Still Quarrying 103 - Pain.

With everything I have been through since March the one thing I haven’t experienced much is pain.  That is apart from the preparation for the apheresis procedure ie. the harvesting of stem cells.  This involved daily injections of a drug the name of which I have forgotten but which I was warned would cause me some bone pain.   A lady who was in the next bed to me during the harvesting described it as feeling like your bones were about to explode.  It wasn’t quite like that with me but the pain in my upper legs and back caused me a great deal of discomfort.  

This caused my mind to drift back to a sermon I heard many years ago in which the preacher referred to ‘the gift of pain’, a messenger to tell us that something is wrong in our bodies. An article in a recent edition of The New Yorker magazine deals with the phenomenon of people who feel no pain.  That might seem like a good prospect but it has its downside.   One lady, Joanne Cameron, who lives in the North of Scotland is highlighted.  She had no pain in childbirth (which I am told is earnestly to be desired!) and as a child had a fall while roller skating but had no idea she’d broken her arm until her mother noticed it was hanging strangely.  This was treated successfully but things have not worked out so well with others with the same imperviousness to pain.  The article cites another woman who suffered multiple fractures in her youth without noticing them.  Her bones never set properly and she was left with permanent damage.  

So, yes, most of us will go along with the idea of pain as a gift when it flags up something that has gone wrong.  But the preacher didn’t stop there. His text was Joel 2: 25:

‘I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten - the great locust and the young locust, the other locusts and the locust swarm - my great army that I sent among you.’  

The background to this is a ‘plague’ of locusts which has destroyed crops throughout Israel.  It has become a favourite text for many speaking as it does of restoration and renewal after tragedy.  But the preacher focussed on God’s description of the locusts which had destroyed the crops as ‘my great army that I sent among you.‘   In other words the locust swarm was not ‘just one of those things’, not a quirk of nature, not the work of an implacable fate but quite literally an act of God.  From this the preacher argued that  God has not merely built pain into our bodies as a warning system; nor does  He merely allow pain to exist;  but that He is actually the source of our pain.   

At the time I was startled.  I had been reading a number of books on healing some of which boldly stated that it was not God’s will that anyone should suffer and the rarity of healing in the Church showed a lack a lack of faith in Christians.  One book by Morton T. Kelsey claimed that the Church was under judgement because people were dying who would otherwise have been healed if only we had prayed in faith.  Whatever you make of this it is certainly the case that Christians do not live comfortably with suffering.  We have all struggled to respond when people have cited the amount of suffering in the world as an argument against an omnipotent and loving God.  It surely would not help if these people were exposed to the kind of preaching that spoke of God sending His ‘great army’ amongst us.  

The problem is that this is a vein of thought that you will find throughout the Bible.   Personal suffering and national tragedy are acknowledged as part of human experience and the source of it is God.  He hasn’t just allowed it.  It emerges from His will.  He has sent His ‘great army.‘   Very often this is seen as an act of judgement, as was the case with the locusts, and the purpose behind it was to bring back to God a people who had grown away from Him.   Therefore, His dark side is not so dark because His purpose is good.  His desire is to see His people turn back to Him.   

I can hear voices protest that this is Old Testament stuff which we don’t need to take too seriously.  But it continues in the New Testament.   Another sermon which has stayed in my mind over the years was on John 15: 1-4 where God is pictured as a gardener tending fruit trees.  The preacher emphasized that in order for fruit to grow there has to be pruning.  The gardener has to take his knife and cut away at the branches.  

I had read that passage on so many occasions and indeed preached on it  but the image of God with a pruning knife had escaped me.  But it is there.  And what does it mean for me?   For Paul it meant seeing his ‘thorn in (his) flesh’ as God’s will for him and an opportunity to depend more on His grace and not his own strength. (2 Corinthians 12: 7-10).   For Peter it meant seeing ‘all kinds of trials’ as an opportunity for faith to be tested and found genuine.  (1 Peter 1: 3-9).  For the writer of the Hebrews it meant seeing ‘hardship’ as discipline and a sign of God’s care for His sons and daughters: ‘God disciplines us for our good, that we might share in his holiness.’  (Hebrews 12: 7-13).

However we look at it what we cannot escape is a conviction throughout the Bible that the trials, tribulations and suffering we are called to endure can be seen in a positive light.  The supreme example of this is the crucifixion experience of Jesus where body, mind and spirit were strained to the utmost and yet through His endurance the salvation of humankind was achieved.   It is with this in mind that the writer of Hebrews was moved to write:

‘In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering.’  (Hebrews 2: 10).  

This is not to say that Jesus was not ‘perfect’ before His sufferings but as F.F. Bruce has written in his commentary on Hebrews:

‘ . . . the perfect Son of God has become the people’s perfect Saviour, opening up their way to God; and in order to become that, he must endure suffering and death.’  

C.S. Lewis’ The Problem Of Pain begins with a quotation from George Macdonald for whom Lewis had a high regard:

‘The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.’  

And how can that that be?  Surely in accepting whatever dark shadows fall on our lives as an opportunity to seek God in a more committed way and to celebrate what has been done for us through the suffering of Jesus.   Even when we feel our lives are coming apart it cannot be altered that we are ‘ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven.’  With that light shining in the depths of our being the darkness is not dark.   

Still Quarrying 102 - Under Pressure.

