“Everything happens as if poets had a special mission, as if they had to give an example that only they can give, as if their life, whatever it may be, was willed to be as it is.”
—François Mauriac, Second Thoughts
I met surprise at sixty miles-per-hour on a freeway I drive quite regularly. I had the road nearly to myself one night. The rain was beating down, but my windshield wipers worked perfectly fine. My little Toyota’s headlights probed the darkness. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, until my headlights illuminated something large and heavy—like a concrete construction divider—directly in front of me. With no time to hit the brakes, I swerved, only clipping the object with my fender.
I pulled the car over, trying hard to breathe slowly while my heart felt like it might jump out of my chest. Had I drifted off to sleep? Had I entered a construction zone? What was it? The unlit freeway gave no clues. I backed the car along the shoulder until I could see better. To my shock, I saw that the object was an eight-foot couch.
Perplexed, I climbed out of the car and stood in the rain. Did it fall off of a truck? What kind of moron loses a couch off the back of his truck? But then I noticed that it was upright, set exactly in the middle of the three lanes at the darkest point of the road. It didn’t tumble off of a truck, it was set there. On purpose. Some bored kids probably wanted to see someone get lit up like a Christmas tree. And I almost did.
I dragged it off of the road and climbed into my car, shaken. Questions stormed my mind. What if I had glanced away for a split second? What if I hadn’t swerved? You’ll laugh, but the entire drive home, I kept waiting for another couch to appear. I have no idea who left that couch there, but even to this day I stay alert for couches when I drive freeways at night—especially on rainy nights. Strange, I know. But that’s how it is. Close encounters with death change one’s perspective. Suddenly, I was different.
And that is how suffering feels to us: like a sudden obstruction in our way. Like a divine couch dropped in the road—and if not dodged it may wreck us. Some people seem to rarely suffer. Others spend all of their efforts trying to dodge it. Still others seem condemned to run into suffering repeatedly at full speed.
Suffering, Our Common Lot
We’re all in the hands of God, and while that is always a good and promising thing, the Scriptures do not shy away from the universal reality of human suffering: “. . . man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward” (Job 5:7 NKJV). Even God enfleshed, our Lord Jesus, suffered in every way we do—physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, relationally. I treasure Matthew 26 as a personal comfort because it describes Jesus staggering beneath the weight of suffering: “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death” (Matthew 26:38 NKJV). Recognizing that cry for what it is helps remove the common, though unnecessary, stigma attached to suffering and sorrow. They are part of the human condition, especially when the soul is under duress.
Truly, suffering is more poignant at some times than at others, but it is the undercurrent of existence, nonetheless. When suffering is greatest, when we stagger in a desert, sometimes we find God waiting there, drawing us out to meet him. I described my own encounter with suffering in A Small Cup of Light, although it was difficult to re-enter my pain, to write about it. The book gave me the opportunity to be utterly vulnerable regarding the alienation and spiritual struggle that suffering prompts, but it also testifies to the faithfulness of God no matter the circumstances.
I know that suffering has impacted me in at least one important way—it has forced my reliance upon God. Sickness, grief, loss, loneliness, bewilderment, and alienation have all forced me into a vulnerability I did not like, but left me grasping for God. This dependency is a good thing, dear child. It is, in fact, a significant goal of the Christian journey. Alistair Begg is correct, weakness is advantageous when dependency is the goal. We were not designed for autonomy, to be masters of our own fates. We were made for relationship with God who knows our mortality. That is why we need not fear suffering.
Suffering Shapes Us for Meaningful Expression
Believe it or not, suffering and creativity are not enemies. Life’s troubles are often the seedbed of deeply meaningful writing and creative acts, especially for artists who perpetually use their life experiences to serve others. Suffering prepares us to sing exquisite songs, to spangle the darkness with bright stars.
Yes, suffering makes us feel naked. Yes, suffering reminds us of our weakness. We grieve. But it seems to me that the writer’s job is to wait upon the Lord who hides his face and to look for him the world over (Isaiah 8:17)—to stay awake in suffering and out of suffering, to find evidence of him in every circumstance for the sake of deeper creativity, no matter the sorrow, no matter the strife.
The best writers take every opportunity to explore the complexity, ambiguity, and paradox of life—all of it—to record upon their cave walls the illumination of a life. This is precisely the generational, inspirational, and generous work to which we’re called. Our vulnerability reveals beauty hidden within and beyond.
