Strength through Weakness (or, Grace in the GPS)

God wants to show us his love for us in the circumstances he providentially arranges for our lives to be lived in. When all is right and rosy in our lives, it is quite easy and natural to arrive at this conclusion. God has blessed me; he must love me. Yet, as all of us who live in this world know, life is not always lived in the Big Rock Candy Mountains. We have troubles and they are never in short supply. If pleasure and ease are the barometers of goodness, it is far from evident in our natural sight that a good and benevolent God rules the universe when there is so much pain and suffering in it for the creatures he has made. By faith, however, we are shown the sufferings of One Man as the very content of God's love for us. This is Jesus Christ, who through his suffering and resurrection offers to unite us to the life of God. In and with our Lord Jesus Christ, then, God demonstrates his mighty love for us in our weakness, pain, and suffering. I want to share briefly with you how in the trial of living with a disability, God has endeavored to show me that he loves me, and I hope, through me, to show how he loves all people.

Before I enter into this discussion, however, it will be prudent to describe what the understanding that God shows us his love in our sufferings is not. It is not to render sufferings not sufferings at all. It sounds very pious to speak saccharine platitudes that minimize the troubles we experience, but this is really an affront to God's goodness and it denies the nature of reality. Suffering, death, disease, and decay are evils in and of themselves. Jesus wept at the tomb of his friend Lazarus and he despised the shame and humiliation of the cross. If this is the case, why then does God send these things to us? The miracle was that though Lazarus was dead and Jesus was abandoned by his friends and forsaken by the Father, God was there, bringing life from death and reconciliation from alienation! This is God's way. He marches right into the teeth of the darkness and makes it work backwards, bringing good from evil. If we understand this, we understand the miraculous transaction by which he turns the tears of our lives into joy by carrying us through them together with himself. This is why Christians are not insensible to the pain like Stoics or grieve like pagans who have no hope when we encounter the troubles of life in a fallen world. Jesus is alive and in his glory. Even in the midst of the deepest valleys, then, we have joy and hope because the one who has already marched through the darkness is with us, leading us through it into the light.

Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy is the disease that has profoundly affected my life. It's a progressive neuromuscular disease that affects the skeletal muscles and cardiovascular systems. I could walk until I was 12, but I've been in a wheelchair ever since. The disease is quite debilitating and usually results in death by the middle 20s. I can no longer manage most major life functions on my own, but I'm now 28 and, by all accounts, still doing remarkably well. Humor, stubbornness, perseverance, and hope characterize my mental mood and outlook at most times, but some days I respond to the crosses of my physical condition and prognosis and the attendant trials of absolute dependence on others, social isolation, and the difficulties or outright impossibilities of pursuing certain career and life opportunities with selfishness, frustration, fear, and melancholy. That being said, I am grateful and thankful for my life and feel very blessed by God to live the life I live.

How has God uniquely shown his love to me in my weaknesses and trials? I feel that perhaps by constitution I have a tendency toward being a solitary individual. In some ways, of course, my lone wolf ways are exacerbated or could even be caused by my disability, but physical limitation is one of the surest ways we discover how much we need others. When conscientious family members, friends, and strangers respond with care to the needs of a dependent individual, that person experiences in a profoundly unique way the grace of being loved, for in direct proportion to the level of his dependence on others, he knows the privilege of receiving love that is given regardless of his ability to benefit those who love him. This is the kind of love with which God loves us, especially since we are sinners unable to truly love God without his own help. In this light, God is always preaching the Gospel to me when people love me by assisting with basic needs I cannot meet myself. My mother, the friends in college who were always so willing to come to my rescue in times of need, or take me to a party, or care for me on a Christian retreat, my youth pastor who always made sure I had a ride to church, and so many others have been the best messengers of God to me.

Secondly, God has made his love known to me in my muscular dystrophy by richly supplying strength in the midst of every weakness and struggle. Like St. Paul the Apostle, I have come to know that God's strength is made perfect in weakness and that his grace really is sufficient. My time living on my own as a student at the University of Missouri really put this to the test. In the midst of uncertainties regarding healthcare workers and coverage and scrambling to find help often at the last minute, nearly perpetual cold feet from bad circulation, bodily discomfort from problems with medical equipment, and, of course, the daily grind of being a full-time college student in the midst of these unique challenges, I not only survived three years of this but I thrived and had the best time of my life. God met all of my needs and gave strength I did not possess to endure difficulties that sometimes pushed me right to the brink of giving up and going back home. I can only attribute my success in that endeavor to One who is mighty to save and empower those who trust in him. Since I graduated, the victories of grace have not seemed so dramatic, what with mounting frustrations about the continued progression of my disease, unemployment, being single, and living at home in my late 20s, but the strength of God continues to buoy me, bringing joy and hope for tomorrow that defies my natural understanding.

