Life is sometimes hard.
I know you have probably been told that if you just read these books, or follow that diet or apply that mantra, you can avoid the hard, the difficult and the painful. If you can manage to get it right you will live in a utopia of joy, health and blessings. But if that doesn’t happen? Was it because you didn’t pray the right prayer or have the right amount of happy thoughts or that you didn’t project enough positivity into the universe? No. It was because in life, pain is unavoidable. No matter how much we don’t want to believe it. No matter how much we hide from it. And boy don’t we try our best to hide from it. Sometimes the sky does fall. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Sometimes shit happens.
You cannot control life as much as you can’t hold back the tide of the ocean with your hands.
How much of our theology is really about the “Kingdom” and how much is really about control? Controlling life. Controlling God. Be in control and you will avoid pain. Create your own spiritual dictatorship with you as the lord and captain of your own ship, and pain will be your footstool. Jesus was never about control. The Christianity he modeled looks more like surrender and submission and sacrifice.
I have been meditating a lot about brokenness and suffering of late. I have been thinking about all of the poor theology and ideas that I have heard from church folk about suffering. (Charismatics and Pentecostals generally tend to have a poor theology of suffering – as in we don’t really have a lot of theology around suffering. Traditionally, we like to sweep suffering and brokenness under the church carpet and try to avoid tripping over the bumps we pretend to not see)
And yet the greatest miracle of all was the brokenness and suffering of Christ. You can’t have the victory of the cross without the brokenness of the cross.
We can do better. Better than rituals for spiritual success and testimony without the process. Testimony is simply sharing where God is at work. When we leave out the hard, painful parts of the story in the name of “testimony”, are we implying that He was not at work in the process? That He is not there in the darkness?
I know that He was there, is there, because He was there at the Cross. He stepped into suffering. He embraced brokenness. His and ours.
It is a very human idea to attempt to gather power and position to avoid weakness. God chose to reveal His power through laying aside His privilege and choosing weakness. It’s not the lion and the lamb. The lion is the lamb.
God is constantly messing with our theology. Challenging our view of Him.
I have a limited understanding when it comes to a theology of brokenness and suffering. I am still trying to get my head and heart around it. Baby steps. What I do know is that our overzealous theology of victory, an overly optimistic view of the end-times and marching up those good ole seven mountains; holds very little relevance to the boy who has just lost a mother, to the man wrestling with mental illness, to the little girl raped daily for money, to the women trapped in addiction.
Ann Voscamp states in The Broken Way “Love isn’t about feeling good about others; love is ultimately being willing to suffer for others.” Love’s intention is to direct our gaze low to the broken, the hurting, the stumbling, the outcast. Christ says that when we care for the least of these, we care for Him. How ironic that sometimes we miss seeing Christ because we thought we should be looking high when in fact he was hidden in the low places.
I am not convinced that a theology that is over focused on might and power and victory is the answer the world is looking for, but then neither are they looking for a theology of lethargic apathy. There must be a balance; a balance of faith in the midst of brokenness and hope in the depth of suffering. Maybe one day I’ll get there.