SPROUL: Before I formally begin this brief series
of lectures there are a couple of things I want to say to all of you. In the first place
I recognize that in the audience this evening we have physicians; we have hospital staff
and administration; we have distinguished clergy who are present. And in a gathering
of people of that sort usually it's customary for a speaker to make his address in a very
abstract and academic way, but I want to ask your indulgence, if I may, to clarify that
I'm directing these lectures to patients first of all, and second of all to friends and to
families of those people who have had to face first hand profound levels of pain of uncertainty
of suffering and in many cases death itself. And the other thing I want to say by way of
preface is that as I address these very difficult matters I'm not going to be speaking as a
physician or as a psychologist or as a philosopher as even Dr. LeMaistre intimated, but I will
be speaking from a dual perspective first as a theologian, but more importantly as a
human being, because the problem of suffering is something that immediately takes us out
of the realm of the abstract and touches us at the point where we are human. And whenever
I encounter this question of suffering either as a philosophical question or as a cry of
pain from somebody who's in the midst of that suffering when they're asking it, the question
that I hear in my profession inevitably is the question, "Where is God in all of this?"
And then the next question is the question that is the one that every theologian dreads
to hear it's this question, "Why?" When I'm afflicted when you're afflicted when pain
intrudes into your life and the threat of death comes the first thing we ask is "Why?"
"Why me?" "Why has this happened?" "How could God allow these things to take place?" Now
anytime we ask this simple question "why" we're asking a question about purpose. The
why questions are the questions about purpose. The why questions are questions about meaning.
We're not asking how; we're not asking when; we're not asking what; we're asking why. And
I think there's a reason why we ask the question. It's one thing to experience pain, but it's
another thing to anticipate that my suffering and my pain is worthless. If I'm going to
have to go through pain; if I'm going to have to go through suffering, I have to know inside
of myself that there's some kind of reason for this, that it's not just an exercise in
futility. This came home to me very vividly and very personally just a few weeks ago.
My wife Vesta and I had returned to Orlando after being on the road and had been speaking
at the, I don't even remember where we were, but anytime that we're away from home and
come back home, it's an experience of great joy. I remember as we drove into our driveway,
I said to my wife, I said, "We're home. It's wonderful." We pulled into the driveway, into
the garage and as I shut the engine of the car off, and got out of the car, came around
behind the car; the door to our kitchen opened and my daughter framed the doorway. And as
soon as she saw us she burst into tears. And she blurted out these words, "Daddy, I just
lost my baby." And she came over to me and I just held out my arms and she grabbed me
and I held her while she sobbed in my shoulder. And it took a few moments for her to get over
the trauma of seeing us on our return and to explain what had happened here. She had
just begun her ninth month of her pregnancy, pregnancy that had been very difficult that
had been one that involved a long period of morning sickness and some difficulties with
hemorrhaging and so on, but she had just that day felt the absence of life within her, and
she had gone to see her doctor and the doctor had gone and put her through many tests and
announced to her soberly, sadly that the baby had died. Well of course that's always a very
difficult thing for any expectant mother to experience, but on top of that the doctor
then explained that the procedure that was necessary for her to follow would be this,
that they would bring her into the hospital the next morning and induce labor, and we
talked about it. And she said, "Daddy, they want me to go through labor, but my baby is
dead." I've often just stood in profound admiration at the strength of women to go through the
travail of childbirth and I've often wondered after they've gone through it once how they
could make the decision to do it again, in many cases again and again. And as I speak
to women about this, I say, "How could you stand to go through this process that we call
euphemistically labor?" And they say because of what we know is waiting at the end of the
pain. It is a woman is willing to endure the pain of childbirth because she looks forward
to the moment that a life will be produced. And once that life is there and she holds
her baby for the first time then the pain is behind her and it, for that moment at least,
she says it's worth it, and I'll do it again. But how do you go into the hospital to go
through childbirth and labor knowing that what's at the end of your pain is death? And
that's what my daughter and I had to talk about and she looked at me as a theologian,
not just as a father, and she wanted to get some heavy answers to her question, and frankly
I didn't have any. And so, we went to the hospital the next day, her husband and her
mother and I, and she checked in; they induced the labor. We sat there in the delivery room
with her timed the contractions and she was being heroic, I thought. I was very proud
of her. And after several hours had passed, she said, "Daddy, why don't you go down and
get some lunch and come back in a little while because I'm doing fine." And so, I excused
myself. I was glad for the respite. I went downstairs and ordered a brief lunch—it
only took fifteen or twenty minutes—and hurried back up to the floor to carry on the
vigil. And as I approached swinging doors that went onto the ward, suddenly I was stopped
by the sound of a blood curdling scream, and it took a couple of moments for it to sink
in that it was my daughter that was screaming like that. And, I'll be honest with you, I
was terrified to go through those doors and go back in the room, and as I approached the
room this nurse stopped me; she held her hands up and she said, "The baby's coming." And
so, I scurried back into the outer corridor for a few moments and then she finally came
out and she said, "Ok, you can go in now." And so, I went in and I saw something that
I will never forget; my wife will never forget; my son-in-law will never forget; and I know
my daughter will never forget as long as I live. My daughter was in the bed and she was
holding to her bosom an eight-month old little girl who had no life. And I wondered about
the medical procedure, the policy. Why in the world did they leave this dead baby in
the arms of a mother? Why didn't they just snatch it away and dispose of it however they
do? And as I discussed that with the nurses, they said the mother needs to see the fruit
of her labor. So, she held the baby for forty-five-minutes, for an hour. They came in and they took pictures,
a lock of hair, gave her a name, and did all of these things; and my daughter cried and
I cried and her husband cried and everybody cried. But as we've spoken of it now in the
last several weeks, she said, "Daddy, I had to hold my baby, because I had to know that
my labor was not in vain, that my pain was not in vain." Just this Monday I received
word in my office that the wife of a rather famous sports figure in America passed away.
