Online Conversation | Suffering, Healing, and Meaning, with Philip Yancey and Julia Wattacheril

[Music] welcome everyone to today's online conversation my name is deborah harsma and i am president of biologos and we are delighted to be partnering with the trinity forum and church of the advent on today's event when sheree harder and i first envisioned this series we named it discovery and doxology often the discoveries of science fill this with wonder and doxology just look at this galaxy cluster behind me each of these bright spots is an entire galaxy of trillions of stars such things lift us beyond ourselves and our needs into a doxology of praise to the creator during the sorrows and stress of the pandemic i have often found comfort in considering the heavens and how they declare the glory of god psalm 103 says that the very vastness of the heavens points us to god for as high as the heavens are above the earth so great is god's love the heavens declare not only his glory and his sovereignty and power but his immense love and that's a reminder i've sure needed this past year today's conversation gives us space to ponder suffering and healing in our world using insights both from science and medicine and from scripture and theology and that's what we do at biologos on many topics ponder the findings of modern science and consider how they intersect with biblical faith if you'd like to learn more you can check out the biologist website for articles on today's topic and podcast interviews with both of today's speakers i'm looking forward to a rich and insightful conversation today and now i'll hand things over to my friend sheree harter president of the trinity forum thanks so much deb and on behalf of all of us at the trinity forum i'd like to invite you and welcome you to this today's online conversation on suffering healing and meaning with philip yancey and julia wada cheryl i'd like to thank the templeton religion trust whose support has helped make this program possible as deb mentioned this program is actually the first in a series that we'll be hosting on conversations between science and faith which is being sponsored by the templeton religion trust and hosted in partnership with our friends at both biologos and the church of the advent if you are new to the trinity forum we seek to provide a space to engage the big questions of life in the context of faith and to offer programs like this online conversation to do so and to come to better know the author of the answers and certainly one of the big questions of our time and indeed all time pertains to our topic today suffering healing and meeting the meaning of suffering remains in so many ways a dark mystery from which many of us will seek distraction as well as relief it is a universally shared experience that isolates is both inevitable and confusing and almost always transformative whether for good or for ill whatever our response pain and suffering almost always seems to upend our assumptions about the world and our place and purpose in it so how does one make sense of trauma and suffering what does it mean to be healed is it possible to live into your life's purpose to flourish as a human being even in the midst of pain and suffering and what role does faith play in living fully even in the midst of pain suffering and loss there are obviously no easy answers to those questions but we believe there is a wisdom to be gleaned from wrestling with him and today we have the opportunity to talk with two such worthy wrestlers both of whom from different perspectives and vocations have cared for those who suffer and sought meaning and hope in this dark mystery philip yancey is a best-selling and award-winning author of more than two dozen books many of which explore the deepest questions around the christian faith including those of pain suffering and meaning his many works include the jesus i never knew where is god when it hurts disappointment with god what's so amazing about grace as well as his most recent and truly remarkable work entitled a companion in crisis in which he introduces and paraphrases the reflections and devotions of poet john dunn written during the great plague of the 1630s his works have garnered 13 gold medallion awards from christian publishers and booksellers and currently have more than 15 million copies in print published in over 50 different languages joining him is julia wada cheryl julia is a scientist and a physician she's a transplant hepatologist or a liver doctor or surgeon a clinical investigator and the director of the adult non-alcoholic fatty liver disease program at columbia university's irving medical center last year around this time due to the overwhelming influx of patients suffering with covid into new york city hospitals she was pulled into the front lines of the covet crisis caring for countless numbers of the desperately sick and dying phillip and julia welcome it's great to see you thanks thank you for having us sheree so i'm just going to dive right in here uh julia i would love to hear about your experience over the last year what you saw and how it's affected your view of suffering thank you one correction that we're not confusing or mislabeling anything i am a hepatologist and not a surgeon so i'll explain a little bit about that in the in the answer um because part of addressing some of the suffering that that we witnessed is um the rolls and hats that we wear and how we're trained to address suffering in our line of work so it was exactly this time last year when i was what we call redeployed to a different role so typically what i do involves patient care with liver transplant patients or general liver care and so i was reassigned to a supervisory role for patients that were in the hospital but declining in their care and needed icu care and this was april and new york so we were super saturated all units were converted to icus including operating rooms and the transition to an uncertain role was part of gearing up for what we were about to see the usual paradigms that i'm used to dealing with with suffering most physicians most investigators or scientists are as well