God, That Hurts! (January 22, 2006)

A friend of mine in college told me about the time an orthopedist manipulated his injured ankle while asking, "Does this hurt?" My friend said "YES! That hurts." Then the orthopedist kept right on working the ankle and my friend, thinking that the man was hard of hearing, said, "That hurts! I said that HURTS!" The doctor calmly responded, "Oh, I'm not trying to find out if it hurts any more."

My friend had assumed that the doctor was trying to minimize his pain - but apparently he had some other good reason for rotating my friend's foot like a corkscrew. My guess is that he was aiming at a more accurate diagnosis.

That incident came to mind when a devout friend wrote to me recently about some nastiness he was suffering. He understands that God teaches us things through our sorrows. Yet he wrote, "But sometimes I just want to say 'Enough already, I get it, I get it - there couldn't possibly be anything more I could learn from this pain.'"

I think he's right. Maybe there is still some lesson he needs to learn, but I doubt it. I suspect the reason lies elsewhere. In saying, "I get it, I get it!" he is probably like my broken-ankled friend saying "That hurts! That hurts!" - to which God might respond, "Oh, I know. At this point I'm not trying to teach you anything."

So what is God trying to do? I don't know, but it won't hurt to throw out a couple guesses - as long as it is understood that these are mere guesses.

Maybe your trial will benefit someone else in ways you could never imagine. I once wrote a whole Pastor's Page on this (“Do We Always Benefit From Suffering?” - August 14, 2005), so I won't belabor the point. But I know that I need to remind myself that even when my sufferings have been mined for all the possible benefit they can do
me, the divine drilling may continue strictly for the sake of someone else. Maybe if I could talk to God and say, "This isn't refining me any more!" he would respond, "Child, it isn't you I'm refining."

I wonder if the apostles of our Lord ever got sick of the beatings and imprisonments and death sentences and were driven to say, "Lord, is this really necessary? I think you know by now that I am loyal to you! These pains sure aren't making me any holier." But I don't think those sufferings were mainly for their sakes. They were for ours. To me one of the strongest evidences for the resurrection of Christ is the fact that the apostles were willing to suffer so much for it. That was unpleasant for them, but it is a constant support for my faith.

Another of God's goals when he keeps "twisting our broken ankles" may be to make heaven all the sweeter for us. I believe there are only two ways for a saved person to increase his reward in heaven: (1) Do good, or (2) Suffer a lot. The first factor is one we can control, the second is one that just kind of happens to us. I think that most of us know that we can make our heaven better by doing good, but maybe it is less widely appreciated that suffering (as long as we don't self-inflict it) has much the same effect. Jesus talked a lot about the last being first, the mourners being comforted, the hungry being fed, etc. Look at the story of poor Lazarus in Luke 16! A wretched earthly life yielded to a blissful eternity. Where grief has abounded, joy will abound all the more.

In the meantime, we just keep trusting God.