I think we would be surprised by the poignant misery that served as inspiration for some of the most celebrated works of human expression. How many artists have suffered from isolation, poverty, deformity, or social exile? Milton wrote despite blindness. Bach, van Gogh, and Dickens composed while suffering what was likely bipolar disorder. Keats died young from pulmonary tuberculosis. Blake and Wilde died penniless. Byron’s club foot, Stevenson’s frailty, and Emily Dickinson’s struggle with isolation and mental illness are well-documented. History is proof that suffering and creativity are not enemies.
Readers intuitively perceive that darkness has deepened and strengthened these authors’ works. We’re moved because they recorded their yearnings and their yearnings are ours. This creativity born from suffering reinforces a principle that God wove into the fabric of creation, namely, that a grain of wheat must fall into the ground and die before it bears fruit (John 12:24). Why do readers feel a magnetic pull toward generative writers? Because they sense a shared experience, an empathy and depth of insight that simultaneously comforts and enriches them.
François Mauriac believed that God does not treat poets as he does the rest of humanity. He noted that for poets, everything happens as if it were tailor-made for them, and they are to give an account, a testimony that they alone can give, as if their lives were specially built to say what they are meant to say. I think he’s correct. Poets have tailor-made experiences that equip them for a particular kind of writing.
Your life experience is creativity’s soil, but other people’s suffering can also provide grounding for your writing. Their loss, grief, and pain may generate profound thoughts in you—visions of the divine that you were meant to share with the world. You don’t have to experience all of humanity’s trouble first-hand to be an effective writer. All you need is empathy. Your generative effectiveness will be closely tied to your ability to empathize with those around you who have hit rock bottom.
I heard it said by one who has greater faith than I, that rock bottom is solid ground for the Christian. She was right. God is the rock upon which you will fall, but even there upon that rock you can sit in the dark . . . and dream. Allow your life experiences, good and bad, to be the crucible of your ideas, conversations, and work. Allow your life to bloom beneath the pressures of your situation, whatever it is.
Engagement, Not Avoidance
I fear for writers whose hearts feed strictly on the superficial happiness of a comfortable and positive life by fleeing “negative” emotions. They will fall victim to the misconception that God wants merely conformity and obedience, forgetting that God wants our full engagement with him. In so doing, they will confuse joy with happiness, grief with abject despair. They will start writing sentimental kitsch.
If the Psalms are a songbook for God’s people, then we should find insight and encouragement in the fact that it does not include 150 happy songs. What we find in the Psalms are honest encounters with grief and gladness, loss and life, bewilderment and boldness, rage and rejoicing. Each song was written in light of the conviction that God is good, faithful, and in charge. They each point the quailing human heart to the rock of salvation and remind us of our rightful place in the hands of God.
Thomas à Kempis penned this beautiful prayer that echoes the message of the Psalms: “If you wish me to be in darkness, I shall bless you. And if you wish me to be in light, again I shall bless you. If you stoop down to comfort me, I shall bless you, and if you wish me to be afflicted, I shall bless you forever” (The Imitation of Christ). Far from being disheartening, these psalm-like prayers embolden us to trust our Maker and Sustainer in the midst of suffering.
They remind us not to hurry nor bustle our way through to the other side of suffering, but to sit in the darkness and wait on God. There in the darkness, I know that God is present and active, doing something transformative in us, not because suffering is specially made to transform us but because God is always in the process of transformation.
I encourage you to stay committed to living thankfully in the moment, whether sorrow-filled or full of happiness. Yes, life is risky. Whatever you do to guard against risk will prevent you from experiencing joy in its fullness. You may not want the suffering, but by being open to risk, you open yourself to joy.
The Temptation to Complain
Above all else, I would ask you not to engage in a pattern of complaint. You have made certain decisions about your life now as a generative writer and must learn to face the frustrations. Loneliness, loss, and human weakness will likely be some of them. Stay focused and resolute throughout. Write. You will meet with grief, bewilderment, failures of many kinds, but if you abandon yourself freely to this calling, then these small deaths will no longer loom so large. You will learn from them and move on to a second birth and a third birth, reborn after each death.
What God takes away, when he takes it away, will be its own kind of death. Nevertheless, in God we find life. Our deaths are nothing but divine opportunities to discover God’s life-giving nature. As I’ve learned through my own health issues, those seasons when my mental faculties suffered have not changed his goodness. When I thought my life was crumbling down around me, he was opening my narrow life onto more hope, more beauty, more life.
Consider it a possibility, even if a remote one, that God knows how your suffering will be the very thing that propels you to better generative service. When you feel far from God, unable to see the world charged with his grandeur, do not panic, just latch onto those who do see it. Read them, talk to them, listen to them, watch them, walk with them, and ride their coat-tails. But give your fear to God.