is how can i alleviate this person's pain and there's multiple different types of pain there's the physical pain which we try to address either with medications with surgeries with strategies we're trying to expand our abilities to deal with pain um but we also try to address emotional pain and and less likely but more needed existential pain um and suffering and all of that was very very vivid in the suffering that we saw you know with kovid i won't try to be morbid uh here but i will try to be realistic when you see someone gasping for air that is a form of suffering that those who might be listening who are familiar with uh end stages of life it's an agonizing phenomenon to watch it's an agonizing phenomenon based on patients um stories to experience whether it's a drowning phenomenon or an inability to breathe it's not traditional sort of pain but it is agonizing and it is a form of suffering and it's one that most of us that are familiar especially in this season of um of easter tide are familiar with as well from what happened on the cross so walking in or seeing these types of suffering these multiple elements of suffering but also having to adjudicate personnel that are dealing with this suffering so the acute phenomenon of someone who may or may not need advanced therapies the things that we're good at uh deploying strategies that are at our fingertips and that we have been resourced in order to deploy but then also the multiple tiered aspects of suffering that we're not so well uh used to thinking about and resource limitations and and team dynamics um as this wave was coming over us with no end in sight um and our anxiety and our inability to sort of take things in um was also uh the unknown um scientists like to predict and control and we like to develop strategies to try to predict and control and so do physicians we're generally fairly decent at being able to predict negative outcomes and be able to get on top of them we weren't able to do that in the initial phases of cobit we were gasping ourselves to try to keep up not only with the disease but how to try to treat it and how to try to develop other strategies so you know the bedside suffering that we heard despite the physical and emotional um and existential the one that i think was hardest for both the providers and the patients was relational the the absence of people at the bedside that they were familiar with that they drew comfort from many of us were seeing patients on an ad hoc basis we didn't have a long history with them we were forming relationships as quick as we could but the suffering of not having a human around that is used to caring for you was the most profound and fortunately um you know we work with some of the most empathic people with nurses and respiratory therapists and people that are at the bedside so often and no matter how many fingernails got painted in the icu or how many people got switched from a prone to a supine position there was no substitute for that family member family members are such advocates um when they're here in the hospital with us and we understand the rationale um we understand that the justification for it but it was equally agonizing when i rose through the hallways asking people what they needed not just ppe or food or whatever the hardest thing that everyone had uh reported having to do at the beginning was i can't do one more of these face time calls um we have a scheduled intubation at 8 p.m i can't sit with another family member like this i have not i only have room for happy memes right now um i just can't do this any longer and of course of course supports were built in along the way but in those early weeks it was so clear that relational suffering did the most damage phil you have wrestled with suffering vocationally from a different perspective in a different place but so many of your works deal with suffering and pain and would be interested in hearing from you what led you to focus so much of your vocational energies on this topic when i was a young journalist one of the things i did was write for readers digest magazine they had a series called drama in real life and i interviewed many people who had gone through some very traumatic experience they would often tell me the worst part of trying to recover was the visitors i got from my church they would come with such confusing messages some would say you did something wrong god is punishing you or somebody else would come in and say no it's not god it's the devil the devil is attacking you and the next person would come in no it's not the devil it's god but not because he's punishing you but because he he loves you and wants you to be an example to others on how to handle suffering and if you're lying there just trying to get well it doesn't help to have such confused messages i was confused myself i didn't know what to say so i immediately dove in as a young person having no right to attack the problem of pain that's bedeviled philosophers for centuries but it was important for my faith and for the people i was around to come up with some sort of coherent view of why if there is a loving and all-powerful god why so much suffering exists on this planet yeah let's talk a little bit about those messages and what you make of it and julia i'll start with you on this but you saw firsthand just how um how itself was a form of suffering the isolation of being cut off from others and yet so often the messages that our visitors give us um seem pat glib even even confusing um whether it's this is all for a purpose or god won't give you more than you can handle or what have you and so much of suffering seems senseless pointless um you know existentially wrong given your frontline view of this do you believe there is meaning in suffering and how um how do people who are in pain how do your patients find meaning in their experience the the short answer is yes but it's generally quite a it can be a protracted experience um so when you are hit with suffering whether it's a new verbal diagnosis of cancer or a physical tumor and you're recovering from the surgery that we just took out the aspect of how do i make meaning