Suffering to Hope

Posted on September 9, 2008 12:00 AM MST by Kasey Heinly

I once asked God a dangerous question. I’d been studying Romans, and had come across this:

"Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance character, and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom he has given us." Romans 5:3-5 (NIV)

I wanted to understand, but my brain just wasn’t making the bridge from suffering to hope, even with the clever map Paul had drawn. I simply didn’t get it. So I asked the Lord to help me get it.

At that time, my grandmother was battling an aggressive form of dementia called Lewy body disease. It is similar to Alzheimers, but moves much faster. By the time we realized she was ill, we’d already lost her. Her physical shell remained, but she showed little or no recognition of her family. I can’t remember the last time I told her I loved her and she was able to return those words.

Watching the disease take hold of her was a suffering that I had never known. How could I rejoice in this? Rejoice that even though she’d lost her ability to swallow, she’d still be with us for a few more days? The only relief I could grasp was that soon she would be with her Maker, and at peace. But it would mean we’d lost her. And that didn’t feel like something I could rejoice over.

We did lose her. On February 26, 2004, she went Home. She was at peace. And we were left behind with the full force of the grief that had lingered in the shadows all the days of her illness. It crept up in quiet moments and knocked me off my feet. In a familiar song or smell. In the darkest hours of the night. I considered anti-depressants. In the end it was simple perseverance that brought me through. Putting my feet to the floor each morning. Praying through each white-knuckled drive to work. Picking myself back up after a breakdown in the bathroom at work.

And something else began to happen. People say all sorts of well-meaning things to someone who has lost a loved one. "You’ll see her again" or "It’s all right, she’s at peace now." It’s not that these things are untrue. For me it was that they dismissed the source of the grief entirely. I wasn’t sad that my grandmother no longer suffered! I was heart-broken that she wasn’t able to share her heart with me on my wedding day. That she’d never hold my children. That I couldn’t remember the last meaningful conversation I’d had with her.

But I began to see that I’d done the same thing to others—offered those true and not comforting words. Meaning well, always. I wanted to remember this anguish, and be able to speak to others who grieved from the same place of grief—offering hope, but acknowledging pain as well. Was this the beginning of that deepening of character the verse spoke of?

I also began to gradually see the hope. The fruit of her life in my own, in the lives of my family members. I see the fruit of her death, too. It has changed our family forever, but brought us closer together. It doesn’t make me glad she’s gone. But it eases the pain of her passing a little to taste the sweet fruit of the legacy she has left behind.

And to see the legacy that Jesus left behind. Because his sacrifice is what makes this a temporary separation, so that we indeed, do not mourn like those who have no hope (I Thessalonians 4:13). It still hurts, but our loss is only temporary. And that’s precisely why we can rejoice.

"So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." II Corinthians 4:18

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