Thirdly, in a unique way, those who suffer and bear weakness in their bodies testify powerfully to the hope of the resurrection. As is the case with the dependence I spoke of that leads us by necessity to the cure for isolation that is love, so it is that those who are most visibly touched by physical brokenness both are invited themselves and invite others to enter into the healing of broken creation and triumph over death that is Christ's resurrection. Ours is a crooked witness that preaches fullness and restoration by way of emptiness and brokenness. I think this is perhaps why "normal" people often respond with discomfort to people with disabilities. People don't want to be reminded that even those who are supposedly "whole" are ultimately just as weak and frail and subject to death as those of us who can't hide it in any way. But, as has been my theme in this reflection, there is grace even in the problem because it is part of the solution. Christ received wounds to bring us healing and died to bring life to the world through his resurrection. Living as a Christian with physical brokenness, then, I am given the privilege of participating in Christ's work of redemption by bearing witness to it in my body. This has a benefit for myself in moving me to cling to Christ, and I hope that it has the same effect on others.

Lastly, and perhaps just as counterintuitively as my other points, God has demonstrated his love for me in the midst of muscular dystrophy –something that would seem in conventional understanding to move me to place my hopes entirely in the spiritual and otherworldly realities of life after death—by showing me the goodness of bodily and worldly existence. Though perhaps my time in the body and in the world on this side of the resurrection will be short, it will be spent as an embodied creature, and, in spite of the difficulties of this existence, it has been given to me as a gift in which to taste and see that the Lord is good. What is more, the life of the world to come will be life in the bodies we currently have and in the same physical world we currently inhabit, though as they will be when made incorruptible and cleansed from all the effects of sin and death. This means that even now, as I enjoy the gifts of the Lord in a broken body and a broken world, I am receiving a foretaste of the glories of the new heavens and the new earth. In spite of the sufferings, in spite of the travails of the world, if we are in Christ, we always have more of the joy of the Lord in the land of the living ahead of us than behind us. We have all come through shadows and we all will go through the darkness on the way there, but may we all be given the grace to see in the depths of the shadow the supreme value and glory of the light that is already shining and will only grow brighter!

The Hidden Power of God at Christmas

Christmas is about the humility of God coming into human flesh, entering the world born in a stable. This is lowly and rustic and familiar, but lest we think God reducing Himself to our span is a lowering of standards, a making of Himself comfortable with the way things simply are with us and our world, we need to be reminded that this is a paradox, a mystery of mysteries. The Incarnation is humility, but it is a great and glorious humility because here is also the presence full-strength of the Power and Majesty and Holiness who framed the worlds in glory and perfection, who rules on high and commands the innumerable angelic host, who demands justice and righteousness from His creatures and will judge them accordingly, who is infinite and incomparable in every way. Indeed, the Incarnation does not gainsay God's almighty power but rather underscores it and shows that it is of one substance with His love and compassion, which He extends even and especially to this race that has fallen from Him and brought the whole Creation into ruin. This is a God beyond all limits. This is a God who is big enough to become small for the sake of love.

The fullness of this Deity came to dwell bodily in the Child Jesus. This means that though this Child was small, though He was born in the meanest of circumstances, poor, of a people oppressed, He was able to faithfully carry out the plan for which His Father had placed His hand to the plow, and He did it not in spite of this smallness but precisely through it. Of Him, St. Paul hymns:

6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7 but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross! 9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:6-11)

And, of course, Jesus through His death and resurrection has raised fallen humanity so that those who believe in Him may sit with Him in the glory mentioned above both now in the Church and forever in the New Jerusalem. Great is the promise of Christmas. Christ and we His brothers and sisters are the firstfruits of the New Creation, with which all of heaven and nature are destined to be crowned.

The Office of Readings on Christmas Day bears beautiful witness to the glory the Kingdom that has arrived in the humble birth of Christ will bring to the whole Creation. But while I was feasting on these wonderful readings this Christmas, I was also mourning the deaths of the worshipers in Nigeria who had been killed earlier that morning in church bombings as they were glorying in the same Christmas mystery. It is confusing, senseless, and tragic that on the morning when they were celebrating peace on earth that at least two dozen of Christ's redeemed should die in such wanton acts of hatred and violence. The promise of Christmas is not yet fully realized. It is perhaps in recognition of such realities that many parts of the Church commemorate the Feast of St. Stephen the Martyr the day after Christmas and the Feast of the Martyrdom of the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem on December 28. It is one thing that during the Christmas season violence should come upon the Church unexpectedly, but in light of all that the Incarnation means for humanity and the world, why do we intentionally turn our gaze back to the predations the enemy has made against God, His Christ, and His redeemed children as we do in these commemorations?

