read again for 2 weeks!). She said that when we suffer and know God better, that is not what it means to suffer like Jesus suffered. Jesus suffered so that OTHERS could know God better! I’m not kidding when I say I didn’t pick up this book for a solid two weeks! How I wrestled with God! It’s one thing to go through hardship knowing I’ll be better for it. But what if the only benefit of my suffering is the blessing of another?

It was towards the end of May 2019 when I finally said, “Ok God, I mean it, make me like Jesus in EVERY way. I’ll suffer if it means others will know You better.”

God’s timing is so precious, because the rest of 2019 was a whirlwind of hardships for our family. It was like God stripped everything away so that the only thing left was Jesus. Psalm 73 became my filter for how I saw life, verses 16-17 especially, “When I pondered to understand this, it was troublesome in my sight, until I came into the sanctuary of God.”

With everything stable and familiar and certain stripped away, we found out that what God said was true. In His presence there is fullness of joy, at His right hand there are pleasures forevermore! (Ps. 16:11)

Have you ever watched a really great movie, and you can’t help but talk about it? And you want others who haven’t seen it to see it, so that they can enjoy it as much as you have. That’s a super simple way to explain how we feel about being God’s kids and having a relationship with Him. The joy we know because we’ve walked with Him is seriously nothing like this world can offer! Thomas often says, “The bitter makes the sweet all the sweeter.” We would not savor our Lord like we do today had it not been for the privilege to walk through some really hard things.

So we rejoice in our sufferings, because He gives it meaning. And we pray that the treasure we have found in Him would shine through us towards others as we ask our Lord to give us the strength and the grace to walk like Jesus walked, in every way.