Suffering: What Was The Reason?

Things Happen. 

Those words don’t originate with me but from Dr. Renita Weems, a beloved womanist theologian and scholar. She used them during a sermon called “Unfinished Business.” 

In this sermon, she said she had to come face to face with how her theology wounded her. I, too, have that testimony! 

I have been harmed by the “name it and claim it,” “blab it and grab it,” prosperity gospel, the belief that you can pray your way into God’s good graces and divine favor. But I have also suffered under a theology that says God uses difficult circumstances to raise my social standing and as a test of my faith. In my faith tradition, it is argued, “There isn’t a testimony without a test,” and the notorious God is “preparing you” for X, Y and Z. 

I have read books and heard teachings and sermons laced with this brand of theology. As I grew older and gained more resources, I seriously questioned these theological conclusions. I wondered, “Do I always have to suffer to be blessed by God?” 

This personal inquiry around theodicy began as I was finishing my last year of undergraduate at a small private college in rural Indiana. I couldn’t shake such questions! I couldn’t understand how  God could be good while sitting back and watching evil have its way in the lives of the righteous. 

I went to my home church to participate in worship and to preach occasionally, but even then, I couldn’t  “dance” or “shout” my questions. They were embedded in my consciousness. I watched people I love be stricken with illness, lose jobs, file for divorce and lose hope. 

These people loved God and lived every day trying to please this God. They paid their tithes and prayed for others. Still, this is the hand they were dealt. 

I went through a rough season of depression, which intensified after learning of my grandmother’s breast cancer diagnosis. What was God up to? What could God possibly be planning to do with me and the people I loved? God, What was THE REASON? 

One day, I came across a post on social media that read, “God is not preparing you for anything. You are just suffering.” 

I needed to sit with this, but as a Baptist preacher, I needed to go to “the book.” What did I find? Matthew 5:45: “It rains on the just and the unjust.” 

I also found Ecclesiastes 9:11-12: “Time and chance happen to them all.” So, the biblical text says that we all will have “our day.”

We all will have our turn, and nobody knows when their turn will come. In my faith community, we talked a lot about Job and how he was “blameless,” but still lost everything he had. 

Our theology around the story of Job has been quite harmful.

What we need to understand is that suffering is inevitable. Being in “holiness,” paying tithes, visiting the sick and shut-ins and attending prayer meetings doesn’t absolve us of our turn to drink from the bitter cup. What would it look like if we abandoned the need to try to rationalize everything and just accept inevitable things? 

Let’s stop running to Romans, which says,  “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose.” Every time tragedy hits, we are prone to run to Romans but why not just sit down and say, “Ish happens?” 

How about we sit with those who suffer instead of offering an intellectual response devoid of feeling or empathy? Why don’t we tell the afflicted, “I don’t know why this has happened to you. But I want to be present and mourn with you.” 

But for that to happen, one must also adopt a theology that responds to questions regarding the meaning of life tragedies by saying, “I don’t know.’ This will take time, energy, and commitment. 

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer,” Zora Neale Hurston said. In this life, we must come to grips and say with the songwriter, “There are some things I may not know, there are some places I can’t go, But I am sure of this one thing, that God is real for I can feel God deep in my soul.” 

Child of God, “ish happens.” It doesn’t mean that God is punishing you for something you did at eight years old or that God is trying to accomplish something great through your suffering. 

Bad things happen, beloved. That doesn’t mean you did anything wrong or that everything that happens is your fault. “Ish just happens.”