Well, until God's Kingdom arrives in all its fullness at Christ's Second Coming, His reign will often be manifested among us in a hidden manner, as it was in the First Coming. God came to us in the fullness of His glory, hidden in the weakness of the Child born in Bethlehem. We remember the martyrs in the midst of the Christmas celebration because in their deaths they bear witness to this Child, who grew up to become the servant of all, pouring out His blood and giving His life for a world determined to reject Him. Resurrection, glory, and the New Creation came through the cross. He descended into the earth that he might rise to the heights of heaven and fill the whole universe, and He made himself the bondsman of His enemies, receiving death at their hands, that he might be the captain of their salvation. This is how Christ has triumphed, won brothers and sisters for himself from among His enemies, and how He is transforming the world that yet lies in wickedness.

In like manner, as the martyrs echo the sufferings of the Lord who bought them, laying hold of Him who unto the death laid hold of them, they plant their blood as the seed of the Church. People see the power that is in their testimony to the Lord Jesus and come to recognize something they cannot account for in the unbreakable hope these have in Him. This is Christ at work, hiding His glory in the suffering of the saints, overcoming His enemies and theirs, converting foes of the Gospel to children of God, and all of it through the death He shares with His martyrs.

In a less dramatic though still paradoxical manner, this is also the way it is with all Christians in the lesser martyrdoms we experience in our lives. Life in a fallen world is filled with small vexations that build up and gradually steal away our strength. Life doesn't quite go the way we plan, and we don't seem as victorious as we think we ought to be. Our jobs are unsatisfying, or we fail in our relationships. We spin our wheels. We seem to accomplish little of lasting worth. Whether they be these kinds of trials or the catastrophies that leave our lives in utter ruin, Jesus Christ is with us, hidden in our hearts with power and grace for us and for our world. What we shall be in Him we do not yet see, but the fullness of God hidden in the helpless Child and the unveiling of the glory residing there that came through His humble obedience to the Father bear the ultimate witness to what is ours even now and what shall be fully realized in us and in our world from our communion with Him. Keep the faith, humble Christian; Christ hidden in us is the power that overcomes the world.

Our Suffering Savior

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
³He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

⁴Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.
⁵But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

Isaiah 53:2-5

⁹But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

¹⁰In 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. ¹¹Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers.

¹⁷For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. ¹⁸Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

Hebrews 2:9-11, 17-18

Suffering is the most universal of human experiences. We cannot escape it no matter who we are or where we’re from. It will always catch up with us one way or another. Suffering is simply an unavoidable aspect of life. Some endure more suffering in a lifetime; others endure less. Some live in wealth; others live in poverty. Some live in health; others live constantly in the grip of illness. Some are despised and persecuted; others live in the good graces of seemingly everyone. But regardless of whether we live most of our lives in an overwhelming flood of trials and tribulations or in their relative absence, we all know pain. We have all known what it is to have a broken heart at one point or another; we have all known what it is to be hurt by friends, family, lovers, coworkers, and strangers; we have all known what it is like to be sick and to endure the illnesses of loved ones; we have all known privation at one time or another; we have all known the ravages of nature; we have all known the tragedies of death that befall our loved ones, and ultimately, we will all experience death for ourselves.

The question of why we suffer has been the most thoroughly considered of all questions theologians have wrestled with throughout the centuries. If God is all powerful, if God is good, why does he allow us to suffer as horribly as we do? In my humble opinion, Christianity does not provide a better answer for why we suffer than any of the world's other great religions. What it does provide, however, in comparison with them is the truth that our God is not removed from or indifferent to the sufferings of his creatures. Christianity asserts a God who exists in solidarity with his creatures in the face of their sufferings. The lessons of the cross are great and could be pondered for all of eternity, but, one of the greatest lessons we can learn from the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ is that we are not alone in our sufferings.

I have come to embrace a particular teaching on the nature of Christ's sufferings that powerfully conveys the reality of our Savior's solidarity with us in our sufferings. We rightly emphasize that Jesus’ Passion accomplished the satisfaction of Divine Justice's wrath against sin, but we cannot come away from the cross without also realizing that in those horrible hours hanging on the tree, Jesus willingly took up the experience of all the horrors of sin, suffering, and death that each and every human being has ever and will ever know. Not only did our Savior take the penalty for our sin upon himself but he also took on all the sufferings resulting from the presence of sin and evil in the world as his own personal experience. Whenever we endure suffering or see its presence, we have known the very experience of Jesus Christ.

