More than My Worst Moments: My Faithlessness and God’s Faithfulness
By: Greta Dornbirer
These past few years have been a doozy, to put it lightly. I had a serious falling out with close friends of mine. A dear family friend passed away. I felt betrayed by people I thought had trusted me. I hurt people. I led poorly. I had to come to terms with my own failure at a job that I had aspired to my whole college career. I dated and was engaged. I broke off my engagement because the relationship was toxic. Through all of this, I had lost my sense of home and belonging, and I was left feeling shaken, angry, betrayed, and abandoned.
Maybe you, like me, have experienced a time of intense suffering, grieving, and healing. Maybe you’re in the middle of the healing process, wondering with growing frustration why the past still affects you and crops up in your living, no matter how much you try to leave it behind. If that’s you, I am with you. You are seen, and you are loved, even in the moments that you feel the most unlovable. Below are a few things I have learned about healing and suffering. God is working in the places of greatest pain to free you from the fear that holds you in chains to the past.
1) This too shall pass.
I love the passage in Ecclesiastes 3—that there is a season for everything, time to weep and a time to rejoice. For every prevailing emotion, it is only that: a season—nothing more and nothing less.
2 Corinthians 4:17-18 is one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture that I constantly return to: “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
I love this passage because not only does it describe our afflictions as “momentary” and “light,” reminding us that the suffering will end—“weeping may stay for the night but rejoicing comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5)—but also that what is unseen is eternal and what we see is not all that there is.
2) Suffering is not your identity but does become part of your story.
It is a temptation for us all as we ruminate on the ways we have been hurt to make our suffering into our identity. We must actively fight against this temptation and choose not to be defined by the worst parts of our stories. What you have walked through does matter, and it matters in the eyes of our compassionate Father. The passage of time will allow for the worst moments of your life to become part of your story but not the whole of who you are. What you have suffered matters to God. His heart breaks with yours. But he will also use your suffering to show you his redemptive work in an entirely personal and unique way.
3) God is the Author of healing, not me.
Recently, I have been reminded that all the progress I have made of moving through healing has been strictly the work of God and not me. He is the Author of healing, and we make ourselves available to His healing work. As I look back on my own healing journey, I see my own faithlessness and God’s utter faithfulness. In the moments where I was angry and withholding myself from Him, He was still working healing in my heart and softening me in ways that I could not understand. I wanted the 5-step formula to healing, a list of all the things I needed to do to be well. Instead, God showed me just how little control and understanding I have of the deepest parts of me that ached for no discernible reason. Our faith is what heals us.
4) Unite your sufferings to the cross and allow this union to deepen your connection
with Jesus.
I was reading this book recently called Night by Elie Wiesel, a Jewish survivor of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. His account is one of the most depressing and heartbreaking accounts of suffering I have ever read. The conclusion of the book is that the author hates God, if there even is a God. Without an understanding of the cross, this conclusion is tragic but also makes sense. Because I know that my Savior suffered and died for me, I know that I serve a God who truly understands suffering because he experienced it. The more I remember that Jesus experienced all the pain I have ever felt in his time on earth, the more I can experience a greater intimacy with Jesus through my suffering: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). The cross is what makes living through suffering possible and even transformative. Jesus weeps with and for you in your moments of greatest sadness and pain and truly understands.
I’d like to leave you with a quote from The Inner Voice of Love by Henry Nouwen, one of the best companions through pain that I’ve ever found:
“The greatest challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them… You need to let your wounds go down into your heart. Then you can live them through and discover that they will not destroy you. Your heart is greater than your wounds” (109-110).
How we choose to live through suffering will come to define us. Choose to see the light amidst darkness. It’s still there. There is still hope. Keep fighting the good fight, and you will see the goodness of God in the land of the living one day.
