Recharge: Job - the gift of pain

The Full Monty:

Job 1-42 To read if you have time to take in a full exploration of Job’s story.

The Continental Option:

Job 1-2 Read this if you only have time for one significant passage.

One Shot Espresso:

Job 1:21 ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.’

I hate pain. The mere thought of a possible headache and I reach for the paracetamol: make it go away. I’ve been raised in a culture that insists on pain-free living. Pain is wrong. Pain is avoidable. This is not only the dominant cultural view of pain it’s also the mainstream, Western, Christian view of suffering. I recently heard a whole bit of teaching on how all suffering is from the devil and that every sickness can be healed if we believe it. Fascinating stuff. I want to believe it.

Years ago I read a super fun book called The Gift of Pain. Yep, super fun alright. It was written by Philip Yancy and Dr Paul Brandt. Dr Brandt was the leading expert on leprosy. He was the world expert because he took the time to really live with lepers and understand how the disease actually worked. Two stories explain everything. One guy he worked with kept losing his fingers. No one really understood how leprosy patients kept losing fingers and limbs and there were many different theories, so Dr. Brandt set up an observation area where he kept watch over his patients’ movements 24 / 7. It turns out that while he was sleeping some rats were coming in and feasting on his fingers. You read that right. What was most remarkable was that the man didn’t even wake up, he felt nothing.

Another time the parents of a young toddler called Dr Brandt for help. It turns out they had gone into their daughter’s room to get her up in the morning and she had bitten off the tips of her own fingers and was using her blood to colour on the walls: she couldn’t feel her own fingers. These stories and some others like it clued Dr Brandt into some groundbreaking information. It turns out leprosy doesn’t make your limbs fall off, it simply shuts down your pain receptors: you can’t feel pain. 

If you just read that last sentence about how leprosy works you’d think we could bottle the disease and sell it to Western countries and make a fortune. We have actually found a disease that solves the pain problem. But here’s the point you may have seen coming: it turns out having leprosy isn’t awesome. It turns out losing your pain receptors has a very bad effect on your life. It turns out the quality of our lives gets worse without pain. Now, the title of that fun little book is making more sense - pain is a gift, who knew?

Dr Brandt does the science but Philip Yancey does the theology. If that’s how the body breaks down because of a lack of pain, what happens to the rest of us when we refuse to acknowledge pain, when we refuse to accept it, when we push it down and cover it up? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (no offense to Philip Yancey) to figure it out - we fall apart. 

Good questions

Our comfort based, pain-free culture is literally killing us. Without even feeling anything we are losing pieces of ourselves. While we sleep through the night in our drunken stupors we are losing our wholeness and dignity and our capacity for love. On and on it goes as we continue to cut off our pain receptors and allow the rodents of this world to gnaw off our true selves. What has this got to do with Job? Good question.

Job lived in a world with theology a lot like ours. He understood that if you were a good, God-fearing person (which he was) you’d be rewarded with a good life. That just makes basic sense. It’s basic maths really - tit for tat type stuff. But Job wasn’t rewarded in that way. He got the short end of the stick and was dealt a whole lot of pain in his life. He hadn’t done anything to deserve this pain but who could ever believe him? After all, as his friends pointed out, why would God allow a righteous man to suffer? Good question.

It’s actually the question. It’s the question a lot of people need permission to ask. It’s the question we need to allow to be asked even as we witness to the reality that good people suffer, that righteous people suffer and that God allows it. It comes back to pain and it also reveals a secret that is a key to this life.

The secret is well-kept in our comfy Western lives but it’s an important one. Pain is an awakening agent that something is wrong with this world and suffering is a means by which God makes us better. OK, hang in there...

Pain wakes us up. It alerts us to danger. It repulses us from things that are dangerous and harmful. It’s a receptor of alarming news. ‘God whispers in our pleasure and screams in our pain,’ said someone wise. Think about your own personal journey and how you’ve encountered God. It was most likely pain that awakened you to your need and your own human condition and your own inability to fix it. It was pain that brought you to the God who alone can save us. And how does God save us? Oh, yeah. That’s right, there is something about suffering and death and whole lot of pain in that story too. 

‘A high regard for suffering’

Mother Teresa had a very high regard for suffering. It’s actually very hard to read her thoughts on it coming from this side of the world. She believed that suffering could be made holy. It’s a bit disorienting to us but she had a pretty good vantage point on suffering from where she stooped to scrape people off sidewalks and give them a bit of loving before they passed into the next world. She actually believed that suffering was a means of grace. By that, I mean that it was a thing God used to connect us to his presence. She might have got this idea from the Bible. (Don’t tell my ‘suffering is from the devil’ friends, I’d hate to burst their bubble.)

The apostle Paul says that suffering produces something in us. It produces fruit and fruit is good. It’s good for you and it’s good for others too. So why do we suffer? Well, that question cannot be answered. It seems when Job questioned God, God didn’t feel a need to defend himself or even acknowledge the question. There are things we cannot understand.

I’m pretty sure the source of suffering is the direct result of brokenness - it entered the world the same time Adam and Eve decided to be their own god and figure things out for themselves. I don’t believe God causes suffering but here’s what I do believe - and this belief has changed the way I respond and react to pain - God redeems suffering. He takes it and uses it for our good and for the good of the world.

Pain becomes a tool that wakes us up to our deep need for God and suffering becomes a means to connect with him. It’s baffling. No wonder Paul prayed to share in the ‘joy of his sufferings’ and no wonder Mother Teresa recruited ‘suffering people’ to do her work. Wait. What? Yep. You read that right. Every Missionary of Charity worker that slaved away serving the poor in the slums of Calcutta was partnered with a Missionary of Charity sufferer: working away through their own suffering and connecting with God and using that connection to ask for his help. I kid you not. Suffering was a pre-requisite for being on the ‘prayer team’ - it was a tool for Mother Teresa that God used to extend his goodness to the world.

I think the real tragedy of suffering is to consider it as meaningless, and to waste it by allowing it to rip us to pieces. What if suffering, like the apostle Paul suggested, is a means by which we released God in us and through us in the world? What if God could redeem it and it wasn’t wasted after all? That would, as Job learned in his life, make pain a great gift indeed.