We cannot, however, simply consider suffering an experience that Christ endured once in the distant past on Calvary. We can be sure that whenever we hurt, Christ is present to us right now at this very moment suffering right along with us. For the Christian, then, we do not suffer in vain, for Christ has sanctified suffering and redeemed it forever. Therefore, just as Christ suffered and was glorified as a result, if we suffer for him and alongside of him, we will surely share in his glory.

Filling Up Christ's Afflictions

What does it mean to truly love one’s enemies? A look into the life and story of 20^th-century evangelical Romanian pastor Richard Wurmbrand is a good place to look for insight into the answer to this question. Wurmbrand, the founder of the international ministry Voice of The Martyrs, suffered profoundly for his faith and work as a Christian minister under the repressive communist regime of his Romanian homeland. Beginning in 1948, he was imprisoned for 14 years for his activities as a leader and evangelist in the Underground Church of Romania. In the hands of his captors, Wurmbrand suffered three solid years of solitary confinement and other unimaginable tortures. Released by the communist authorities in 1964, Wurmbrand left Romania and settled in the United States, traveling the world and speaking out on behalf of Christians persecuted in the Communist bloc of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He tells his story in the profound volume, Tortured for Christ.

Though it has no “literary value,” as Wurmbrand readily admits, Tortured for Christ has been an important book in bringing the plight of persecuted Christian communities to public light in the West, expressing the profound love for Christ, his people, and the world that motivates Christians to suffer for their faith, and mustering support for those suffering persecution.

I think Wurmbrand’s story is particularly pertinent considering that at the current time over 200 million Christians are suffering some form of discrimination or persecution worldwide and that during the century we have just come out of 50 million Christians died for their faith in Jesus Christ, a figure that accounts for 65% of the martyrs in the 2000 years of the Christian Church’s existence! At such a time in history, Christians need to have a strong sense of the message of love they have for those who hate them and the God they serve. For those of us who live in historically Christian cultures and societies, we must look to the experience and message of those who have suffered profoundly for their faith in order to express the depths of God’s love for humanity to our societies, where opposition to Christian claims is only growing.

I bring this anecdote from Tortured for Christ to show the power of Christ’s witness through his suffering Body to reach the enemies of God and humanity with his love. In the experience of Wurmbrand and fellow members of the Underground Church imprisoned for their work for the Gospel, suffering at the hands of the Communists became their most powerful means of reaching them with God’s love. Wurmbrand recounts the martyrdom of Grecu, beaten slowly to death over the course of two weeks under the leadership of an official named Reck, to illustrate the redemptive power of Christian suffering:

During the beatings, Reck said something to Grecu that the Communists often said to Christians, “You know, I am God. I have power of life and death over you. The one who is in heaven cannot decide to keep you in life. Everything depends on me. If I wish, you live. If I wish, you are killed. I am God!” So he mocked the Christian.

Brother Grecu, in his horrible situation, gave Reck a very interesting answer, which I heard afterward from Reck himself. He said, “You don’t know what a deep thing you’ve said. Every caterpillar is in reality a butterfly, if it develops rightly. You have not been created to be a torturer, a man who kills. You have been created to become like God, with the life of the Godhead in your heart. Many who have become persecutors like you, have come to realize—like the apostle Paul—that it is shameful for a man to commit atrocities, that they can do much better things. So they have become partakers of the divine nature. Jesus said to the Jews of His time, ’Ye are gods.’ Believe me, Mr. Reck, your real calling is to be Godlike—to have the character of God, not a torturer.”

At that moment Reck did not pay much attention to the words of his victim, as Saul of Tarsus did not pay attention to the beautiful witness of Stephen being killed in his presence. But those words worked in his heart. And Reck later understood that this was his real calling. (42)

To love one’s enemies is to return blessing for their cursing, to take their reviling and torture, and instead of following in their steps by deforming the image of God in humanity through hatred, to unite those sufferings to Christ and by them appeal to the tormentors to be reconciled to God. As Grecu’s story indicates, God uses such appeals to break the most hardened of hearts and renew the image of God in the most depraved of sinners.

Persecutions and sufferings will come, but Christ is redeeming the world through the sufferings of the persecuted. The sufferings of the saints are a massive signboard pointing back to the cross, where Christ’s suffering and death turned to blessing and life for the world. Pray for the persecuted Church. Their love, expressed in so costly a fashion, is our surest testimony that the sacrifice of Christ is healing the world. Indeed, their suffering love is itself a conduit by which that healing Christ has accomplished flows to others, including persecutors. Let us love our persecuted brothers and sisters and support them in their powerful witness to the Christ who is filling up his afflictions for the sake of the Church and the world through them.