of this can sometimes be too much for that given moment and so a lot of the answers that you just named i think there were multiple articles written about this in early 2020 about the limits of toxic positivity and always having a remedied pat answer for something quite traumatic so i don't assume that every patient of mine expects suffering in their life most of them do most of them have experienced some form of suffering or trauma but they may not have fully processed it and that's true for the people taking care of them too uh so what i would say to the aspect especially around the pandemic and the relational suffering that we saw is that entering into that suffering didn't necessarily come with a glib answer it was just an acknowledgement and a validation of how much it was terrible and being in this space oftentimes silent um and maybe even distanced but being another human warm body that was sharing that agony with them um obviously that that takes a toll it's an interpersonal type of interaction and so that's where you know the person in me that's wondering about meaning downstream both for the profession that's having to do this in an untrained manner but then also the the patient population and their families um because it was spread through those um phone calls those video phone calls um were opportunities to share space whether it was limited by physical space or not but there was meaning in the sense of community naming what the issue was being mutually frustrated with our inability to be able to deal with it in a superb fashion but understanding that meaning would come with time perhaps and more so an openness to receiving not just the suffering but the process of trying to make it better you know the faith that's required to hope that meaning will come in time i mean it does require some faith and of course often suffering shakes our faith phil i wanted to ask you and perhaps unfairly about one of the great questions of all time for for christian faith um as well as for those outside and that's the the question that's been called theodicy the idea of how can a just good and loving god allow such seemingly pointless suffering in the world i think one poet sort of summarized the idea like if god is good he is not god god is god he is not good when faced with such um senseless or inexplicable suffering c.s lewis called this the problem of pain and it's a problem that you have wrestled quite a bit with as well and i'm wondering in the course of your wrestling with it um what how you have come to understand or approach uh the paradox of theology of theodicy a couple of things c.s lewis also used the phrase about nature that it in the world it's a good thing spoiled and it's easy in the middle of a pandemic to lose sight of the fact that it is a good thing that our bodies are amazing works fearfully and wonderfully made and even in the pandemic itself i i was surprised to find out that 99 of all viruses are not harmful it's only one percent but occasionally when one will jump a barrier say from an animal to a human host it can in this case cause the entire world to shut down almost so it's a good world but it has been spoiled and i think it's important to remember that god is no more pleased with this world than we are i remember when i went to newtown connecticut and spoke on the problem of pain to people who had just lost their six and seven-year-old children and i could i could say to them biblically god grieves as much as you do more than you do god cares about your children more than you do god is unhappy with the state of this world the reason we know that of course is because of how jesus responded when he was here when he was here he didn't just say okay get used to it this is the best we can do he said if you have a problem whether it's leprosy or uh born blind or whatever that's not god's desire i want to make that well and he gives us a very bright clue into what god wants for this world so don't judge god by what's happening on this world god himself would say it's a spoiled world he plans to restore it one day but in the meantime in the meantime we're living here on a planet that is wonderful and good but also dangerous and in in some cases even fatal you know i'm struck by the fact that uh the new testament emphasizes well at least two things one that jesus himself god himself is familiar with suffering as a man of sorrows as someone who experienced it both pain loss rejection isolation all the various forms of suffering and we're also given the repeated um reminder that he is with us and i'm wondering how both of you uh we'll start with you phil but um believe that that potentially affects our view of suffering in general but also the individual suffering that we might go through you mentioned this book i've been working on a companion in crisis which is a modern paraphrase of john dunn's devotions and dunn lived through the bubonic plague it was 1623 when he wrote it and we we tend to read parts of it in english literature classes no man is an island if a cloud be washed away by the by the sea europe is the last for whom the bell tolls the bell tolls for you and in that meditation john dunn is isolated he's in quarantine the only people he sees are doctors and medicine was rather primitive in those days they didn't really help very much but as he heard the toil tolling bell he realized i've been so self-absorbed i've been so concerned about my own health rightly so because he thought he was dying that i've forgotten about everybody around me and in that passage for whom the bell tolls he starts thinking of it's not just about me i'm a pastor and there are people in my church and their what they're going through should be affecting me i wrote a few books with dr paul brand and he he gave me a line that has stayed with me he said a healthy body is not a body that feels no pain he worked with leprosy patients who destroy themselves because they don't feel pain they don't have that warning system a healthy body he said is a pain that few is a body that feels the pain of the weakest part and we've seen that in the last year a little more than a year with the