Stewardship and Suffering

STEWARDSHIP AND SUFFERING

(NLT): “What do you have that God hasn’t given you? And if everything you have is from God, why boast as though it were not a gift?”

August 8, 2018 was my last normal day.

Up until that point of the year, everything had seemingly been going great. The church where I served had seen God do some pretty incredible things. I had just returned home from my yearly preaching retreat confident that we were going to see even greater things happen in the coming year. But, that’s not even the best part. My wife and I were less than two months away from welcoming our fourth child (and second boy!) into the world. To quote Gershwin, “Who could ask for anything more?”

And then came August 9.

That morning, I woke up in the hospital. I had started experiencing severe pain in my side in the middle of the night. Thinking it was something simple like kidney stones, I drove myself to the ER, figuring they’d give me the once over and send me on my way. Much to my surprise, finding the source of my pain wasn’t easy. Test after test revealed nothing behind that insidious ache. The morning, however, brought with it the terrible truth…

I had leukemia.

As I heard those words come out of the doctor’s mouth, I could hardly believe it. “Leukemia? How can I have leukemia?” I hadn’t had any symptoms. There didn’t appear to be any risk factors in my lifestyle. There was a part of me that just knew there had to be some kind of mistake. And yet, every test confirmed the diagnosis. Not only did I have leukemia, but I had a very aggressive kind that would require aggressive treatment – intense chemotherapy and eventually a bone marrow transplant. The way my doctor put it, the road ahead wasn’t going to be a sprint into victory; it was going to be a marathon.

In the months since that day, I’ve come to see how true those words were. I’ve gone through four cycles of chemotherapy, had a bout with pneumonia that landed me in the ICU, and spent more days in the hospital than I care to count. I’ve lost my hair (twice!) and dealt with the side effects that come with putting toxic cancer-killing medicines into your body. At the beginning of this year, I underwent a bone marrow transplant in Lexington, a procedure I’m still in the process of recovering from. If this journey has been a marathon, it’s one that’s been run on a rollercoaster’s track, full of ups and downs and turns and twists we never saw coming.

All of this has made me wonder about the nature of our suffering. Why do we suffer? Why do bad things happen? More importantly, how should we handle them when they do happen? As Christians, what does it look like for us to “run the race” of suffering well?

In , the apostle Paul is writing to the church in Corinth about the idea of stewardship. Now, he’s not talking about stewardship in the way we normally do. There’s not a mention of giving or tithing. Rather, Paul seems to have a broader view of what stewardship is. According to him, all of life is a matter of stewardship. If you were to flip through that chapter, you’d see words like “servants,” “managers,” and “faithful.” Paul wants to remind them that everything they have comes from God and will ultimately go back to Him. At the end of the day, we’re responsible for what we did with what God gave.

But then, towards the end of the chapter, Paul makes an interesting turn. Though the Corinthians brag about all the good things they have, Paul chooses to boast in something altogether different:

: “Even now we go hungry and thirsty, and we don’t have enough clothes to keep warm. We are often beaten and have no home. We work wearily with our own hands to earn our living. We bless those who curse us. We are patient with those who abuse us. We appeal gently when evil things are said about us. Yet we are treated like the world’s garbage, like everybody’s trash – right up to the present moment.”

Paul’s view of stewardship included his suffering. When he and his traveling companions lacked the basic necessities of life, their resolve to keep going was a matter of stewardship. When they worked hard to spread the Gospel message, their perseverance was an act of stewardship. When people said evil and untrue things about Paul and his preaching, his response to their insults was an act of stewardship. By sharing this view of his hardships with us, Paul presents us with one of the most beautiful and difficult truths about our own suffering:

Suffering is a matter of stewardship.

Like I said, that’s a difficult truth to hear – particularly when we’re in the middle of suffering. Yet, we would all have to admit that our suffering is, at the very least, something that our sovereign God has allowed into our lives. That means it’s something we need to handle with care. We can’t just dismiss our suffering as an anomaly or as something that wasn’t supposed to happen. We have to approach it as something that has been given to us for some reason. We have to approach it as though it has a purpose.

In doing that, we discover the beautiful part of that truth. Our suffering is not meaningless. Our hardships are not hollow and empty. We can find something – some meaning and purpose – in the middle of them. More than that, we can find Someone in the midst of them. The God who brought us to this moment is in this moment with us. The Master has not left His stewards on their own. Even in the midst of the trial, even in the darkest night and the deepest pain, He is there with us. The God who went to the cross – the “emblem of suffering and shame” – isn’t going to back away from us in the midst of our suffering. Indeed, if the cross shows us anything, it’s that He’s right there in the mess with us. If that’s true, then Paul was right…

Suffering is stewardship.

So, how do we steward suffering? When we’re in seasons of trial and trouble, how can we be sure we’re handling it rightly? To say it another way, how can we “suffer well”? I wish I had all the answers to those questions. Still, there are a couple things I think we can focus on as we attempt to steward our suffering in a good and Godly way:

· FOCUS ON THE “WHAT?” NOT THE “WHY?”: I think we sometimes miss out on the stewardship of suffering because we begin with the wrong question. Think about it: what is the first question we ask in times of suffering? “Why? Why is God doing this to me?” We want to know the reason why these things are happening. We want God to explain Himself. But, what if we changed the question? Instead of asking “Why?” ask “What?” Specifically, “What does God have for me in the midst of this? What could God possibly be up to here?” I’ll admit that it’s often hard for us to see God’s hand in the midst of our suffering. Some of the reason for that is because we’re so busy focusing on ourselves that we don’t take the time to focus on Him. We’re so concerned with what’s happening to us that we fail to consider what God might want to do in us. Asking ourselves the “What?” question puts us in a posture of expectation, allowing us to better see how God might be leading us through this valley. If we want to steward our suffering well, then we must look for His purposes in the midst of our pain. Look for His work. Look for His hand.

· FOCUS ON OTHERS: They say misery loves company. When we’re experiencing pain, our first inclination can be to make sure others feel that pain as well. In the midst of our suffering, we are prone to lash out in bitterness, sarcasm, and anger. As the saying goes, “Hurt people hurt people.” Notice, however, how Paul responded to people as he dealt with his own difficulties. There in , he uses words like “bless” and “patient” to describe how he treated some of the very people who were causing his suffering. We cannot properly steward our own trials if we fail to treat others in a Christ-like way. We extend grace even when we feel attacked. We share kindness even though our own pain may be overwhelming. We show patience even when things aren’t going the way we want them to. Just because we’re suffering doesn’t mean we have to drag the people around us into the pit, too. We can suffer well by being a blessing to others even when we feel “less-than-blessed.”

· FOCUS ON THE END: One of the hardest parts of suffering comes from the uncertainty it causes. We rarely know how things are going to turn out. Even now, I have no idea what the outcome of my journey with leukemia will be. Will there be remission or relapse? There’s no way for me to know how this ends. And yet, the Bible assures us that we do know how it ends. As reminds us, we are destined for a world with no more “death or mourning or crying or pain.” We are headed for a world without suffering! God has promised that our eternal stories will not be dominated by what we suffer here. Instead, we are looking forward to a new world – a better world. In our darkest days, that may be the only hope we have. As it turns out, it’s the only hope that we need. One day, we get to take all the suffering and pain – all the cancer, the Alzheimer’s, the broken bodies and the hurt hearts – and we get to set them at the feet of Jesus. On that day, He’s going to repair and restore us far more than any other doctor could. No matter what, our suffering isn’t terminal. We are merely its stewards, and our Master ultimately gets the final say.