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,  through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.  Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance;  perseverance, character; and character, hope.  And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.  (Romans 5: 1-5)

There is a thread running through Scripture particularly in the New Testament which says that suffering is a positive experience to be celebrated.   In James 1: 2 we find this: ‘Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trails of many kinds . . .‘   You will find similar thinking in the writings of Paul and Peter.  This is not to say that suffering is to be courted, that we should deliberately put ourselves in the way of pain or adverse circumstance.  But when it falls to us in the Providence of God to go through a dark and difficult experience we are called to remember that God is not apart from the experience and that this is His time to work in us the qualities of Christ-likeness.  

There was a documentary shown recently on BBC 4 on the artist Peter Howson and his work on a massive painting called ‘Prophecy’.  From staring at a blank canvas to the eventual completion of his vision we saw the artist’s commitment, how he followed the creative urge, how much he gave mentally, physically and spiritually to satisfy that creative urge.  

God is the source of all creativity and it is His urge to create in all His people a reflection of His son Jesus.  Joni Eareckson wrote a song some years ago which had the prayer:  ‘Make me a portrait of Jesus . . .  That is Joni seeking to step into God’s will for her confident that that will is good and loving.  It is His creative urge to make us more like Jesus and a strong thread of thought in Scripture says that for many of us this will involve suffering.   It is one of the most powerful aspect’s of Joni’s ministry that she has accepted this despite her life-long struggle with quadriplegia and more recently cancer.

Paul was someone who knew about a wide range of suffering.  You can read about some of it in 2 Corinthians 11: 23 - 29.   The passage from Romans at the top of this blog speaks about the Christian’s response  to the darkness that falls on our experience.  He writes that suffering is an opportunity to show ‘perseverance’.  The word translated ‘suffering’ from the original Greek means to press something down and was used for the crushing of olives to produce oil and the crushing of grapes to produce wine.  The word translated ‘perseverance’ means ‘living under.‘   Put the two words together and what we see is Paul  sharing a vision of the Christian living under a pressing or a crushing.  If you like, hanging on in the faith that this experience is not apart from God and will be productive.  Oil and wine is the end-product of a crushing.  

Paul takes this further when he writes that this perseverance will produce ‘character’.   Let’s get back to the Greek again.  ‘Character’ is a translation of Greek word which means ‘something that has been tested or approved’.   Paul is looking to the end of a period of pressure/crushing and what we have become.  Hanging on in faith will see us more fit to be representatives of the Kingdom of God, not just fitter for heaven but  fitter to show the qualities of the Kingdom now.  

This is why Paul can speak of the pressed and crushed character producing ‘hope’.   Turning towards God in the midst of our suffering brings the assurance that He is present and He is holding us in His heart.  Romans 8: 28 - 39 assures us that nothing will ever separate us from His love.  Christians have experienced this love as we have grasped that God did not spare His only son to reveal His love for us.  Paul sees this as part of the ministry of the Holy Spirit: ‘God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.‘  It is the Spirit’s work to remind us of God’s love, to enable us to experience God’s love, even in the midst of our worst of times.   

The darkest day in human history was when the Son of God was stretched out on a cross and tortured to death.  And yet we are encouraged by the apostle John to believe that it was the love of God for humankind that motivated this event: ‘God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son . . . (John 3: 16).   The  darkest day showed the height and the depth of God’s love for us.  If that is the extent of His love for me then it continues through what pressing and crushing may fall to me:

‘There is nothing in all creation that will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’  (Romans 8: 39).

Still Quarrying 101 _ Home.

I didn’t do much writing while I was in hospital.  The nausea and fatigue made that very difficult.  (Interestingly, on one of my bad days a doctor told me that  nausea can be worse than pain.)   However, what you will read below was written last Sunday, 12 January, after being told that I would probably be going home in a few days.  

“I think this time has given me a deeper appreciation of ‘home’.  I can’t just recall how it arose but in chatting with one of the nurses I mentioned my study.  She said: ‘It must be great to have a place like that.’  It was a reminder of the privileged life I lead and the joy of having ‘a place like that’  where I can study, meditate, pray and prepare.  

“I remember a friend coming into the study one day and saying: ‘So this is where it all happens.’  I made a joke about all the things that needed to happen urgently like tidying for instance.  But there is a sense in which he was dead right. From the silence of contemplation comes the action that reveals the Kingdom of God.  Moses came down from the mountain and out of the Tent of Meeting to reveal God’s will for His people.  Isaiah came out of the Temple with a vision of his role as a prophet in a nation that needed to change.  Jesus emerged from a forty day period of spiritual conflict in the desert to preach and heal.   From  the isolation of Paul’s prison cells came words that advanced the Gospel in his time and continue to do so.  

“All of this has arisen from a sense of ‘home’ and my appreciation of a particular part of it.   But for a Christian a ‘home’ can be made anywhere because God’s presence and love and power can always be depended upon.  That can happen even in the most desperate circumstances that you would baulk to call ‘home’.    How homely was Flossenberg Concentration Camp to Dietrich Boenhoffer?   Did Watchman Nee’s heart warm to be resident in Tilanqiao Prison in Shanghai for twenty years?   Did Richard Wurmbrand look back with fondness to his long imprisonment and torture in various prisons in Rumania during the Cold War?  Doubtful.  But in each one of those cases and many others like them emerged Christian witness that has inspired and will continue to do so.  These men found God in the worst of places and encouraged others to build the Kingdom where they are.  

“So, home?  At this moment I am not at home because I am not in a particular building with my wife and son and with all the things with which I have formed a connection.  But today, the Lord’s Day, I have experienced a call to make this hospital ward my home, to be content, to engage with my God, to welcome visitors, to be sensitive to any opportunities for witness.  

“I have pushed my table up against the wall, bluetacked a wee cross to the wall, set my Bible on the table and created a corner of the room that feels like home.”