covet epidemic and julia was one of those on the front lines looking for the weakest part who was in the deepest need and unfortunately we were so overwhelmed that we had these situations of isolation where people had no human companionship and and the fear was completely absorbed absorbing and we lacked what we can often do which is to reach out with compassion and to say you're not alone i'm with you i'm here i interviewed a chaplain who worked at a memory care facility with dementia and alzheimer's and suddenly there was an outbreak of covert 14 people died in this facility and so all the visitors were were banned and what a terrible thing these people who are already confused who only had one tie say to their family and suddenly the family just stopped visiting them don't they care anymore and she had to sit with each one of these often alone as they died and then go and carry the news uh in the lobby to the to the families that's one of the great cruelties of this disease and we've seen pictures of these doctors and chaplains with their ipads and cameras doing face time with the families locked outside suffering is meant to be shared and that is one of the things that the church can do we can respond with compassion we can relieve the stresses that keep people from healing we'll take care of your dogs we'll keep take care of your children we'll make sure you have enough food that's what frees up the body to do its healing wonders and so much of the time in in the cohort crisis that was taken away from all us you know julia just sort of follow on in that we were talking earlier about sort of um unhelpful things that are often said and one um you know of the platitudes we often get told is you know that which does not kill you makes you stronger you know but of course there are um injuries and there are sufferings that merely maim um and diminish and one of the things that it seems like is that whether it's trauma or great suffering is almost inevitably transformative one either grows or grows bitter and from from your experience kind of on the front lines working with so many people what distinguishes those who grow who who grow better versus growing bitter and how might we think about enduring and persevering through pain in a way that enables uh spiritual growth rather than a sense of diminishment thanks for that question sheree um you know i wouldn't even limit it to the patient population that we saw i see it also in scientific investigation it's basically when you get a new challenge um how do you deal with overwhelming circumstances and it does come from a place of privilege to be able to even talk about it rather than just hustle and deal and survive but what one aspect of being able to pause and look at the circumstance which is a number one um but to also be open to what you are about to learn uh it's a humble posture um it's a it's an openness they always say change must be open to change um it's a learner's heart um it's a willingness to be taught um that leverages a lot of trust that there is a teacher out there that there's uh someone who's gonna guide you that there is a aspect that's teachable and that you're going to receive that that's a lot so for folks who do have a spiritual background um at least there's language around that whether or not we feel comfortable as as providers engaging them around that but from that same um conversation that we had with that i had with phil earlier you know one of the things when whenever i see a patient and they're overwhelmed with a circumstance or even a colleague quite honestly or a mentor is what experiences have you had in the past that have felt similar it's like when we address pain have you ever felt this pain before what did we know about it how did that help our diagnosis and treatment or how did how did you cope at that time what strategies did you learn and oftentimes that is an unhealed area perhaps if they haven't necessarily pursued it towards healing and meaning yet so there's an opportunity but it's also a technique that we use to leverage in order to build more coping mechanisms if it was the church that came in and supported you and not your multi-disciplinary team with all our bells and whistles then we need to call on your church uh we're we're our ineptitude is going to slow down your healing process but if your church was a liability to your healing or they hurt you along the way one that needs addressing in some way and sometimes i do represent the church because i do i do i'm open about my status as a believer and i've done a lot of apologizing for for church-related trauma with patients um but i also that person also has an openness towards a new opportunity that can sometimes be stewarded with another human being that openness to change so when you see someone who's resentful or angry you just have to be curious about where that came from and patient enough to dialogue about it when they're ready to talk about it yeah well i feel like we have barely scratched the surface but before we go to questions from our viewers i'd really like to hear from both of you on this and maybe we can start with you um phillip in that all of us will suffer in our lives uh it's basically inevitability and we will almost all of us also be in the position of caring for those who are suffering and certainly loving those who suffer how does one suffer well and how does one care for and comfort those who suffer in a way that encourages their flourishing there's a good pattern on handling our own suffering in the bible itself the apostle paul in the book of second corinthians talks about a personal pain that he had he doesn't really describe it he calls it a thorn in the flesh and he starts by calling it a messenger of satan so i talked about a good world spoiled well the apostle paul is right there this should not have happened i don't deserve this and then like most of us he wanted it taken away he wanted it removed so he prayed three times he said he seemed to be used to having his prayers answered for god to take it away but it didn't happen and then finally he went the last stage well okay i gotta live with this is there