Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
-Shakespeare
Suffering is the common experience of mankind. It is something I am both anguished by and enthralled with.
It seems, that God often uses the most painful experiences in our lives to grow, teach and humble us. They are not for nothing.
But in our suffering, it can be hard to see that.
Last week, I attended a talk about Suffering and Evil. It was about the problem of pain, and how suffering poses a deep dilemma for us, even more so for the most fervent lovers of God. For undeserved suffering poses a great moral dilemma: How can a good God bring me so much pain? The sufferer is in deep perplexity: Is God for me or against me? It is baffling, guilt-riddling, isolating: Have I sinned so badly to deserve this, does God not love me?
At the end of the talk, during the Question and Answer session, I asked how one ought to respond to a sufferer. In the light of sin, empathy and that unfathomable space of not knowing what God is doing, how do we bring comfort to another? LT Jeyachandran, a well-known speaker, answered, "It is not our part to judge the sufferer for his suffering. Sometimes, suffering happens to good people. It is not always punishment. But only when the dust has settled shall we fathom even a little of it. Only God knows, and it is merely our duty to listen, to love, and to comfort."
How true.
I don't know why but I started to tear. Because of those 2 years of utter depression and darkness, I understood the taste of suffering, of what it means to sleep in fear and depression and to awaken in despair, to lose everything one values and gain only but pain, to withstand despicion and struggle with guilt, to grapple with a silent, withdrawn God and to wrestle with Him day after day, with a blank world, white pills and isolation. You will understand only after the dust has settled, he said.
Suffering has no answer in its presence. It is only when it has ended, does some semblance of an answer come to one.
Now that that period of clinical depression has ended, and God has promised me a Rainbow, I now understand that period of suffering as a form of cleansing for me, a period of intense stripping and rebuilding, a terrible and beautiful moulding process. That suffering made me grow. It gave me a story to tell. It gave me a new life.
Yet, suffering always bears the quality of having no complete answers. Even as the answers for my suffering reveal themselves slowly, and I am convinced of God's immense love for me, the tears still came because still, I asked, God, did it have to be this way? Did I have to suffer so much?
I suppose the answer is yes. Suffering is not only important, but necessary for our growth.
Today, at the pre-race briefing for the Half-Iron Man race this Sunday, I found part of my answer.
As they went through the rules for the triathlon, I was cringing in my seat. I had agreed to stand in for a friend for the cycling part of a relay team, comprising of 2 others who would swim 1.9km and run a half-marathon. Little did I realize what I had agreed to. The 90km race was in less than a week, and even though I often biked extra distance during training, I had not been training with the race in mind. According to a newspaper article yesterday, the bike leg was invariably the longest and toughest. Said a seasoned triathlete at an interview, "When you've cycled 60km already, going up the slope the 5th and 6th time becomes a case of mind over body."
The cycling leg has been termed "a stiff test" for the athletes, with the most number of rules and points of disqualification, with a route going 6 times up the formidable slope on Benjamin Sheares Bridge under a hot sun, with one surely having to eat and drink while riding on the bike (quite a balancing feat), and the worst rule was, each bike had to be at least 7 metres away from the next one. This ensures nobody drafts, which means tailing behind a bike so as to avoid the extra effort of breaking the headwind.
No drafting. I’d never gone even close to 90km without drafting before.
What had I done. The same feeling of dread and realisation of my folly that I have every time I sign up for a mission trip came into my heart. Silly girl, now look what you’ve done.
“Oh, I’m so silly,” I said aloud to a friend. "No drafting!"
“I see your training group often drafts along long stretches, yes?”
“Yes, you’re right. Now I’m really done for.”
As those words left my mouth, something suddenly hit me. No, it was not true. Yes, the Big, Fast Boys in my training group often found it a great thrill to draft down long stretches at incredibly high speeds, but because God had withheld providing me with a new bike by giving my money away for Alisha’s hearing implant operation, I suffered with training on a much heavier, larger, lower-speed and poorer-grade bike for a prolonged period of time. Even though I pushed so hard, I was still the slowest in the group for a long time, so slow that almost always, I was thrown behind to ride alone, pushing against the headwind, with no one to draft behind.
Little did I realise, that that was the best ground for training.
Suffering is like that. It perplexes us while we're in it. But on retrospection, always helps us to see how it disciplines, moulds and strengthens us.
During the time after I had given away the money my father had given me for my new bike, every ride hurt, physically and emotionally. Many times, when I was thrown behind to ride all alone against the brutal headwind, with my friends soaring ahead, my heart would sink like a rock. My father had told me it was not that he couldn’t buy me a bicycle, but it was a matter of principle that he would not get me the bike. “It was a decision you made to give your money away, so you’ll have to live with it. It’s a matter of Principle, a lesson you must learn. I cannot pamper you.”
Riding alone with the pain in my legs, the discouragement of being left behind and the hurt that I mightn’t ever get a new bike… that was, in a way, a form of suffering, even though this suffering is incomparable to the suffering of poverty and hunger. Those rides were awful. I wanted to give my roadbike away and stop cycling altogether. For a few weeks, I refused to touch or even look at it.
But we forget, how suffering makes us grow, how it has a purpose, even if we don’t see it at the time.
What I didn’t realize was how God allowed that suffering for a greater purpose. Is that hard to believe? That a good God allows us to suffer? It was precisely because I had trained so much and pushed so hard on a terribly heavy and ill-fitted bike for so long that my legs bring me much faster and further on Faith, my new bike now. Because of that prolonged period of suffering and training, Faith can ride with the Big Boys now. And because of that, even though I'm a little worried, I have faith that God will see us through.
Are you suffering in some way, in some aspect of your life, and does it perplex you too?
Know that it is not for naught. As Shakespeare puts it, “Sweet are the uses of adversity/ Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous/Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.”
Suffering often prepares us for the races which we don’t even know lie ahead of us. They train our characters and grow our spirits, so we’ll be ready when an unexpected trial or race befalls us, when we have to rough it out alone, with nobody to draft or seek guidance from. I never knew, but those times of grief in solitude, whether cycling alone behind the pack or simply living through clinical depression, were excellent times of training the mind, body and spirit. I now see how those dark periods of adversity not only humbled, but also strengthened and refined my character, too. The greater the suffering, the greater the glory and beauty at the end.
And I suppose, it brings me greatest comfort to know that God suffered the biggest suffering known to mankind, and finished the toughest race known to humanity, to exchange a crown of thorns for a bejewelled crown of honour. Because of that, surely, we can delight in our sufferings, persevere through them, and finish our races, too.
“Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial,
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