It took me a really long time to get to forgiveness. 

I knew forgiveness was pretty important — Jesus makes that really clear in the Gospels. But I also had gone through enough of the process of learning my heart to know what was really in there. I couldn’t fool myself into believing I’d forgiven when I really hadn’t.

Besides, I knew that wasn’t what Jesus wanted, either. He’s the one who taught me the importance of the heart. He’s the one who helped me learn that our hearts are the key players in relationship with God.

I couldn’t just play lip service to forgiveness. Neither Jesus nor I would be fooled. 

So what do you do when you know forgiveness is important but you just aren’t there? 

You ask God to help you get there, and you be with the truth of the mess in the meantime. 

I’m serious. This is what I did. For years — literally, years — I consciously asked God to help me learn forgiveness. And then I would look at the reality of my heart and know that forgiveness wasn’t in there yet. I was still reeling. Still in shock. Still picking up the pieces of brokeness. Still learning what happened because of all that brokenness. 

Still learning what Jesus could do with all that brokenness, too. 

I read so many perspectives on forgiveness over the years, and none of them penetrated me.

Forgiveness is a choice, they said. It’s a choice you keep choosing and choosing and choosing each day. Or they said, Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting what happened or saying that it’s okay. It means wilfully choosing not to hold that against someone anymore. Or here’s another one: Unforgiveness is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the other person to die. 

These things may be true, but none of those declarations or platitudes meant anything to me. They just didn’t compute. And they annoyed me. 

What got me to forgiveness was being with the pain. Examining it. Learning from it. Figuring out how it had formed me. Allowing Jesus to take me on the long journey of reckoning. 

And then getting to a place where I saw new things. 

The thing that helped me the most with forgiveness was having been with Jesus through that long season of darkness and scratches at healing. That long season helped me realize Jesus could handle everything that had happened to me. Even more, he could bring me through it — teach me new things, make something new.

I became more identified with Jesus and what he was making of me and my life than with the broken circumstances that had brought me to him in the first place. 

That’s when I could finally consider forgiveness.

When I didn’t need to hold the wrongdoings so close to my chest anymore. When Jesus had given me something more.

Do you know what it’s like to feel so identified with your suffering that you don’t know how to tell your story without it? 

I do. 

I know what it’s like to be so connected to all the ways I’ve been broken that I can’t see anything else anymore.

Living in the anger. Living in the sadness. Chafing against the injustices. 

You feel like your suffering defines you. It’s the only identity you have.

I also know what it’s like to come out on the other side. It feels like slowly waking up, or watching the misty fog clear before your eyes.

Suddenly, there’s more to see.

For me, each time this has happened, it has been akin to realizing God was able to handle all that happened to me. It didn’t surprise him or faze him. He let me come to him with it and said, “Yes. It’s true. I know.” And then he sat down beside me or walked next to me in the aftermath, attending to the process of carving out a new identity, showing how these things would be connected to bigger pictures. 

I became less identified with what had happened and more identified with what God could, would, and was already doing with it. 

It makes for a pretty monumental shift.

I’ve experienced a shift like this a few different times in my life, and each time it has felt like a huge boulder being removed from around my neck, and the connecting rope along with it. Instead of being submerged at the bottom of the ocean anymore by the weight of it, I found that I could stand upright in the water, my feet sure on the sandbar beneath me, feeling the cool water and its buoyancy against my skin, surveying the waves and the horizon and the light … free, now, to play.

I’ve shared here previously that I walked through a marital separation and divorce in 2003-2004 and that it was an experience that created a heavy cloak of shame that I wore the length of my body every single day. 

I remember sojourning back to California from the Midwest, where I’d been living the previous year, with all that belonged to my name packed in the backseat and trunk of my little white Volkswagen Jetta. I arrived at my dad’s house, which would be my new home for the first part of that new season, and stepped into the tiny guest bedroom feeling all out of sorts and wondering what, exactly, my life had become. 

I was starting over. Starting from scratch. Re-entering the familiar context of my hometown, surrounded by people I’d known my whole life, but nothing was the same. 

Those first few months created a cocooning of sorts inside my soul. I would hole up in my room at the end of each day and play Sarah McLachlan’s new album over and over and over. I sat in that room with the door closed tight behind me. It was the safest place I knew.

And it was grief. Disorientation. A place where I pulled my shame cloak just a little tighter about my shoulders each day. 

But I’ve also shared that, eventually, I began to rethink all the beliefs that had been stamped into my soul through that experience. That was I worthless and thrown away … but no, I was beautiful to Jesus. That I was a single girl on her own for the first time … but no, I was now the bride of Christ. That I was less than desirable … but no, Jesus found me to be lovely. 