something that i can learn from it is there some reason some meaning as you say behind it and he finally came up with yes there is actually the way i read the apostle paul he had trouble with with arrogance he was not an easy person to get along with he needed humility and that's what he learned we don't know what that thorn was but somehow it forced him to realize that it's not my strength it's god's strength and god's strength is often poured through my weakness in surveys they show that if you ask people what is the time when you grew most spiritually about 80 of the time people will talk about a difficult time a hard time not the prosperous easy times but often involving suffering and the second part of your question how do we care for others i've asked so many people who helped you who helped you often i've never heard them say oh there was a there was a philosopher i read who just made me understand what was going on they don't say that often it's a grandmother it's someone who's just got time on her hands who sits there nearby and if you need some ice chips or you need some orange juice she's there she's not lecturing she's not philosophizing she's just being there and if if we are the church there's a there's a wonderful phrase in ii corinthians where god is described as the father of compassion and the god of all comfort and it says we who have received comfort that from that god are called to go out and distribute to dispense that comfort that compassion to those around us that is the church being the body of christ looking for that weak part and responding with comfort and compassion julia i uh the first part of your question about before there's action i would say or with an interpersonal dynamic with another human is i try to remember and remind my team of this too that you can't give what you don't have and so particularly for people in the helping professions healthcare workers social workers pastoral staff etc oftentimes the system incentivizes at the expense of who you are doing for others there comes an end to that and then you become dysfunctional if you if you're not being taken care of yourself so a lot of the coaching or counseling that i do is encouraging people working moms especially to take time for themselves otherwise you will see the effects we will see the effects for what's happening right now in a year or two if not sooner um so starting with the self you know the second commandment of jesus you have to to love yourself first and i think that's very very hard for a lot of people to hear because there are modern concepts of what that looks like is not intimacy with christ necessarily um so i'd say start there then uh while you are potentially simultaneously letting jesus address your own personal suffering you are equipped through holy the holy spirit to help address some of the hurts of others and as it's a mutual process that's what the beauty of transformation is and it's visible and highly recognizable whether you articulate it or not when when someone is being transformed because it does it spills over it spills over towards a healing aspect patients will comment your team has a good vibe that's all they'll say they we don't necessarily need to say anything more than that but that spirit of coming together for another person's good a patient knows that when you know a team's rallying for you and it's not just about orders being filled or medications going in but they honestly want you and are rallying for you to get better so that you can re-engage your church your home and all the things that are so important to the to a person under our care that's in brief that's how i'd answer it thank you that's great we're going to turn to questions from our viewers and if you're joining us for the first time you can not only ask a question in the q a box in the bottom center of your screen but you can also like a question and that helps give us an idea of what some of the most popular or pressing questions are from among our viewers so uh we'll just start with a question from our viewer jenny savage and phil i think i'll direct this one to you um she asked if there is a role for the practice of lament with our suffering and if so what forms of lament have you seen as being most helpful whether as an individual or as a community practice early on in the pandemic time magazine reached out to nt wright theologian i think he's probably been on your conversations with mercery and he he responded by writing a whole column about lament saying the first thing we need to do is just cry out one of the things that strikes me as i read the bible is god can take it we can say anything in fact sometimes when i'm at a secular university i'll say i i know that there are people here who don't even believe in god and i frankly respect a person who not only i respect a god who not only gives us the freedom to lash out but actually gives us the word to use because i haven't found a single argument against god among the great atheists that's not already included in the bible in books like job and lamentations and the psalms the psalms are a great place to start because the words are there beautiful words we often think the psalms are what you take to a hospital room to read to comfort people well you you better read it in advance before you use it as comfort because there's a lot of anger and there's a lot of protest against god and god is saying to us i understand it's it's not easy there are things that you don't understand and will never understand so i can take it just let me have it and of course jesus himself when he was here cried out my god why have you forsaken me quoting one of those psalms so lament is a is a gift that we have and i i like lament being expressed in a in a group dynamic because there's more there's more than lament there's also hope there's perspective and when you're with other people it could be that one person feels only anger and protest right now but actually there's a lot more going on and if we're in a group gradually we can kind of soften the edges a little bit and learn from each other but but i'm glad that that jane ass asked that question