to the ravages of war. He lovingly understands the painful and convoluted thought process of every pregnant teenaged girl who chooses to abort her child while, at the same time, experiencing the pain of every unborn child and the wasted future that could have been.
This is the God of all comfort, the God of all love, the God of all grace. For on the cross, Jesus took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows. He is now linked forever to the suffering of those He gave Himself for. He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities and by His wounds we are healed (Isaiah 53:4,5). He also is the great High Priest who sympathizes with our weaknesses and who is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and have gone astray (Hebrews 4:15,16; 5:1,2). This Jesus, the eternal now, sees all suffering and, because of who He is, cannot turn a blind eye to what He sees. The same love that drove Jesus to the cross remains today and He cannot walk away from our suffering, but is bound by His love for us to experience the pain we suffer in even greater depths.
Jesus is like a loving mother, whose heart aches over her sick child and who wishes she could change places with her daughter to provide relief. Jesus feels our pain to a greater extent than we could ever experience it. It is because of the reality of this emotional and grieving God that I feel comfortable enough to approach Him for help. The marvelous thing is that I usually don’t have to go too far to receive comfort from Him as He is already present in my grief. God runs to us before our first tear falls. In fact, His tears for us have already fallen before ours well up in our eyes. This is why I can trust God—He has tears in His eyes and nail scars in His hands and feet. This is the God who is approachable to those who sin, as well as those who suffer its repercussions.
Grief and love are inseparable. If we love, we will hurt. In fact, the more we love, the more we hurt. Loving people means setting yourself up for major pain. Love causes you to become attached to the one you love. This attachment is real and results in a sharing of emotions (happy and sad) and even physical pain. (There are many cases where a child suffers pain and the parents experience that same pain.) People in love want what is best for each other and receive joy when good things happen. However, the opposite is also true. When they suffer, you suffer. This sharing of emotions and experience of collective pain is a strong proof that you love. To really impact someone’s life, love is required. This is why God has such a powerful impact on our lives.
God loves us and because of this He doesn’t only laugh and cry with us, but most importantly, His love transforms us. For love to work at its highest potency, it must be connected to those who suffer. If we love, we are willing to enter another’s afflictions and suffer with them. We must experience their pain, their injustice, their nightmares. When this happens, we demonstrate our love to them, for love limited to spoken words is cheap and is not love at all. Love, for it to have an impact, must be manifested through our shared experience.
“Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13, NIV)
Love is proven when it is connected to sacrificial suffering.
If I have any integrity with those we serve at UrbanPromise, it is only because I have gone through some of the suffering with which our people must deal. I have witnessed first-hand the issues of racism, injustice, abuse and the various indignities that poverty produces in their lives. It is during these times I have come to appreciate the symbolism in the Roman Catholic crucifix. This is because I can better relate to the crucifix of the suffering Jesus than to the cross that has been emptied by my Protestant brethren. I find it very comforting to know that we have a God who is familiar with injustice, poverty and suffering. He is the Jesus who truly suffered on the cross. Suffered for our sins. And suffers now with us in our brokenness.
He doesn’t hide from suffering but embraces it and has experienced every type of suffering known to man. I am so glad that in times of trials I can come to this Jesus, my God, who
“…was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.” (Isaiah 53:3, NIV, emphasis added)
Did you get that last part? He is familiar with suffering. He is approachable because He is with us in our pain. He has been there. He still is there. This is the type of God to which the poor can relate—the One who hangs on a cross, the One who suffers with us, the One who has and still does face injustice and indignity. The One who was born in poverty. Christ is love because He chose to go through more suffering than we could ever experience. He has confirmed the deep integrity of His love by choosing to suffer to the greatest extent for us. He still does. This suffering Jesus is the Saviour that we fellow sufferers can easily approach. He has proven His love by undeservedly dying on the cross for us (Romans 5:8).
While suffering Patrick’s loss, we felt a deep chasm of emptiness in our hearts. Together, we were all grieving the loss of a friend and loved one. What made our suffering even worse was the fact that Patrick had been murdered, and some in the media were assuming his guilt as a gangbanger. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Murder is such a heinous act of evil, and when it happens to a young man just entering his prime, an innocent victim, it is painfully hard to deal with. Someone stole his life in the midst of what seemed to be a path that would lead to life-changing moments for everyone he touched.
Of all the types of grief to bear, the loss of a loved one to murder has to be the toughest. We all needed the gentle touch of the God of all comfort and He was not letting us down! We felt His presence in each hug offered and received, with each tearful glance and in the prayers we had together. In the midst of this injustice, Jesus was right there, suffering with us. Somehow, there was peace in the midst of all this craziness because we knew that though God was not responsible for the actions of the murderers, He was not absent from our dilemma. The horrible, sinful actions performed by the few cannot stop God from making beautiful things happen. God’s kingdom is still being fully established. He was present in it all.
Later that night, I went home and began preparing for crisis counselling for our staff and the children whom Patrick served. They needed it and so did I. It was a hard night. My own children were traumatized and had nightmares (this continued for months afterwards) that a bad man would break into our house and murder us in our sleep. After a restless night, I arrived, bright and early, back at the community centre and was greeted at the door by the media. The place was crawling with cameras, reporters and huge television network vans with satellite dishes on their roofs. As I brushed them aside and made my way into the centre, I heard a teenager utter the following words, while pointing angrily at the media throng:
“Why are they always here when something bad happens? Why are they not here when all the good stuff occurs like when one of us graduates from school? They should have been here a long time ago, doing a story on Patrick, a good story, instead of this one.”
I remember talking to the media later in the day and asked them why they never seemed to report on the many good news stories that took place on a regular basis in our communities. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the response. I was told that there is far more bad news taking place than good in our city, and therefore the media report only what they see. “How sad!” I replied. “You are blind because you do not see that there are far more good news stories out here than bad. You are so blind to goodness that all you can see is evil.”
How do you see goodness? Love. Love provides true 20/20 vision because it tends to see things differently. Love sees the truth. Love sees the good news stories in spite of the bad.
I remember hearing Dr. Tony Campolo, founder of UrbanPromise, telling a story of his teaching days at the University of Pennsylvania where he was a professor of sociology. During one of his lectures, Tony made reference to Jesus’ ministry to prostitutes. It was then that he was challenged by one of his students, who curtly disrupted the lecture by proclaiming that Jesus never saw a prostitute in His entire life. Tony, rather agitated by this young man’s audacity to not only interrupt his teaching but also challenge his intellect, took on the young man in front of the class and began to share Scripture that showed Jesus’ ministry of compassion to prostitutes. Tony was experiencing enormous satisfaction as he ripped into this pretentious student, defending the faith while impressing his students with his great knowledge.
When he was finished