You will forever be dogged by your changeableness because we live in a broken world. You will swing between hilarity and deep sadness, anxiety and absolute peace, faithfulness and unfaithfulness, sincerity and flippancy. But God is unchanging and the one to whom, through all your changing, you should direct the ear of your heart, awake to his voice. He is immutable, unchanging, the ground of being.
God Renews Your Strength
On my way home from work one evening, I began to experience strong tremors through my torso and arms. The muscles in my face began to lilt and my cognition slowed to a crawl. All signs pointed to a stroke, but I knew I was not having a stroke. My heart rate was normal and, when we later checked it, so was my blood pressure. By the time I arrived home, my hands had turned in on themselves, growing rigid like someone who suffers from cerebral palsy. Although I was unstressed, my nervous system was malfunctioning in frightening ways. My children, somewhat accustomed to my health condition by then, still found my appearance alarming. They helped me to a chair where I could safely sit and wait for the symptoms to subside.
I asked my son to bring me my Bible because I needed something to distract me from my pain and worries. He did so and with my rigid hands, I cracked the covers and let it fall open. The first verse I read was Psalm 144:1 which says, “Blessed be the Lord my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle” (NKJV).
I laughed out loud. Ironies abounded. I had every reason to dismiss this verse, to find in it no application for my life. But I was struck by the stunning coincidence and I was forced to ask, “What if I did not turn to this verse on accident? What if I was meant to read it? What if this verse holds true for me even now in my present condition?”
I have no tightly organized argument to explain how that verse was true for me in that moment, but I know it was true nonetheless—if not literally, then in some other way. I have faith that it was true. It reminded me of another passage written for those who suffer in the world and wonder whether God is paying any attention at all.
“Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel: ‘My way is hidden from the Lord, and my just claim is passed over by my God’? Have you not known? Have you not heard? The everlasting God, the Lord, the creator of the ends of the earth, neither faints nor is weary. His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the weak, and to those who have no might he increases strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall, but those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:27-31 ESV)
We believe God’s promises to be true. We believe that his understanding surpasses our own. We believe that he gives power to the weak. But sometimes these things are hard to see, difficult to believe. Even still, God renews our strength when we wait on him in our suffering.
In a mysterious way, he is mounting us up on eagles’ wings. In a way perhaps we do not understand, he is helping us to run and not grow weary, to walk and not faint. None of this is possible apart from a God who works mysteriously and paradoxically. None of this will be realized apart from faithfully trusting him and taking his hand.
Walk Into the Darkness, Hand in Hand With God
The sun is setting behind the towering pines of your childhood. Let your soul shine radiantly, pulsing with spiritual life and charged with purpose. You already stand upon that immovable ground of being whether you feel it or not. Today I awoke with my memory alive, filled by vivid snapshots of your childhood. Ponytails, freckles, long fingers pressed to my face, reading books beneath your bed by flashlight in hopes that I would not come downstairs and find you awake past your bedtime.
I remember reading the promises of God and asking him to keep them in your life. There were days that my faith faltered, but God steadily carried you and kept his word. I know that regardless of whatever desert he has in store for you, he will still keep his word. Even when you feel like you’re free-falling, it is only a trick of your perception. God holds you steady in his arms. May you rest on that fact and know that all your efforts to live faithfully—including your generative writing—are entirely dependent upon his faithfulness. Yours is a gift springing from his faithfulness.
A dear friend of mine lost his wife many years ago. When I was in a period of suffering, he spoke out of his own experience and ministered to me in deep and unforgettable ways by simply reciting a poem from heart. It is a poem by Minnie Louise Haskins titled “God Knows” and I commend it to you as a helpful reminder.
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
And he replied:
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”
So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night.
And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.So heart be still:
What need our little life
Our human life to know,
If God hath comprehension?
In all the dizzy strife
Of things both high and low,
God hideth His intention.God knows. His will
Is best. The stretch of years
Which wind ahead, so dim
To our imperfect vision,
Are clear to God. Our fears
Are premature; In Him,
All time hath full provision.Then rest: until
God moves to lift the veil
From our impatient eyes,
When, as the sweeter features
Of Life’s stern face we hail,
Fair beyond all surmise
God’s thought around His creatures
Our mind shall fill.
Benediction
May you learn to take God’s hand while you’re still young. May he lead you toward the breaking of day in the lone east. May you embrace the story—every valley, every mountain.