Be Not Afraid: Overcoming the Fear of Death by Johann Christoph Arnold

Author:Johann Christoph Arnold
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Death, Psychology, Bereavement, Emotions, General, Grief, Family & Relationships, Self-Help, Bruderhof Communities, Death & Dying, Social Science
ISBN: 9781570755118
Publisher: Orbis Books
Published: 2003-08-11T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Suffering

Whenever I think of suffering, Miriam comes to mind. Born with multiple physical handicaps, including the inability to swallow, she had to be fed by dropper for the first few weeks of her life and by feeding tube until she was one year old. But it was “brittle bone disease” that affected her most severely. As a toddler she would sometimes break a bone just by trying to pull her leg out from between the bars of her crib. Later, a bump into a door frame or a simple fall caused by tripping could mean a series of fractures in her arms or legs or both, often followed by hospitalization and surgery, and always accompanied by much pain, not to mention six weeks or more in a cast. By age eight, she had broken her legs sixteen times.

At ten, Miriam was suffering heart failure. As if that weren’t enough, the curvature of her spine, which significantly reduced her lung capacity, left her continually short of breath. By the time she entered adolescence, she was wheelchair-bound.

Then came the biggest blow of all, when she was just fourteen: her mother’s suicide. Miriam herself died at twenty-eight, by which time she had undergone at least fifteen operations, been hospitalized more than forty times, and suffered hundreds of fractures.

Throughout her short life, Miriam’s personality remained largely free of the burdens placed on her by her medical condition. In fact, she reminded one of a sparrow - small, spunky, cheerful. This was true at the end of her life, too: though she struggled for every breath, she was indomitable. When nothing more could be done for her medically, she said, through her oxygen mask, “Well, I think I’m ready. I only have a few more thank-you notes to write.”

Can a lifetime of suffering like Miriam’s, or a debilitating illness of any length, ever represent God’s will? If we claim it cannot, we are faced with a certain tension. After all, the New Testament tells us of people like a man whose blindness was caused “so that God might be glorified,” and that it was God’s will that Jesus should suffer and die. On the other hand, because the Bible is so full of passages that speak of God’s power to heal and save and give life, it seems incomprehensible that sickness and death should still exist at all.

Writer Elisabeth Elliott points out that though we accept these things, at least on a certain level, as part of life, we find them harder to accept when they “strike down a child, an ‘innocent’ adult, or someone else whose victimhood offends our notions of fairness. And so we rationalize and theologize and try to come up with answers.” In my view, this is often a waste of time. Certainly it can be fruitful to explore the meaning of suffering, to grapple with the “big” questions, and to let them deepen us. At the same time, Elliott goes on, there is a price to be paid “every time we satisfy our need to rationalize such things as suffering.

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