Solidarity in our Suffering

How the Cross (and Trauma Research) Offer Better News Than Unhelpful Christian Clichés

“This is the good news. God writes your story—including your story of suffering—in a way that grows you into his likeness and reveals his glory,” he said at a conference years ago, the audience nodding in affirmation.

I don’t recall the speaker’s name, but I do recall my dismay, even disgust.

I’ve sat with families navigating cancer diagnoses for their children and with spouses hearing early dementia diagnoses and with women and men sharing stories of unspeakable abuse. And I’d never, ever consider it good news that God somehow orchestrated these things.

I’ve long believed the Christian good news (aka “Gospel”) is not that God stands at a distance arranging our suffering for some secret purpose, but that God meets us in solidarity with our suffering in Jesus Christ, entering in to what feels cruel and pointless in order to heal, redeem, and ultimately undo all that fractures humanity and creation itself.

Even still, I have dozens of phrases from sermons and talks stretching back into my childhood that make their way from the recesses of my psyche every now-and-then…phrases like:

• “God won’t give you more than you can handle.”

• “Everything happens for a reason.”

• “God is using this to teach you something.”

• “This is part of God’s plan.”

• “God must be preparing you for something greater.”

• “God is more concerned with your holiness than your happiness.”

• “Maybe God allowed this to draw you closer to him.”

• “Trials are blessings in disguise.”

• “If God brought you to it, he’ll bring you through it.”

I think back to my seminary days where it seems we spent more time trying to discern the mind of God than we did learning what it means to sit in suffering-solidarity with others in the name of Jesus. And nearly 30 years of pastoral care and clinical therapy have convinced me that we’ve too often lost the real goodness of the good news.

Can suffering mature us? Can our painful stories manifest in transformation? Of course.

I’ve written about this, and most of us—religious or not—know this intuitively.

Those I’ve cared for over the years have taught me this. A woman who I accompanied through years of processing the trauma of her father’s abuse later told me, “Because of what I’ve experienced, I can sit with others with fewer answers and more compassion.” She is now someone who cares for others navigating abuse.

Suffering can deepen compassion, humility, courage, surrender, and love. But suffering does not automatically mature us. Sometimes, it fragments us. Unaccompanied, it may overwhelm the nervous system, leaving us vigilant, shut down, or despairing. Trauma research has helped us see what many therapists, pastors, and wise elders have long known: suffering that is witnessed, held, and accompanied is far more likely to become transformative than suffering borne alone.

I thought about how this happens recently while talking with my friend Jim Herrington on his podcast. We were discussing the tension between safety and suffering, and how easy it is to drift toward one of two extremes. On one side, we can valorize suffering in ways that make God seem cruel, calculating, even sadistic. On the other, we can valorize safety in ways that leave us unwilling to risk discomfort, grief, change, conflict, or vulnerability.

We don’t need to pit safety and suffering against each other. In fact, when safety and suffering walk hand-in-hand, maturity follows. I was reflecting on this again recently as my youngest got married last weekend, rendering Sara and I true empty-nesters. I was thinking about our shared story as a family, with two difficult cross-country moves—something not uncommon to those in ministry, but also profoundly painful.

When our girls were young, we prioritized safety, connection, and attachment. But that did not mean protecting them from every hard thing. We made those difficult decisions to move, and we suffered, leaving family and friends, even homes and geographies we loved. There was grief in it, and Sara and I struggled to make those decisions knowing the cost to us, to our girls. But we were together in it. The suffering was accompanied—Emma and Maggie were safe with us, held in their pain. And that makes the difference.

Maybe this is one of the reasons the Gospels spend so little time trying to explain suffering philosophically. Yes, there is a place for that—I don’t deny that. But, the Gospel writers were far more concerned with presence, solidarity, renewed communion—Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, announcing an end to exile and the kingdom come.

Georges Rouault (1871-1958) Etching "Christ and the Children," 1935.

Friends, we don’t need to exhaust ourselves trying to decipher the hidden intentions of God behind every painful event. We don’t need to live in a story of a God who stands at a distance scripting tragedy for our growth.

God became flesh and joined us in the struggle.

That God knows the hell you’ve been through. He’s been there.

And while there are no easy answers, there is companionship in the pain.

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