Suffering raises the hardest questions of faith. Where is God when a child dies, when a body is broken or when a family is torn apart? The Bible does not hide from these questions. The Psalms are full of lament, and Jesus himself cried from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46).
These nine stories about suffering and grief, retold in our own words, do not offer easy answers. Some come from the darkest places of the twentieth century; others from hospital wards, farms, ordinary homes and one novelist's honest struggle with depression. Together they point to a God who does not stand far off from our pain but enters it with us. Each ends with a takeaway for sermons, small groups or pastoral care.
Stories in this collection:
- "No Problem Is So Big…": Linus and the Art of Running Away
- "Where Is God?": Elie Wiesel and the Gallows
- "After All, He Was a Jew Too"
- Joni Eareckson Tada: "He Was Paralysed Too"
- Forgetting the Thistles
- "I Received a Lesson on the Nature of God": Randy Hoyt's Loss
- Elisabeth's Tumour: When Healing Came
- The Garden of Unborn Children
- Amy Tan: Depression, Family and Finding Happiness
"No Problem Is So Big…": Linus and the Art of Running Away
In one of Charles Schulz's Peanuts comic strips, Linus is chatting with Charlie Brown about how to deal with life's difficulties.
Linus explains that he does not like to face problems head on. In his view the best way to solve a problem is simply to avoid it. In fact, he says, it is a distinct philosophy of his: no problem is so big or so complicated that it can't be run away from.
Takeaway: Many of us share Linus's philosophy. But pain we run from tends to follow us. Faith gives us the courage to face our troubles, knowing we do not face them alone.
Source: Charles M. Schulz, Peanuts comic strip.
"Where Is God?": Elie Wiesel and the Gallows
Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he was deported to Auschwitz and later Buchenwald. He survived, and years afterwards wrote about his experiences in his memoir Night, first published in French in 1958 and in English in 1960.
One of the most harrowing scenes describes a public execution in the camp. Two Jewish men and a young boy were led to the gallows while the prisoners were forced to watch. As the nooses were placed around their necks, the two men cried out, "Long live liberty!" The boy said nothing.
Somewhere behind Wiesel, a man asked, "Where is God? Where is he?" Then the chairs were kicked away. The two men died quickly, but the boy was so light that he did not die at once. For more than half an hour he hung there, struggling between life and death, as the prisoners were marched past him.
Again the man behind Wiesel asked where God was now. And Wiesel heard a voice within him answer that God was right here, hanging on these gallows.
For Wiesel, that moment marked the death of his childhood faith. Yet Christian theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann and John Stott have reflected on the same words in another way: God is not absent from human suffering but present within it, seen most clearly in Jesus, who hung on a cross of his own.
Takeaway: The cross does not explain away suffering, but it shows us where God is in the middle of it: not watching from a distance but sharing our pain.
Source: Elie Wiesel, Night (1958; English 1960); discussed in Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, and John Stott, The Cross of Christ.
"After All, He Was a Jew Too"
Before he became the Episcopal Bishop of California, C. Kilmer Myers served as a priest in New York City. According to the writer Maggie Ross, one of the most unsettling features of his ministry there was a woman named Emma.
Every afternoon at four o'clock Emma stood outside the church and screamed abuse at Jesus. Her rage was not hard to understand. She was a survivor of the Holocaust, and she carried a grief few people could imagine.
One day Myers went out to her and gently suggested that, instead of shouting at the building, she go inside and tell Jesus herself. Emma disappeared through the doors.
An hour went by and she did not come out. Worried, Myers went in to look for her. He found her lying on the floor before the cross, completely still. He knelt and touched her shoulder. She looked up with tears in her eyes and said quietly, "After all, he was a Jew too."
Takeaway: God can handle our anger. When we bring our rage honestly to Jesus, we may discover that he has suffered as we have, and that he understands.
Source: Reported in Maggie Ross, The Fire of Your Life.
Joni Eareckson Tada: "He Was Paralysed Too"
In the summer of 1967, seventeen-year-old Joni Eareckson went swimming with her sister in Chesapeake Bay. She dived into water that was far shallower than she realised, struck her head and broke her neck. She was left paralysed from the shoulders down.
Her rehabilitation took two long and often painful years. During that time she learned to paint by holding a brush between her teeth. Inwardly, the struggle was even harder. She was angry with God and demanded to know why he had allowed this. At times she wished she had not survived.
At first she could not reconcile her paralysis with belief in a loving God. The turning point came one night when a close friend sat beside her bed and reminded her that Jesus knew exactly how she felt. On the cross, her friend said, he was paralysed too. He could not move or shift his weight; the nails held him fast.
That simple thought changed something deep within her. God no longer seemed distant. Over time, she later said, she came to understand that he loved her, and gradually he became enough.
