Backwards Beautiful Suffering
For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. -2 Corinthians 4:17
There were so many things I could have focused on in that moment, while taking in the panoramic expanse out my window. It was a dazzling, perfect day. The sun was ricocheting off every object down below in a way that only happens in summertime, when the earth is slanted toward it in just the right manner. Trees were the deepest green. Like the strategic vantage point of some bird of prey, I had a unique ability to monitor activity in every direction from up there on the 9th floor.
I should have taken it in. I should have honed in on something else. Anything else. But that man-made red and white bullseye logo a mile up the road had me suspended. Everything else around it blurred beyond recognition. A Target sign. The staple of suburban housewives everywhere. The first place I “google map” as soon as we get a new set of military orders...so I can start planning where to live. The home of the dollar bin of happiness. THAT Target. The Haven. That sells everything. The sign...made out of glass and neon. The logo. And as I stared and contemplated it, I was consumed with loathing.
That window happened to be a hospital room window. That hospital room window happened to be attached to a massive medical facility where my appendix and I had happened to part ways 12 days prior. It had been a frightening experience. At first I thought I had been poisoned by one of those massive bags of the best gummy bears in the world that you get from TJ Maxx, and learned hours later through the urgent tone of an ER doctor’s words that I needed emergency surgery for appendicitis. If that hadn’t been disturbing enough, I woke up from the surgery to learn that my appendix had ruptured, and that I, in turn, was a very sick person. Eager toxins were let loose in my abdomen, and we would need to “wait and see” what would happen next. Waiting and seeing equaled a second hospital stay a week later to have a torture device, affectionately called a “drain,” installed directly into my right-bumby-cheek to reach a painful abscess that had developed in my abdomen as a result of the opportunistic bacteria.
The reality for me that day, Target-sign day, was foul. I was in significant pain. I was unable to move about freely because of the torture device in my bum. I was unable to wash my hair or take a shower. (Refer back to “torture device.”) I was unable to be with my kids. My husband was unable to be with me (Refer back to “kids.”) I was lonely. I was scared. I was suffering. And as I drug my squeaky-wheeled IV pole of misery over to that hospital window, I was primed to find, hone in on, and clench with all my might, a catalyst for despair.
Looking that mile up the road, that Target store represented everything I didn’t have and couldn’t do. It meant shopping for beach towels and sunscreen. It meant prepping for BBQs. It meant down-time for mommies who had margin. It meant home decor for pain-free, bouncing-all-over-town ladies who had aspirations and the capacity to implement their interior design dreams...and no tubes in their bumby-cheeks. Ugh. The luxury! It meant birthday party planning and card games for road trips and picnic baskets and bike helmets, and all the things that I was not able to enjoy in my ugly hospital gown and my ugly hospital socks, with my ugly, unwashed hair, and the ugly, painful tube in my bum, with my ugly hospital food on my ugly hospital tray, in my ugly, painful, miserable circumstances.
Oh yes. In that moment I hated Target. It sounds ludicrous, I know. But it was palpable and genuine; a genuine snapshot into envy and lack of perspective and forgetfulness. In my misery, I let myself forget who I was. I had forgotten who God is, and in that ridiculous hatred I was forgetting a penetrating truth...that if I could only, if I WOULD only shift my vantage point I would find all around me the evidence of the supernatural beauty and purpose of suffering.
With my focus firmly affixed down the road at other people’s seemingly perfect realities, I was blind to the perfect, backward realities of living as a daughter of the King: the last is first. In weakness is strength. The meek inherit the earth. Losing your life is gaining it. And our suffering, without a doubt, is a salve that anoints and shapes us into who God wants us to be. Hardship clears the scale-like debris from our fallen-earth eyes so we are able to see that all we really, deep-down want or need is Him.
Thank you, Lord, that in our sanctification You love us enough to smash through the lies the world sells us, our flesh tells us. One way or another, because of your deep, abiding love for us, You recalibrate our hearts.
Have you ever had a “God snapped me out of it” moment? My olympic-sized through-the-window pity party was interrupted by the presence of a beloved pastor in the door of my hospital room. The visit was short. The prayer brief. But the about-face was seismic. The unexpected visit pulled me away from the window, and the intercession on my behalf in the midst of my lowest moment had been a simple reminder to me that God was not down the road. God was not outside, beyond my reach in the razzle-dazzle sunshiny day. He had not forgotten about me in the ugliness. He had not left me to fend for myself in my pain and loneliness. He had not left me purposeless until a time when I could dress appropriately and bound down the hall. He was there, in the ugliness, with me. And His presence, the experience of it, the supernatural proof of it, the tangible movement of it in that room was...enough.
The mystery of the upside-down workings of the Holy Spirit in us is that what should make sense doesn’t and what shouldn’t make sense does. For me, it was the reality that NOTHING on earth I had been longing for that day, no thing in ANY aisle in ANY store in America, no person, no mission, no medicine could have made me feel more healthy and alive than the simple presence of God at my bedside.
While I was casting my gaze down the road, scanning the horizon to find and covet all that I thought I lacked, God was casting His gaze directly upon me, and waiting patiently (oh, so patiently) for me to acknowledge that all I need in this world is Him. I was brought back to the no-matter-the-circumstance joy of the Lord that I have walked in, but had forgotten in times of triumph, as frivolous -okay, even very meaningful -things, had overtaken my heart. Sickness, my “momentary troubles,” had brought me back to a healthy desperation for the eternal connection with the Lord that wouldn’t...couldn’t have happened any other way.
When all else is stripped away, He remains. If His faithful love for us was the only truth we gleaned from suffering, it would be worth it. But it’s not. His presence, the workings of His Church, His healing power, His provision, His compassion, His sovereignty, His will, and the beauty of eternity are all conveyed to us through suffering, hardship and pain.
In the words of John Paul Tripp in his appropriately titled book, “Suffering,”
“Suffering has the power to help you see where you’ve been completely blind but didn’t know it. Suffering can bless you with a joy that’s independent of life being easy….Hardship can turn envy into contentment and complaint into praise.”
These are all the things I have experienced and am continuing to experience in my now year-long journey with physical suffering. These momentary troubles are, indeed, achieving glory in me. Not one bedridden moment, scar, or agonizing experience has been in vain. I hurt. But I can cry out to Him. I experience pain. But I have a Savior who knows pain; who willingly chose to leave painlessness and who chose suffering out of His deep love for me.
As I continue to partake in this journey, I’m finding I look down the road, across the horizon, less and less. My help doesn’t come from there. I’m away from the window and looking around my room. There is plenty of work to be done in me and through me right here. And in this backwards, beautiful journey I find my complaints are, indeed turning into praise because in my greatest, deepest tribulations, I am brought back to my greatest, deepest, only hope...Him. Thank God.
And thank God for Target. We’re out of milk.
Leigh-Ann Reid
Leigh-Ann Reid is a passionate follower of Jesus, a Marine Corps spouse and a homeschooling mom of three. As a nomad military wife, she has been blessed to live, serve and glean wisdom from 10 unique communities in 16 wonderful years. Her passions are reading, writing, traveling and decorating cookies. And Target.