And then, in what was one of the most pivotal moments of turning around inside that season, there was the belief that my shame was merited because my new life as a divorced woman was counterfeit … but no, God sees me as Christianne, his daughter, not Christianne, his divorced daughter.

It became a season of reckoning. 

My suffering brought me face to face with what I truly believed about myself, others, and God. And by leaning into what those beliefs really were, God and I could look plainly at them together. In the context of that painful honesty, he could begin the work of reforming my crumbled foundation. 

I mentioned yesterday that my first turn in the suffering happened about 10 years into my heart’s journey with Jesus. One morning, I was sitting in a session with my spiritual director and was presented with the invitation to revisit a particular wound. 

I could see myself in that scene I shared with you already of being nine years old and given responsibility that was way beyond my years and then being held responsible for the disaster that resulted. I saw myself in the room of my sentencing, and my spiritual director gently invited me to explore whether Jesus was in that room with me that night.

Where was he? What was he doing?

He was sitting right there next to me, and he didn’t lift a finger.

It really angered me to see that — to see him sit calmly by while injustice happened to me. What’s more, as I’ve already shared, that night had far-reaching ramifications on my life, and Jesus did nothing about it. 

That really, really hurt. 

I sat in my director’s living room, eyes squeezed shut and tears streaming down my face. My thoughts raced with anger and sadness, wondering what Jesus could possibly say to me, wondering if he could say anything at all that would begin to help me understand or make what happened — his inaction — okay. 

I didn’t think it was possible. I’d lived with that wound far too long. 

But then slowly, like an onion, I felt him unraveling the cloth strips that were wrapped around my head, covering my eyes, the cause of blindness. 

Slowly, he unwrapped them in order to let me see. The weight of the cloths began to fall away. Dots of light began to shimmer on my eyelids.

And quietly, gently, I heard him say to me: “My daughter, it is true. I did allow that to happen. I was there, and I did not lift my finger. But you see, I had a greater scope in mind. I saw a vision beyond the story you could see. There is the greater story of your life, and how I’ve planned to use you. Because of what you’ve carried, you can come alongside those who also carry these burdens. You can touch them, because you know how they feel. You know what it feels like to be where they are.”

It isn’t that God was absent. It isn’t that he was uncaring. It’s that he had a different aim in mind entirely.

Sometimes our suffering connects to a broader scope that we cannot see. When we are in the woundedness, it pains us to even hear that. But when we are ready to heal, Jesus can lead us through.

When I think about “turns in suffering,” my mind immediately flies back to the first major turn I encountered in my own experiences of suffering. 

I had been walking in a very intent way with Jesus for about 10 years. Ten years was about how long it took for me to find myself steeped in my belovedness, to be rooted and grounded in that identity of love. I’d spent many long years encountering the truth of my heart — learning what my heart even was, and then learning what was true of it — and then combining that with the process of learning who Jesus was and how to bring the truth of my heart into relationship with him. 

In those 10 years, I’d discovered and acknowledged the wounds in my heart. I’d been through the anger mill. I’d grieved a lot of losses. I’d allowed myself to admit what I didn’t know. I’d allowed myself to learn.

And it wasn’t until about 10 years into that sacred journey that I experienced my first turn in the suffering. I guess healing — or preparation for healing — just takes that long sometimes. It did for me, at least. 

And when it did, I was ready to receive some new perspectives. 

Let it take as long as it takes. I’ve learned from experience that the wait is worth it.

What is it like for you to let the suffering and healing process take as long as it takes?

As we begin our turn in the exploration of suffering, I want to share right from the outset that I don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all response to it. 

I’ve noticed this on even just a small scale in my own experience as I’ve been holding this exploration in my heart the last few weeks. I’ve gone back to key moments in my life history that created shock-waves of suffering, and here is what I noticed: 

• The way those situations impacted me often differed from one to another.
• The way God met me in the suffering of each often differed from one experience to another.

Each experience of suffering meets us in a unique way.

Each time, the effect of suffering has to do with an amalgamation of so many factors — our life history up to that point, what certain relationships meant to us, what we believed about the world at that point in time, what we believe about God, our specific hopes and dreams, and so many other factors, too.

How something affects me at 5 years old is different than how something else will affect me at 25 years old — even if both are real experiences of suffering.

Who I am, how I take in the world, and what I understand about myself and the world around me will be different in each instance because they happen at different points in time. My understanding of reality has changed in the space between them.

Therefore, the way each instance of suffering impacts me will differ in both.

And the same holds true when it comes to making meaning out of the suffering and finding healing in some way. 

Each case is unique — and this holds true inside the scope of our own suffering experiences as well as from another person’s experience compared to ours. 

