My walk with the Living God is not your typical Southern I-was-raised-in-church story. Although I did attend church with my family as a child, I didn’t “get it.” Nothing in my childhood Sunday school classes penetrated to the core of my will and reason, and so I was unprepared for the inevitable hardships of life in a sin-wrecked world. I had no theology for suffering.

As a teen and young adult, I adopted a worldview based on atheistic humanism. The problem was, this worldview necessitated I remain busy and preoccupied at all times. Otherwise, the reality of pain, despair, and emptiness would press me in a suffocating embrace. From my godless perspective, suffering was meaningless, and since life held a great deal of suffering, life seemed meaningless to me as well.

Then I met my Creator through His Word, and everything changed. But the verses that first resonated with me were not the standard reassurances of God’s love – the fear nots and the comforting promises of faithful love. To the contrary, the very first Scripture I remember striking a deep chord and reverberating through my brain was from the prophet Isaiah. It was a Scripture about pain.

Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction. For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another.
(Isaiah 48:10-11)

For the first time in my life, I learned the anguish and angst I’d experienced in life had a purpose. There was meaning in misery; a reason for the suffering.

The craziest idea I’d ever had took hold of me. My pain wasn’t even ultimately about me at all. It was all allowed to occur for God’s glory. And He wasn’t going to share His glory with anyone – not even with me.

In those two verses, read in the context of the entire chapter but impressed into my heart by the Holy Spirit as a personal message, I realized all my life to that point had been a refining process.

The torturous heat I’d felt, sometimes due to my own poor choices and other times inflicted upon me by circumstance, wasn’t merely rotten luck. Instead, the intense heat of anguish melted down every atom of my being in order that the ugliness inside me could be separated and removed.

Even my stupidity, my “looking for love in all the wrong places” and the horrors I’d found in dark corners I never should have probed, was included in the liquefaction. The Great Refiner applied heat to every part of me, discarding what was useless to Him and reshaping the rest into a vessel He could use – for His glory.

My pain was for His glory, and yielded to Him, it became a thing of beauty; a connection point by which I could share my eternal hope in a merciful and magnificent Creator God with others who are wounded and broken by suffering. Life and life’s pain were no longer meaningless.

From these two verses, the Holy Spirit continued to reveal a theology of suffering to me through the Word of God. I was unsurprised to read Paul’s assertion that we should rejoice in our suffering or James’s admonition to “count it all joy… when you meet trials of various kinds” (see Romans 5:2-5 and James 1:2-4).

Nor was I surprised to learn that my salvation was purchased by the suffering of the Son of God, or that my obedience to Him required further suffering. I was simply ecstatic to learn all the pain had a purpose after all.