I’ll do just about anything to avoid suffering. At times, my life looks like a drive down Sargeant Road near my house, where I swerve every few seconds to avoid the cavernous potholes.
Sometimes, however, not all potholes can be missed.
I read recently that “you have to build calluses on your mind, just like how you build calluses on your hands. If you choose to avoid suffering, suffering will find you in other ways” (Justin Whitmel Early, The Body Teaches the Soul, 141).
How true it is. Avoiding conflict with others leads to conflict within us. What we refuse to face on the outside begins to eat away at us on the inside. We can stuff it, ignore it, or deny it, but eventually suffering will find its way through the cracks in the lining of our souls.
I never thought martial artist Bruce Lee and novelist Ernest Hemingway would have anything in common—but they both understood something essential about suffering. If you are breathing, you CAN experience joy, but you WILL experience suffering. Bruce Lee once said, “Do not pray for an easy life; pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.” In a similar fashion, Hemingway wrote, “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places” (idem.).
I imagine you might be thinking, Well, this sure is a negative blog. If so, keep reading.
Yes, suffering will find us in one way or another. But the encounter with suffering doesn’t have to be the final word. It doesn’t get the final say.
Let me introduce you to a countercultural, biblical idea called “Antifragility.” Antifragility means not just surviving hardship but becoming stronger because of it. In a world where “we are miserable in part because we spend all our time trying to prevent ourselves from becoming miserable” (Lembke, Dopamine Nation, 44), the idea that suffering can have a positive impact on our lives seems like modern blasphemy.
Antifragility is the scientific and biblical challenge to our modern convenience. The modern spirit craves efficiency and ease, but science shows that our minds and bodies benefit from hardship, stress, and strain.
To build a strong immune system, for example, children need to get sick. To prevent excessive allergies, we need to be exposed to lots of allergens. But for many, and especially many parents, modern life has tricked us into thinking that the good life for our children and us is to avoid suffering. It isn’t. “As is often noted, we do better to choose our suffering lest suffering choose us” (ibid., 147).
What science describes, the Bible dictates. Suffering, though not avoidable, is not void of purpose. Suffering is the crucible of our fallen world by which we are shaped into the likeness of Jesus “who for the joy before Him endured the cross, despising the shame” (Hebrews 12:2). “Christ also suffered once for sins” (1 Peter 3:18). “Christ suffered also in His body” (1 Peter 4:1). “Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8).
But suffering is not the end of the story. We have the promise of “the sufferings of the Messiah and the glories that would follow” (1 Peter 1:11). We “participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that [we] may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed” (1 Peter 4:13). “We share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory” (Romans 8:17). “We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope” (Romans 5:3-4).
We are not masochists who go about looking for suffering. We are Jesus followers who know we will encounter suffering, but what we do with that suffering makes all the difference in the world.
My encouragement to you is three-fold:
- 1. Don’t lose hope in your suffering. One day suffering will give way to glory.
- 2. Don’t suffer alone. “If one member suffers, all suffer together” (1 Corinthians 12:26). Friends don’t have the prescription of why you may be suffering, but they have the presence to be with you in your suffering.
- 3. Keep your eyes on Jesus. Not on your pain, but on the One who walks with you through it.
