We love to tell the stories of God coming through in power, but there’s another powerful type of testimony that I’m afraid we haven’t made enough space for in the church. What about the story of when you suffered loss and grief, but God sustained you through it? What about the closeness you felt in the middle of the worst trial of your life? What about the time God gave you peace that surpasses understanding when the circumstance made peace seem impossible?
There are many people in the church who have suffered, or who are currently suffering, and many of those people can tell you of God’s amazing love, his abiding joy, and his comfort that they’ve only been able to experience when they’ve clung to Him through their trial. Unfortunately, those stories don’t get told very often because Americans are a bit awkward around grief and loss.
In fact, many of us have been trained by a faith teaching that makes all suffering the result of a failure of faith. On top of being unbiblical, that faith teaching casts a shadow of shame over the otherwise glorious testimonies of God sustaining you in your moment of need.
Sometimes when people are praying for a miracle, we get so focused on what we’re praying for that we actually begin to feel distant from the God we’re praying to. In many cases, people miss out of the comfort of God because they’re trying too hard to get God to answer. I’ve been there many times.
In my time of being a pastor, I’ve called, visited, and cried with many people in the middle of their worst days, and many times, I’ve heard people testify through tears to the goodness of God and the sweetness of his comfort. I’ve gotten to hear men and women praise God and thank God for who He is even when the worst has happened. When I hear it, I can tell it isn’t fake, and I wish everyone could hear what I get to hear.
When you draw near to God in suffering, you actually do mourn deeply, but you don’t mourn as those who mourn without hope. You mourn with hope of the resurrection coming one day, and you mourn along side a God who loves you. This kind of testimony is a lot harder to tell because there’s no glorious single moment of victory like there is in a healing testimony. Instead, the glory is still and small like the very voice of God. We need these stories in the church as much as we need the others.
Dustin
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