because lament is a is a starting point i don't like it i don't like what's going on it's wrong it's and i think god would agree yeah you're right it's wrong i will put it right one day but probably not in your lifetime julia i'll toss this next question from an anonymous attendee to you and that it seems like this picks up on some of the things that you had talked about and our viewer asked how can you bear one another suffering and pain when you are emotionally and spiritually drained yourself you can't it becomes uh it's a well that needs recharging and and that sort of harkens back to what i was saying before it is not selfish it is not um it's actually one of the best things that one could do um so to invoke what what philip just said that's an opportunity to cry out to god and say lord these are the 10 i've done this a gazillion times these are the demands that are placed on me uh this is what i have in my reserve i need i need filling and that requires a huge amount of faith uh when you're depleted it's hard to have um when you know that there are some some basics that you need sleep you know a little bit of food nourishment um a safe roof over your head so i don't take those things for granted either um and so when you to the person who's asking the question um god's not asking you remember remember jonah remember the nap remember the pillow remember the sustenance um i would be very curious with you as to where you feel um you're being called and how you're being called in that direction and and sit with god and that is an opportunity for you to hear from him directly as to what his expectations are um and he really cares so much more about you um and sustaining you to do the long work of one being a reflection of him in this world and then what that looks like in terms of service to others is an outpouring of that not at your expense we have quite a few questions that deal with empathy and compassion and pain avoidance and i want to combine just two of them and toss them your way phil we have one question from claire leichert who asked how can you be a comfort to someone who is grieving if you have never gone through serious trauma yourself and somewhat related john dozier asked a question addressed to you saying following the suicide of my father on christmas night back in 2002 i wrote about suffering on uh the audience of christians living in a culture of comfort and john asks what are the dangers of the church often avoiding pain as much as the world does well i'm i'm impressed that this person really hasn't experienced much trauma in their lives the first person who wrote and i would say don't try to speak into something you don't know about personally just try to be supportive and caring and loving there are a lot of helps available online there are grief support groups there are all sorts of of communities that the person can join to hear about grief particularly but mainly they need to know i'm not alone somebody cares for me and somebody's there when i need something boy the one on suicide uh that that is so hard and um the bromides don't help it doesn't help to say things like god needed him more than you did oh my goodness that that does more harm than good again the best thing that we can do is to show love and care and to show you're not alone and to be a listening ear so many times when people go to a hospital they think they have to say something and actually most people just need a sounding board they need a listening ear as as julia said earlier on we don't need to go with answers in fact when we when we go with answers often we have the wrong answers i think back to the book of job these terrible things were happening to job and his friends were his friends who cared about him they were his friends they loved him for seven days they sat there and grieved with him and then they started talking it's when they opened their mouths that the problem started because for seven days job knew i'm not alone they care they know what i'm going through and then they started with these philosophizing comments about it you must have done something wrong god is punishing you the typical bromides that people get so i would say the the first advice to people who want to help is to keep your mouth shut as long as possible that's great so another question comes from gerald wibberly and i hope to throw this one to julia gerald asked if you are suffering from an incurable disease and know that your time to live is limited what merit is there to endure this suffering any longer when you can no longer converse and barely think um that hits on a lot of different issues thanks for asking that question um so each one of those aspects needs unpacking a little bit so the the aspects of suffering um if you're cloudy-headed or in an exercise pain you know medical teaching helps us try to alleviate some of that pain and cloudy-headedness so that we know uh to the best of our ability that that individual is speaking of their truest sense of their truest desires um because uh any aspect to which we don't address their suffering um even when they're maybe not asking for a direct end to it there's the subtext there um how do you help someone who doesn't see a purpose to living basically you know we in medicine typically do mortality based decisions even though morbidity and quality of life matters very much to our patients the system is sort of wired to think about things in terms of life and death and so that's where you can see some of the differences in opinion about what meaning is and what survival is and what metrics we're trying to pursue so for that individual oftentimes when i've gotten that question myself from a patient that's in a profound degree of suffering we have to tackle each aspect the physical aspect the um oftentimes the brain lucidity or clearness of thinking is more detrimental to the family than the individual who's undergoing that obviously with this individual they sense it um but the degree to which we can address even though it's not compartmentalized in an integrated human being we that's our strategy to try to help it get better is work with that person dealing