She prayed for healing and believed it would come. In the years since, she has explained that she still believes she will be healed, because the Bible promises resurrection bodies. She simply expects to wait a lifetime for it, and in the meantime God stays with her. Through her books, her art and the ministry she founded, Joni and Friends, she has encouraged millions of people living with disability.
Takeaway: Jesus is not a stranger to our limitations. Paul heard God say, "My power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9), and Joni's life has become a living example of it.
Source: Joni Eareckson Tada, Joni (1976), and Joni and Friends.
Forgetting the Thistles
An Australian priest, Fr John Speekman, recalls a visit to his family's farm. His young nephews and nieces insisted he come up the hill with them to see the mouse plague. They set off carrying every container they could find, full of water: jugs, buckets and bottles, according to the size of each child. Twelve-year-old Richard pushed a wheelbarrow with a large drum filled to the brim. Three farm dogs came along too.
The top of the hill was riddled with mouse warrens. Each child poured water down a hole, and as soon as a bedraggled little mouse poked its head out of its flooded home, a quick little hand snatched it up. By the time the mouse hit the ground again, it was usually dead. The priest could not quite see what those lightning-fast fingers did, but few mice escaped them.
The priest's job, it turned out, was to look after the dogs. The hillside was covered with long, dry, razor-sharp thistles, and the barbs kept lodging deep in the pads of the dogs' paws. Every few steps one of them would stop in its tracks and lick its foot. As soon as he freed one dog from the stinging barbs, another needed help, and then he would have to go back to the first and start all over again. It seemed endless. He wondered why they had bothered to bring the dogs at all, and why the children took no notice of the animals' suffering.
The next day his brother-in-law was driving some sheep through the same hill paddock and asked whether he would like to come. He stood in the back of the ute and jumped down to close the gates behind the flock. The three dogs rode in the back with him, barking without pause, desperate for the command that would let them loose on the dusty mob ahead.
When the order came, they leapt over the side and raced back and forth across the hill, driving the mob exactly where it needed to go. Only when the panting dogs jumped back into the ute did it strike him: not one of them had a thistle in its paws. He could not remember seeing any of them stop or limp all day. When they were doing the work they were made for, they did not notice the thistles.
Takeaway: When we give ourselves wholeheartedly to the work God has called us to, many of the small hurts that once stopped us lose their power. Purpose does not remove every thistle, but it helps us keep running.
Source: Fr John Speekman, submitted to OzSermonIllustrations.
"I Received a Lesson on the Nature of God": Randy Hoyt's Loss
What should have been a joyful time became a nightmare for Randy Hoyt. When his wife, Kris, was only five months pregnant, she was rushed to hospital for an emergency Caesarean section. She was bleeding so heavily that she needed around thirty units of blood. As doctors fought to save her life, Randy cried out to God, asking what he wanted and why he would not heal her when he so clearly could.
Kris died. Sixteen days later, their premature daughter, Grace, also lost her fight for life. Randy was left alone to raise six children. He asked God what had happened to all their plans, and who would now teach, guide and love the children the way their mother had.
He soon began to see an answer. Friends and strangers started a campaign called "Help Bring Hope to the Hoyt Kids." Over the next six months hundreds of people gave money, cooked meals, donated supplies and simply showed up. More than five hundred letters, emails and cards arrived from people who said they were praying for the family.
By the end of those six months the medical bills had been paid, the mortgage was paid off and Randy was able to return to work. God had not saved his wife and daughter, but his love had surrounded Randy's family through the hands of his people.
The grief did not disappear. Yet whenever he felt himself sinking, Randy pictured Kris and Grace together, alive and whole and full of joy. Looking back, he wrote that he had asked God for his wife's life and had instead been given a lesson in who God is. God is good, he concluded, and that knowledge took away his fear of the future.
Takeaway: God does not always answer our prayers in the way we ask. But even in loss he can reveal his goodness, often through the love of the people around us.
Source: Randy Hoyt, "Seeing God", Pentecostal Evangel, 21 January 2001.
Elisabeth's Tumour: When Healing Came
As reported in Time magazine in 1995; we have not been able to view the original article.
Elisabeth Jernigan was only a few months old when her parents, Betsy and Lennie, in North Carolina, noticed her right eyelid weakening and beginning to droop, and her pupil becoming fixed. Her grandfather, a Harvard-trained surgeon, was worried and urged them to see an eye specialist. The ophthalmologist referred them to a paediatrician, the paediatrician to a neurologist, and finally the neurologist gave the diagnosis they had feared: a brain tumour.
Exploratory surgery removed part of the tumour from the nerve that controls the right eye, but it was too dangerous to try to take it all. Then the pathology report brought the worst news of all. Elisabeth had an extremely rare, malignant tumour of a kind the doctors said had proved fatal in every recorded case. They expected it to keep growing, leading to paralysis and death.
