He was dead on arrival.
We spent the night in the community, as it offered us a strange solace. People came in and out of the community centre seeking comfort they received through fellow sufferers. UrbanPromise staff went throughout the neighbourhood on little walks and spontaneous prayer meetings erupted on the streets in the community.
People were tuned into the spiritual world like never before and it was common to witness complete strangers hugging each other while huddling together in prayer. From the toughest men to the most vulnerable children, everyone in the community was humbled, broken and open to God. Our God, familiar with suffering, had now come close to that community in Warden Woods. He was definitely present in every nook and cranny. His Spirit was hovering over the streets and moving among the people there. Though we were all experiencing the devastating results of sin, God’s grace was even more present, slowly oozing out His healing comfort. Where sin abounds, grace abounds more (Romans 5:20).
It is only human to do all we can to avoid suffering. Yet ironically God seems to be most present in our tears. In 2 Corinthians 1:3-5, Paul states:
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.” (NIV, emphasis added)
God’s comforting goes hand in hand with suffering. You can’t have one without the other. Suffering, though unpleasant at the time, is a reality of life. It is guaranteed—we will all go through it. Suffering is inevitable in a sinful world. We should not be surprised when we go through afflictions. In fact, we should expect it.
However, there is good news. Linked to suffering is comfort. Comfort of others when we suffer together, and more importantly, that of God’s presence in the midst of our suffering. Jesus is found in the midst of our pain. In His immense grace, He enters our suffering and provides comfort for those who open their hearts to Him. Jesus does not leave us alone, but actually joins us in our tears. The tears we weep become His. The pain we feel becomes His pain. He actually embodies each emotion we feel and carries our hurt even more deeply than we ever feel it. He does this for every person, everywhere, at anytime, throughout the world. Jesus weeps with the mother who loses her child to disease in the Third World. He cries with every father who loses his son to AIDS. He feels the pain in the heart of every rape victim or every child who loses a parent to the ravages of war. He lovingly understands the painful and convoluted thought process of every pregnant teenaged girl who chooses to abort her child while, at the same time, experiencing the pain of every unborn child and the wasted future that could have been.
This is the God of all comfort, the God of all love, the God of all grace. For on the cross, Jesus took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows. He is now linked forever to the suffering of those He gave Himself for. He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities and by His wounds we are healed (Isaiah 53:4,5). He also is the great High Priest who sympathizes with our weaknesses and who is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and have gone astray (Hebrews 4:15,16; 5:1,2). This Jesus, the eternal now, sees all suffering and, because of who He is, cannot turn a blind eye to what He sees. The same love that drove Jesus to the cross remains today and He cannot walk away from our suffering, but is bound by His love for us to experience the pain we suffer in even greater depths.
Jesus is like a loving mother, whose heart aches over her sick child and who wishes she could change places with her daughter to provide relief. Jesus feels our pain to a greater extent than we could ever experience it. It is because of the reality of this emotional and grieving God that I feel comfortable enough to approach Him for help. The marvelous thing is that I usually don’t have to go too far to receive comfort from Him as He is already present in my grief. God runs to us before our first tear falls. In fact, His tears for us have already fallen before ours well up in our eyes. This is why I can trust God—He has tears in His eyes and nail scars in His hands and feet. This is the God who is approachable to those who sin, as well as those who suffer its repercussions.
Grief and love are inseparable. If we love, we will hurt. In fact, the more we love, the more we hurt. Loving people means setting yourself up for major pain. Love causes you to become attached to the one you love. This attachment is real and results in a sharing of emotions (happy and sad) and even physical pain. (There are many cases where a child suffers pain and the parents experience that same pain.) People in love want what is best for each other and receive joy when good things happen. However, the opposite is also true. When they suffer, you suffer. This sharing of emotions and experience of collective pain is a strong proof that you love. To really impact someone’s life, love is required. This is why God has such a powerful impact on our lives.
God loves us and because of this He doesn’t only laugh and cry with us, but most importantly, His love transforms us. For love to work at its highest potency, it must be connected to those who suffer. If we love, we are willing to enter another’s afflictions and suffer with them. We must experience their pain, their injustice, their nightmares. When this happens, we demonstrate our love to them, for love limited to spoken words is cheap and is not love at all. Love, for it to have an impact, must be manifested through our shared experience.
“Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13, NIV)
Love is proven when it is connected to sacrificial suffering.
If I have any integrity with those we serve at UrbanPromise, it is only because I have gone through some of the suffering with which our people must deal. I have witnessed first-hand the issues of racism, injustice, abuse and the various indignities that poverty produces in their lives. It is during these times I have come to appreciate the symbolism in the Roman Catholic crucifix. This is because I can better relate to the crucifix of the suffering Jesus than to the cross that has been emptied by my Protestant brethren. I find it very comforting to know that we have a God who is familiar with injustice, poverty and suffering. He is the Jesus who truly suffered on the cross. Suffered for our sins. And suffers now with us in our brokenness.
He doesn’t hide from suffering but embraces it and has experienced every type of suffering known to man. I am so glad that in times of trials I can come to this Jesus, my God, who
“…was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.” (Isaiah 53:3, NIV, emphasis added)
Did you get that last part? He is familiar with suffering. He is approachable because He is with us in our pain. He has been there. He still is there. This is the type of God to which the poor can relate—the One who hangs on a cross, the One who suffers with us, the One who has and still does face injustice and indignity. The One who was born in poverty. Christ is love because He chose to go through more suffering than we could ever experience. He has confirmed the deep integrity of His love by choosing to suffer to the greatest extent for us. He still does. This suffering Jesus is the Saviour that we fellow sufferers can easily approach. He has proven His love by undeservedly dying on the cross for us (Romans 5:8).
While suffering Patrick’s loss, we felt a deep chasm of emptiness in our hearts. Together, we were all grieving the loss of a friend and loved one. What made our suffering even worse was the fact that Patrick had been murdered, and some in the media were assuming his guilt as a gangbanger. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Murder is such a heinous act of evil, and when it happens to a young man just entering his prime, an innocent victim, it is painfully hard to deal with. Someone stole his life in the midst of what seemed to be a path that would lead to life-changing moments for everyone he touched.
Of all the types of grief to bear, the loss of
