Forgiveness is giving up on the hope of a better past. – Anne Lamott
Grace is extending that forgiveness to the present. To people, to circumstances, to moments. It is simply allowing the moment to be what it is.
(This doesn’t mean we can’t work for a better future, but I will discuss this more a bit later.)
I have written about forgiveness and grace before, but I haven’t taken this idea of grace and extended it to God’s grace.
Richard Rohr calls God the great allower.
I think this is the very thing that we struggle most with God. Why does God allow suffering? In theological circles this is called “theodicy”, or “the problem of pain”. It is in essence a struggle with God’s allowing our suffering. God’s grace for our suffering.
To put this in context, before I address this, I think it is important to talk about the future tripping, also called anticipatory anxiety. This is imagining future possibilities and suffering (in the present) because of it.
Mark Twain said “I’ve experienced a great deal of pain and suffering in my life, most of which has never happened.”
Not only will most of these events never happen, but even in the future possibilities that do happen, when we imagine them playing out, we imagine experiencing the future alone, forsaken by God.
God is not in our imagined future. God is in the real.
This doesn’t make the experience of the suffering of the of the imaginary futures less real, but we have a lot more say in this type of suffering than we feel we do when we are caught up in it.
The other point I want to get across as context to this question of suffering, is the fact that God cares about our suffering.
In the book The Shack, there is a scene where the Holy Spirit takes the tears from the main character’s face, and puts it in a bottle. Counting each tear , and keeping it, because it is precious to God. This is directly taken from Psalm 56:8 or 9 (depending on the translation):
You keep track of all my sorrows.
You have collected all my tears in your bottle.
You have recorded each one in your book.
Baxter Kruger talks about Jesus’s action after the miracle of the multiplication of the bread and fish in the same way. Jesus tells the disciples to go out and collect every crumb of food that is left over.
Nothing goes to waste.
Our suffering is counted. Our suffering will not be wasted.
Okay, but still, why does God allow suffering?
I think God isn’t scared of suffering.
Have a look at Psalm 22. The writer believes he is alone, but realizes at the end he never was. This has a correlation to Jesus’s experience on the cross, even with Jesus shouting out the name of Psalm 22 in Hebrew to remind the Jews of it.*
Jesus knows how it feels to believe we are forsaken by God in our suffering. He also knows that it is not true.
Jesus went through suffering, came out on the other side, and isn’t terrified of it. Like the first person crossing a river, knowing the river’s depth, and not being scared for others to follow.
And the final and most important part of this is that God does deal with suffering. He resurrects. Maybe a bit later than we would like, but God knows life follows death.
God believes in the resurrection.
All of this has made me realize the problem of pain is not a problem to be solved philosophically.
In the tension of God’s love for us, and his allowing of all, is the very character of God.
And in our grace, we allow God’s grace. We allow God to be the allower.
When we are here, we can give God our most precious thing: our trust.
And from this trust, we can then work towards changing the future. We can work with the knowledge that we can have grace for the imperfect future as well, because we aren’t working alone. We are working with the driving force of the universe. We are working with the resurrection.
* I think it is important to realize that Jesus wasn’t actually asking why his Father actually forsook Him. Jesus was saying the name of the Psalm in the language of the Psalm. Remember the Psalms weren’t numbered yet.
Jesus even tells his disciples that they will forsake Him, but He won’t be alone, because His Father is with Him (John 16:32).
Life in the Garden 