Her parents began to pray, and so did their friends and their church. They prayed for healing, and also for the grace to accept her death if that was what lay ahead. Her surgeon grandfather admitted he did not have the faith to pray for a miracle, but he prayed for wisdom in choosing the right doctors and for the strength to bear what was coming.
Elisabeth's condition worsened. Fluid built up on her brain and had to be drained again and again with a needle. She became lethargic and sick, and the doctors planned another operation to insert drainage shunts. Before the surgery, the family gathered while a priest anointed her with oil and prayed for her healing.
The night before the operation, a doctor drained so much infected fluid that he postponed the surgery. Twelve hours later he returned and, to his surprise, found almost no fluid at all. When the operation went ahead, the surgeons planned a final attempt to remove the rest of the tumour, even though it would cost Elisabeth the sight in her right eye. But they could not find the lesion. They removed the section of nerve as planned, and when it was tested, no cancer cells were found. Later scans showed no trace of the tumour.
Her doctors called it a spontaneous resolution. Her family called it a miracle. Her father asked people who might one day see a young woman with one eye permanently closed not to feel sorry for her, but to remember that God is powerful and good.
Takeaway: Sometimes God heals in ways that leave doctors without an explanation. Whether healing comes or not, we can pray honestly, as Elisabeth's family did, for both a miracle and the grace to accept God's will.
Source: Reported in Time magazine, April 1995.
The Garden of Unborn Children
In the grounds of Zōjō-ji, a Buddhist temple in Tokyo, there is a garden dedicated to children who died before they were born, whether through miscarriage, stillbirth or abortion.
Grieving parents place small stone statues in the garden in memory of their child, often dressing them in little red caps and bibs and leaving toys or pinwheels beside them. Row after row of these figures stand together. Families may also take part in a memorial ceremony known as mizuko kuyō.
Wooden plaques carry messages from parents to the children they never held. One, as reported by Catherine Hammond, tells a baby that they will never be forgotten and asks for forgiveness for ever.
Takeaway: The grief of losing a child before birth is real and often hidden. The church needs to make room for that grief, and for the longing for forgiveness and peace that may come with it.
Source: Reported in Catherine Hammond, Stories to Hold an Audience; background on Zōjō-ji and mizuko kuyō.
Amy Tan: Depression, Family and Finding Happiness
This story mentions depression and suicide. If it affects you, please see the note at the end.
Amy Tan is the bestselling American author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Bonesetter's Daughter and other novels, as well as a book of essays, The Opposite of Fate. Her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, published in 1989, became a huge success and was later made into a film.
What fewer readers know is that Tan has spoken openly about her long struggle with depression, which she has described as having serious bouts of, and which she believes is partly biochemical and partly a pattern that runs through her family.
Her family history is marked by sorrow. Her grandmother suffered from depression and took her own life, and Tan's mother witnessed it as a child. Her mother herself struggled for years and often spoke of wanting to die. When Amy was a teenager, her father and her older brother both died of brain tumours within months of each other.
For a long time, Tan did not seek treatment. Part of her fear, she has said, was that medication might change who she was. As a writer, she worried that it might take away something essential to her work, since many writers believe their creativity depends on their pain.
Eventually she did seek help, and she has spoken publicly about taking an antidepressant. It did not make her artificially cheerful, she said. She can still get angry and still feel sad. But it keeps her from falling into the abyss. She has compared it to a person with diabetes taking insulin: simply a treatment for an illness.
Her story challenges two myths at once. One is that success, fame or achievement can cure deep pain. The other, sometimes found in churches, is that seeking medical help for depression shows a lack of faith. Tan's honesty reminds us that depression is a real illness, that it is nothing to be ashamed of, and that help is available.
Takeaway: Elijah, one of the greatest prophets, once prayed that he might die, and God met him with rest, food and gentle care before he spoke (1 Kings 19:3–8). If you are struggling with depression or thoughts of harming yourself, please talk to someone you trust, a doctor or a local crisis line.
Source: Amy Tan, interviews (including Salon, 1995) and The Opposite of Fate (2003).
Final thoughts
A cartoon philosophy, a gallows in Auschwitz, a woman at the foot of the cross, a paralysed teenager, a hillside of thistles, a grieving father, a vanished tumour a garden of tiny statues and a novelist who found help for her depression. None of these stories makes suffering simple. But together they point to a God who comes close to the broken-hearted.
For further reading, Sopranu has a summary of C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed and a review of Laura Story's When God Doesn't Fix It.
"The Lord is close to the broken-hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit" (Psalm 34:18). Who in your life needs to hear that today?
More stories you may like:
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.