Written: December 11, 2024

Can suffering produce any good? And if it can, how does that good influence our view of the suffering itself?

Since Gemma passed, I see in my life that my capacities for gratefulness, love, joy and the ability to see beauty have enlarged. Suffering has filled these cups to the brim and they now overflow. I’m slowing down not just because of the burden of loss, but because my eyes now wear the lens of the inescapability of painful suffering. 

Eskimo and butterfly kisses with my living daughters have multiplied. Lengthy nighttime snuggles rarely bring frustration at the amount of time it takes for 2 and 5 year olds to drift off to sleep. I notice my husband’s smile anew and my heart skips beats when it breaks out. My tenderness and intentionality to those hurting has grown. I see them more as my compassion has grown. I’ve witnessed the best of humanity in friendship and support. We are helping families whose children are on life-support.  I am grateful to have known and loved such a precious human as Gemma. I can sometimes smile now thinking of her. Her life and my own are gifts with expiration dates. We do not know when, but I am no longer disillusioned that I control my life’s ending. I find hidden in each minute the gifts of life, breathe, love and beauty like never before.

And yet I carry this bag filled with the stones of agony. I’m hunched over by its weight. I would do nearly anything to put it back where it came from and replace it with the weight of my daughter. Nightmares wake me in a panic as I relive the fear that haunted me within the hospital walls. My daily patience quota is much smaller as my energy disappears as soon as I wake it seems. My anger and hurt have come out in ways that are abnormal to me. The Anxiety of future loss can make my head spin and leave me frozen with the fear that suffering will hunt me down again today and add more boulders to the bag on my back.

The benefits of suffering can never justify the suffering itself. Gemma’s traumatic death is an unwelcome invader and thief. I would trade the gains any day to gain her life. But I cannot, so I will learn from her life instead. I will be transformed by it, but in her honor, not her shame. I must learn to journey life with this devastating bag of agony. Perhaps some stones will be pulled out eventually, but the bag is now part of my life’s uniform. 

How can one carry a greater capacity for joy and this heavy agony all at once, for all of their lives? The same terrible event somehow produces these opposing forces. 

Somehow God works this evil for the good of those who love Him. I believe, in His common grace, grants some goodness to all sufferers. But can His allowance of these evils really be justified? When all is said and done, and the work of Christ complete, will I believe what He accomplishes through this will be worth it?

Such a terrible question. I don’t know. But if the answer is no, is there any hope of Redemption? Or is painful suffering the totality of what Her death will become? Did she die for nothing? God, I hope not. Can her death be both a terrible unjustifiable evil and yet purposefully allowed for everyone’s ultimate good, including her own? How can this be so?

I go back to the fact that God did not spare His own Son to fix this. For the joy set before the Son He endured crucifixion and rejection by His people, the very creatures He came to redeem. He knows more than any the painful toll this world places on us. He knows death more intimately than I do. He shares an intimacy with my daughter that I cannot. 

Either He is who He says He is, or He is not. Either He is the Redeemer and Healer, or He is not. 

For me, I will learn to live a life enlarged by suffering, with greater joy and greater sorrow. Side by side. This is what I can do – what I must do. He will have to do the rest.