Answers

           I'm a lady who likes answers.  I want to know why and for what purpose.  Does this wheelchair make me more like Christ?  Then check.  Does my paralysis help refine my faith?  It does?  Then check.  Does my disability cultivate the fruit of patience or long-suffering?  Check again.  But sometimes those answers -- you know, reasons why I might suffer -- good as they are they just don't cut it.  They're not enough.  Because sometimes my quadriplegia absolutely overwhelms and I find that answers aren't sufficient.

            I bet you experience the same thing.  It happens to you.  I know it does. When your heart is being wrung out like a sponge, an orderly list of the "sixteen good biblical reasons as to why this is happening" I tell you that kind of mechanistic, dry, inert way of looking at scripture can sting like salt in a wound.  When you are hurting, you don't stop the emotional bleeding that way.  A checklist of good reasons why this is happening to you may be okay when you're looking at your suffering in a rearview mirror -- maybe two, three or five years down the line -- but when you're hurting right now in the present tense and you hear, "Well, friend, let me explain why God might be allowing this in your life, why it is happening," you just can't swallow it.

            Answers, no matter how good they are, cannot be the coup de grace. Purified faith should never be an end in itself; it should culminate in God.  Stronger character is character made muscular not for it's sake, but God's.  A livelier hope is more spirited because of it's focus on the Lord.  To forget God at the center of your suffering, to forget that God is the God behind all the answers is to tarnish faith, weaken character, and deflate hope.  After all, 2 Peter 1:8 says, "If you have these qualities [you know, stronger character, refined faith] existing and growing in you then it means that [and here's the kicker] knowing our Lord Jesus Christ has not made your lives complacent or unproductive."  Wow!

            Friend, never distance the Bible's answers from God.  I once heard Dr. Peter Kreeft say that the problem of suffering is not about some thing, but Someone.  So it follows that the answer must not be something, but Someone.  "Knowing our Lord Jesus Christ" means keeping your eye on the Sculptor of your life-not on the suffering, or even suffering's benefits.  Besides, answers are for the head.  They don't always reach the problem where it hurts -- and that's in the heart.   When a person is suffering, like me for instance when the pain drives me to bed... I'm just like that little girl who is on her knee looking up into the face of her daddy saying, "Why daddy, why?"  I don't want answers, I just want daddy to pick me up, pat them on the back, and say "There, there, honey.  It's going to be okay."  That's what we want to hear.  We just want to know that it's okay.

            I have found that when things overwhelm me, when my paralysis just lays me flat and down for the count... Jesus, my Lord and Savior, really is (can you believe it?), He really is enough.  And that makes everything okay.

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