Soul-Making and the Vale of Tears

Today's Reading

Read Romans 5:3-5: "We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."

Read James 1:2-4: "Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing."

Read 2 Corinthians 4:16-18: "So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison."

Read 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 — Paul's thorn in the flesh, prayed against three times, never removed: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."

Read Hebrews 12:5-11 — the strangest analogy in the New Testament: God's discipline as the discipline of a Father who loves us enough to refuse to leave us where we are. "For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness."

Read 1 Peter 1:6-7 — gold tested by fire.

Reflection

There is a class of New Testament passages on suffering that, taken together, make a startling claim. Suffering, the apostles say, does something. It is not just a thing endured. It is, in the providence of God, productive — of endurance, character, hope, glory, the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Romans 5, James 1, 2 Corinthians 4, Hebrews 12, 1 Peter 1: this is one of the most consistent threads in the New Testament, and any honest reading of the Christian doctrine of suffering has to reckon with it.

It is also one of the most weaponized parts of the Bible. There is almost no verse from this set that has not, at some point, been quoted at a person in active grief in a way that made the wound worse. Someone's child dies and a well-meaning friend says, "well, he uses everything for good." Someone's marriage falls apart and a small group leader says, "this will produce endurance." Someone gets a chronic diagnosis and a co-worker says, "God's strength is made perfect in your weakness." The verses are true. The use is often miserable.

So we have to be careful here. The free will defense had its limits; the soul-making argument has its own. To say that God uses suffering for the formation of character is true. To say it to a stranger whose grief is fresh is to do exactly what Job's friends did. The truth of a biblical statement and the appropriateness of saying it in this hour to this person are different questions, and pastoral wisdom is the ability to tell them apart.

C.S. Lewis felt the difference acutely after his wife's death. In The Problem of Pain, written before his bereavement, he had given the most beautiful version of the soul-making argument any modern Christian has written: "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world." After Joy died, Lewis read his own old book and found it embarrassingly distant. The arguments were correct. They were also, in his own grief, almost unusable. So he wrote a different book, and in A Grief Observed he made a remark that should be tattooed on the back of the hand of every Christian who has ever quoted Romans 5 to a stranger: "What do people mean when they say, 'I am not afraid of God because I know He is good'? Have they never even been to a dentist?"

Read that line until it hurts. Lewis is not denying that God is good. He is naming what we forget the moment we get glib about God's purposes in pain: that even good things can be terrifying. The dentist is doing you good. The dentist is also drilling into your tooth. A child is right to be afraid of the dentist even if the dentist is, on balance, on her side. To say I am not afraid because I know He is good is to deny that the goodness in question can include the drill. Anyone who has ever been to a dentist — or a hospital, or a funeral, or a chemotherapy session — knows it can.

So here is how Christians have learned, over the centuries, to hold the soul-making promises without making them glib.

First, the promises are made by people who have suffered. Paul writes 2 Corinthians 4 from a life that includes shipwreck, beating, imprisonment, hunger, thirst, and the daily anxiety for the churches. He writes 2 Corinthians 12 about a thorn in the flesh he prayed three times to have removed and was refused. James writes "count it all joy" to congregations under pressure. Peter writes "the genuineness of your faith — more precious than gold" to Christians scattered by persecution. Hebrews writes about discipline to people whose property has been seized. None of these passages are written by a comfortable Christian to an uncomfortable one. They are written by sufferers to sufferers. They have an authority a slogan does not.

Second, the promises are addressed to the sufferer, not to the bystander. James says "count it all joy when you meet trials." The verse is permission for the sufferer to interpret her own pain as productive. It is not authorization for an outsider to tell her what her pain is producing. The sufferer may, with time, come to say "this season made me." She does not need her co-worker to say it for her. The same words, in the same Bible, function as gospel from the inside and as cruelty from the outside. The grammar is everything.

Third, the promises do not deny the pain. James 1:2-4 says "count it all joy" — the verb is hēgēsasthe, reckon, consider, treat as. It does not say feel joy. It does not say the trial is itself a joy. It says: when this thing comes, treat it as the kind of thing that, in the hand of God, produces something. The pain remains pain. Endurance is not numbness. Hebrews 12 is unsparing about this: "all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant" for the moment. The moment is real. The pain is real. The "later" is real too. They are different times, and Hebrews is not asking you to skip from the first to the second. It is asking you to trust that the second will come.

Fourth, the promises sit inside a larger framework that prevents them from collapsing into mere pragmatism. The Bible never says suffering is good. It says God uses it. The two are not the same. Tim Keller, who lived this distinction, put it: "Suffering is unbearable if you aren't certain that God is for you and with you." Note the structure. Suffering is unbearable. Suffering remains unbearable. What changes is not the suffering but the company. God for, God with — these are not erasers of the pain. They are presences that make the pain something other than meaningless. The pain stays. The aloneness goes.

Lewis kept circling this in his late letters. "We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us," he wrote in Letters to Malcolm. "We are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be." That is the honest sentence. The Christian who has read the Bible cannot say the best will not hurt. He can say the One who is bringing about the best is here, and is for us. The dentist is, in fact, on our side. He is also, in fact, drilling.

If you are in a season of suffering today and someone has quoted these verses at you in a way that wounded you, you are not crazy and you are not unspiritual. The verses are true. The use was wrong. Let the verses come to you instead the way Paul wrote them — as a sufferer to a sufferer — and see what happens. Romans 5 is not a tract handed to you by a stranger. It is a letter from a man with thirteen scars. He is not telling you it does not hurt. He is telling you, on the other side of his own thirteen scars, what it produced.

Going Deeper

Take 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 and read it as if Paul were sitting next to you. Notice that he prayed three times — like Jesus in Gethsemane — and that the answer was no. Notice that he did not get the thorn removed. Notice that he was given, instead, a different thing: "my grace is sufficient." Sit with the difference between the request granted and the grace given to keep going without the request being granted. That difference is most of what soul-making turns out to be in practice.