In this series, wherever we range in the exploration of suffering and how to hold it, I want you to know this is my heart toward you and where I’m coming from. I will share some of my own meaning-making and healing experiences with you, but these will not be meant to be prescriptive — just descriptive. Descriptive of my own unique experience and what helped me understand or led to healing, and descriptive of just one of the many possibilities that exist in the realm of suffering and how we might hold it.

This is my heart toward you: making room for your own unique experiences and needs. 

xoxo,
Christianne 

When I was in Nashville last week, I attended a conference hosted by Donald Miller. During one of the conference sessions, we spent time talking about negative turns in our life stories, and specifically, in that context, the work of Viktor Frankl. 

Frankl was a psychotherapist with a background of success in helping individuals on suicide watch move away from their desire for self-harm. But he is most famous for his work Man’s Search for Meaning, which was based on his experiences and those of his fellow prisoners in the concentration camps of World War II. Specifically, the book shares his observations on the nature of suffering, how it affects our humanity, and the importance of meaning-making in the midst of it.

I’ve not yet read the book, but I’ve just placed a copy on hold at our local used bookstore and look forward to learning from it and sharing any insights gained from it here.

But what struck me most about what we learned of Frankl at the conference was his incredible conviction about all this — about man’s search for meaning — by believing it is meaning that fuels hope and life, even in the midst of horrific suffering and even death. 

Does this resonate with you? 

Is the search for meaning important in your own experience of suffering?

Hi, friends. 

That turn in our exploration that I mentioned previously is here.

We’ve spent a long time wading into the deep marshes of pain, haven’t we? My heart has carried two realities at once as we’ve journeyed together: sadness at the heaviness of the pain, and a fierce emboldenment to make room for the reality of it and protect this space to honor it.

Today, as we begin to shift our position to look at suffering from some new angles, I want to go back to where we started. What began this exploration? 

It was a poem about the beauty and intricacy of the heart: 

I Promise

Has not the Architect, Love, built your heart 
in a glorious manner,

with so much care that it is meant to break 
if love ever ceases to know all that happens 
is perfect?

And where does anything love has ever known 
go, when your eye and hand can no longer 
be warmed by its body? 

So vast a room your soul, every universe can 
fit into it.

Anything you once called beautiful, anything 
that ever

gave you comfort waits to unite with your 
arms again. I promise.

— Hafiz

Suffering comes from a brokenness of heart. A marring of the perfection of love we once knew creates a detachment, a fracturing, a shattering, a disintegration of being. 

It’s pain.

The pain of suffering can be experienced in the body, yes. But even the pain of bodily suffering affects us at the heart level. It crowds our hearts with questions of love, worthiness, significance, meaning, care.

Let’s explore, together, how the heart might subsist in suffering, and how the heart might mend.

Early in our series, Kirsten shared in a comment her experience of suffering: 

It leaves me expecting the worst. It leads to distrust. It leaves me always waiting for the other shoe to drop. In a way, it defeats hope.

I’ve been thinking about her response a lot these days, and I really resonate with it. It’s a lot like what I wrote about how suffering can shut us down on a heart level. It leaves us protected against life. Our guard goes up, and we’re just waiting for the next hit to come.

There’s something about hope that always conjures itself in my mind like a bright point of light ahead. That’s what hope looks like to me. And in receiving Kirsten’s words, I connect suffering to a response of turning away from that bright point of light, turning away and crouching away from it, eyes closed tight against its invitation. 

We become crouched against life … against possibility … against openness … against hope. 

In what ways has suffering defeated hope in your life?

On Friday, I mentioned that I sensed a turn in our exploration of suffering toward some alternative perspectives. But I realized over the weekend that’s not true.

There is still more sifting to be done.

There is still more sitting in this place of taking the suffering seriously and giving it its due weight. So today, we’re continuing forward into the painful realities of suffering. 

A dear friend of mine shared an aspect of her own struggle with suffering that invites guilt:

“I think one of my biggest struggles with suffering is the idea that it’s my fault, that I’ve done something wrong,” she said. “Not that I’m being punished, but that I’ve been unwise or imperfect and done something to cause my own suffering.”

Isn’t this the truth?

I can just see so many of us working and re-working events in our minds. If I’d just done this one thing differently … if only I’d said or did this instead … if only I had all knowledge and perfect action, perhaps this suffering never would have come about, or perhaps it simply wouldn’t hurt quite so much. 

We begin to feel responsible for our suffering. And then, as my friend so attentively noticed, “Not only am I suffering, but I am bad for having caused it.” Suffering compounds suffering.

Has suffering caused such an effect in your own life?