I was mindlessly scrolling on Instagram when I came across a reel that stopped me in my tracks, and derailed the rest of my day.
A Christian content creator basically said that you could suffer your whole life, and that God may never answer your most frequent, desperate prayers.
I don’t know if I got through the full video before I started hyperventilating and sobbing. Every time I thought I was calming down it just started back up again. I felt like a baby, completely out of control of my physical and emotional reactions. The thought that I could feel the way I’d been feeling for the rest of my life left me inconsolable. My body was shaking, my head was pounding, I was crying so much I couldn’t see and was struggling to breathe.
What kind of loving God would tell you over and over to trust Him, to have faith in Him and His promises, to pray ceaselessly but with no intention of delivering you from your greatest trials?
The idea that I might have to live another forty or fifty years with the same despair I’ve been begging God to rid me of…and that I was supposed to find joy in the Lord…the same Lord that formed the Earth and heavens in seven days…that wiped out entire armies…that literally brought the dead back to life…would watch me suffer for decades on end without lifting a finger, knowing He could end this agony in an instant…and it could all ultimately be for nothing.
Recently I’ve found myself consumed with fear about the false prophets referenced in the Bible, denominations, and the idea that I could misinterpret God’s word, join the wrong church, and at the end of my life, no matter how hard I tried to obey Him, be turned away from the gates of heaven because I wasn’t a Lutheran or something.
I thought about ending up in the same place as pedophilic politicians, Satan-worshiping celebrities, and the worst people I know in real life. I thought about someone that hurt me in a way I didn’t know I could be hurt, leaving me with wounds that I don’t know will ever fully heal. What if we all end up in the same place, but they at least got to enjoy their time on Earth?
I know I’m far from perfect. I gossip, I drink more than I should, I love slutty clothes. I’m jealous, I’m judgmental, forgiveness doesn’t come naturally to me at all. I can be selfish. I know we’re all much more evil than we think we are. I know I personally have an incredible capacity for cruelty. But I genuinely can’t think of a time in my life where I’ve *really* indulged it. I’m not a malicious person. I have hurt people, but not on purpose, and not without remorse. When I mistreat people, I feel bad about it – and more importantly I do what I can to take accountability for it.
I guess what I’m saying is, I know I’m flawed. I know that I disappoint God. But I guess I haven’t completely abandoned my secular definition of a “good person,” and still think of myself as one on some level.
And the idea that I could have fifty years left of the same torment I’ve been feeling, while people with no conscience or ethics get to spend that same time living in luxury and leisure, using others for their personal gain and destroying and discarding them without a second thought, is making me insane – especially with how fixated I’ve been on the afterlife, and that we could all spend it the same way.
I wish I could tell you I had a scripture to share that relieved me of this feeling, or that I had been relieved of this feeling in the first place. But the truth is I’m still struggling with it.
As far as the idea of going to hell, I know I need to just take the time to read the Bible from beginning to end for myself, and that might calm some of my anxieties. But there are plenty of people that have done that – in fact devoted their lives to it, learning Hebrew and Greek in an attempt to understand it as accurately as possible – only to come to different theological conclusions.
As I’ve thought more about the possibility of spending a lifetime suffering, my mind wandered back to a movie I watched by the name of Father Stu – ironically just before I was thrust headfirst into a season of intense and unprecedented heartache.
I don’t want to spoil anything, because it’s an incredible movie that I believe every Christian should watch at least once. But a line that stuck with me is “we shouldn’t ask God for easy lives, we should ask Him for the strength to endure difficult lives.”
The protagonist of the movie went through something horrible, that changed his life forever. And he probably did suffer for the rest of his life.
But his pain was not in vain, and it wasn’t random – even though he probably thought it was when it began. God truly used his suffering to create one of the most beautiful testimonies I’ve ever heard, and touch the hearts of so many people, opening them to relationships with Christ and helping them in their walks with Him.
I struggle taking certain Christians seriously when they talk about suffering. It’s easy for people with heated pools and four car garages to lecture people on food stamps about the poor woman that gave everything she had to God. It’s easy for someone with a hot, funny husband they adore and five beautiful children with another one on the way to lecture the never-married 40 year old on Sarah. It’s easy for the healthy, with full mobility to lecture the sick and disabled about the leper, or the sick woman healed by touching Jesus’s cloak.
I think a lot of Christians struggle with real empathy and sympathy, and this might be controversial to say as a Christian, but shouting scriptures won’t fix suffering. What’s important to remember when your heart is breaking, your emotions are running wild, and your body is tired is that God loves you. He wouldn’t let you go through this if it didn’t serve a purpose, even if you have to go years wondering what exactly that purpose was.
I don’t want to suffer for the rest of my life. But if it’s God’s will, it will be for a reason, and it will be worth it.
what do you think?