with each of the aspects oftentimes i hate to label it depression or anxiety because oftentimes it is unaddressed trauma that's manifesting itself in that way so that's where counseling techniques and engaging someone to help specifically deal with some of those questions as to what is worth living for what am i what am i pursuing with this um and is it to my own benefit or am i serving someone else's um and i think dr doug dale got into this a little bit as well he did so phil the next question comes from ron boyd and ron asked how can people of the church be more understanding to those who suffer and to those who experience pain it just seems that if we don't experience it we often lack an understanding of the problem i just haven't run into that many people who haven't experienced pain and suffering i guess there are ways to intentionally visit hospitals visit hospice groups i remember i had a neighbor who had a terminal illness and she invited me to go with her to a group called make today count and i went regularly with her one by one people in the group would would die and it was a very moving experience for me to be invited into such sacred times where we didn't talk about sports we didn't talk about the economy or our daily news we talked about the things that matter most why if you have a little bit of time left how should you spend it how do you say goodbye to the people you love how do you make amends to the people you've had problems with and there are groups like that uh aaa would be a whole different kind of suffering but it also teaches and i think i would recommend that that this person intentionally find a group could be visiting prisoners but deliberately to put yourself in the place of those who around those who are suffering they're great teachers they just need somebody to listen to them and you can learn a lot it's a very moving experience so we have had several questions i'm just going to combine them into one about suffering from injustice we have one viewer peggy narlock who wrote in about struggling with the fact that her mother passed away because she wasn't given the right pain medicine we have other questions from anonymous attendees who want to ask how one deals with anger that comes from suffering as the result of injustice julia any thoughts on that so many um i'm glad you're asking this question i was gonna dovetail off of our piggyback off of phillips response with regards to lament so we can work with anger just like he said i would say the inflection point for spiritual formation for me specifically relates to being angry over things and there are some great songs um i was in finland coming back when sharka episode in the history of the united states with charlottesville happened and i listened uh to a sermon called prayer anger six times on repeat on that because i was like lord i'm almost uh there's an aspect to this which is freeing that was very reminiscent of how i grew up there was an aspect to it where i said how long how long is this going to continue and i think we see that you know these isolated incidents of linkedin stories facebook stories from patients or providers who are hospitalized et cetera these stories that are emerging about how they're they're interacting with the health care system what our incentives are how those incentives are not necessarily made to serve them or their group of of self-identified individuals or group identified individuals there's a rift there and we have to be angry about it and their mechanisms for for being angry are both time angry waking up but also healing i can honestly tell you some of the protests that were going on in new york last year i never thought i'd see that in my lifetime um and solidarity and an aspect of hope emerged for for me so for people that are um this is where we get it systemic suffering or group suffering in the collective they almost they it's not almost there's an individual aspect to healing and processing but there is a strong collective aspect that the church can really have an opportunity to excel at because the tools are there we are equipped um so uh injustice writ large in every arena i pray for my friends in the fbi that are dealing with it as much as i pray for the nurses and respiratory therapists that are dealing with it across across the street because there is a reckoning within us just like suffering is that i can enter into seeing that and being angry not in a depleting way but in an empowered way and discerning that requires a lot of spiritual sophistication sometimes in order to enter into that process with you and that is profoundly uh healing to communities and generate some of that hope that needs that needs to be there as this this arc starts to curve um in order for some corrective action great the next question comes also to uh to you julia and we've had so many people liking questions that it seems to have gone away here it is claire asked to what extent does understanding a medical situation scientifically help you make sense of it in a spiritual sense thanks for that question is it clear yes yeah claire um so this is a key component and i encourage all of you to do this with your physicians if they don't do it i just sort of template this into my discussion is the the role of information in your care um what information sources have you historically gone to from a scientific or medical basis how can i teach you about which ones are good and which what are red flags to tell you that's disinformation or misinformation um those are the types of things you should feel free to talk about with your with your health care provider with your doctor so information for some can be anxiety provoking and um be too much information at one time so when i pull up labs with my patients i tell them these are the things that we're paying attention to as a federal law everyone soon is going to have access to their own labs their own reports etc to the degree that receiving that information makes you anxious and uncertain and more than anything contributes to distrust in your team that may not be good for you to look at by yourself you absolutely need to understand