Theology of Suffering

I've thought a lot over the past couple of months about what it means to have a theology that can bear up under the weight of significant hardship. For a while now, I think I've had a hidden fear that if things got bad, my doubter-heart would buckle and I would either shake the fist at God, or be crushed by the pain. There have been many days of lament and so many tired times since everything started with Watts. More than the last 5 years combined, I'd imagine. We have felt ragged and threadbare, trying to keep our eyes up to see the 3 feet in front of us (most of the time, that's what we can manage). I think my fears of personal collapse would have come true if there wasn't space for hardship in our view of God. In all of that struggle, I have been more grateful than ever for a theology that not only bears the weight of trouble, but sees suffering as an expected and central part of it.

What if we believed this cancer was the result of some wrong decision we'd made? Or due to a lack of faith?

What if we thought God was apathetic and just watching the suffering of us and so many we've met?

These views just wouldn't hold up for me. Instead, I see a truer theology in words like these:

in the Abbey of Gethsemani

There's a statue of Jesus on a monastery knoll
In the hills of Kentucky, all quiet and cold.
He's kneeling in the garden, silent as a stone,
All his friends are sleeping, he's weeping all alone.
And the Man of all Sorrows never forgot
What sorrow is carried by the hearts that he bought...

(Andrew Peterson, The Silence of God)

It's the Suffering Savior of Isaiah 53, the Empathetic God of Hebrews 4. In this season with new depths of trial, I'm drawn to this compassionate God, and to his promise not that he will spare us from hardship, or even explain it all, but that he will not leave us alone in it. A promise to be spared trouble would not be believable, and to be alone in it would be hopeless. But thank God for a Gospel that says, expect that trouble will come and that I know the pain you feel and will be with you in it.