it but in the context of what your disease means and if your team if you work on it piecemeal it won't feel overwhelming to them they can't go through 20 years of data necessarily in 3.2 minutes but we parse it based on what the need is at the time so that leverages a lot of trust in your healthcare team and whoever that is needs to understand if you are getting information that moves you in the negative direction from building trust or if it's a trust enhancer in the same way you know our posture with god is that is the repentance bringing us towards god or is there shame that sort of distancing from them it's a it's a good little discernment tool that i use with my patients so if information you know digging up medical information or scientific information from mouse models that are not necessarily relevant to humans is one aspect that we can actually teach we can do commercials that tell people around phase zero phase one phase two phase three phase four this is part of teaching and we can do that as commercials or public health messages bring everyone up to some sort of health literacy capacity and then you can start to learn to parse the data with your provider what's relevant what should i lose sleep about generally you shouldn't be losing sleep your team should be taking care of you but if you are losing sleep if it is provoking anxiety you should feel comfortable bringing that to your team and saying i don't know how to deal with this information it seems detrimental and they'll tell you stay away from it we'll help you figure out what sources are going to be helpful to your care so i think we'll have to take one more question from our viewers and i'll address this to to phillip this question comes from ember lydiard and ember talks about what seems like perhaps an emotional or spiritual conundrum he asks how can acceptance of physical illness and pain and allowing god's grace to be sufficient coexist with faith hope and the belief that god is all-powerful and could heal is it that we just keep praying for healing but in the meantime if god hasn't healed us we trust him you know essentially how does one reconcile the belief that god could heal if he wants to with trusting that he may not i remember a statement that gk chesterton made about the book of job he said the first part of job is job saying i don't understand in the last part of job when god speaks is god's saying you don't understand and there are some things that we can't reconcile miracles do happen i believe that but they're miracles they're not everyday occurrences and paul's thorn in the flesh is a good example i've interviewed a lot of people who have gone through trauma and most of the people i've interviewed have have not had that kind of miraculous resolution they have learned through it and in in as i reflect back on on the various people i came up with this phrase that pain redeemed impresses me more than pain removed it would be great if we just prayed and everybody immediately got a healing it would be wonderful it doesn't happen that way but the but the bible and all the great passages about suffering in the new testament has us look forward to what it can produce it can produce good things go back to romans 5 romans 8 um first peter james james the book of james they all talk about there are some things that can emerge out of this difficult time patience hope compassion these kinds of things and later we can look back and say god recycled stuff that i wish had not happened paul wished that he didn't have the thorn in the flesh at all but it turned into good and god can take the things that we most resent i think of johnny erickson tada for example who prayed like crazy and had every person with a gift of healing prey and anoint her with oil she didn't get deliverance in a miraculous way but she became a prophet to the rest of the church she reached out formed an organization to help those with disabilities that's an example to me of pain redeemed impressing me more than if johnny had been healed miraculously of her quadriplegia all right kelly has promised the last word to philip and julia julia let's start with you okay this is from a section of martin luther king jr's speech called the american dream in a section called overcoming loss all this is simply to say that all life is interrelated we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny strangely enough i can never be what i ought to be until you are what you ought to be you can never be what you ought to be until i am what i ought to be this is the way the world is made i didn't make it that way but this is the interrelated structure of reality thank you julia phillip i would go back to that phrase in ii corinthians 1 the god of all comfort and the father of compassion a lot of people stumble over their image of god even some people have a hard time saying father our heavenly father because they have memories from childhood of abuse there are other people i was one of those who grew up with the image of god as kind of the scowling super cop just looking for somebody doing something wrong so they could smash them and we have a different view we believe in the god of all comfort and the father of compassion and i i wish this phrase from the bible the great physician has become for me a good reminder of who god is god is one who wants the best for us who came to give us life abundant life beautiful life and if we can get to know that god of all comfort the father of compassion and spread abroad that comfort as paul tells us to do in 2nd corinthians we can change people's image of god god is on our side god is on the side of the one who is suffering i'm absolutely convinced of that and the proof was the way jesus went out of his way to be among those who are suffering and bring them that comfort directly always he responded with healing and compassion and care phillip and julia thank you so much and thank you to each of you for joining us have a great weekend [Music] you

Channel: The Trinity Forum

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Length: 57min 20sec (3440 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 24 2021