Bob Griese the all-pro former quarterback of the Miami Dolphin's wife, young wife, Judy,
died this week after battling cancer for ten years. Now I'm not a close personal friend
of the Griese family, but I was in Miami a month ago and I was doing a series of lectures
and after one of these lectures a woman came up to me, pressed through the people and came
up to me and she said, "RC," she said, "I'm asking you to do a personal favor for me."
And I said, "What's that?" She said, "I have a dear friend who's been fighting cancer for
ten years and she's really down right now." And she went on to tell me something of Judy
Griese's story. And she said Judy's been listening to your tapes and all and she knows you, not
personally, but through these educational materials, and she said, "I'm just sure it
would mean a lot to her if you would somehow find the time to go and see her." And I said,
"Sure, I'll go." And I'll be honest with you. I can't remember feeling more inadequate than
when I got in that car to go and visit a woman who had been battling this disease for ten
years. And we drove into this very lovely section of Miami, and I saw the Griese home,
and the Griese home is a very nice home, and the irony was that right across the street
was the home of the Bernasconi family, and you'll remember, those of you who follow professional
sports know that Nick Bernasconi was an all-pro linebacker for Miami and he's been much in
the news for the last couple of years because his son, who was a very talented athlete,
was paralyzed in an injury and has become a paraplegic. And so, a pall of suffering
was hanging over these neighbors, over these long-time friends. Well this lady took me
up to the house and rang the doorbell and Bob answered the door and he took me into
the family room and Judy was sitting back there in a chair and I came in and I sat down
next to her in the chair and, dear friends, I had no idea what to say to her. And she
looked at me, and the tears started to just roll down over her cheeks and she said, "R.C.,
I don't think I can take it anymore." I didn't know what to say. I mean, what do you say?
Do you say, "Don't talk like that"? Or do you say, "You have to keep hanging in there,
you have to keep it…" And I thought who am I to tell this woman how much she has to
take? So, I didn't say anything. I just held her hand, and I sat there feeling more and
more and more inadequate by the moment as I held her hand for about forty-five minutes
and just listened to her talk. And when we were finished and had some prayer and I left.
The next day I got the report that she fell down the stairs and was carried into the hospital
and she never came home from the hospital. It was basically the end. But this woman came
to me the next day and she was all excited and she said, "Oh," she said, "you just can't
believe how wonderful it was last night when you visited Judy Griese." And I said, "I didn't
say anything." I said, "I was so embarrassed," I said, "I know she was looking to me to give
her some words of comfort and of wisdom and to explain the secret counsel of Almighty
God, which I'm not equipped to do no matter how much theology I've studied," and, I said,
"I didn't do anything. All I did was sit there and hold her hand for forty-five minutes."
And she said, "But that's all she wanted. And that's all she needed. She's heard all
the sermons, and she's heard all the platitudes. But she just wanted somebody to show her that
they cared." And she said, "Whether you like it or not, because you're a minister, you
represent the presence of Christ to her." I said, "Hey, it's a poor representation."
And I thought at that moment of a statement that Martin Luther once made. He said, "It's
the duty of every Christian to be Christ to his neighbor." Now Luther was too fine of
a theologian to mean that statement in a literal word. Martin Luther understood that no one
of us can ever fill the shoes of Christ. But to be a Christian means to represent Him,
to bring His comfort, His peace, His understanding, and not His judgment to people who are in
pain. I don't very often get the opportunity to listen to the televangelists, that's the
new word that's been coined this year, the TV preachers, but I did hear not too long
ago, I heard one of these preachers, I couldn't even remember at the moment who it was, but
he was standing up and he made this statement to the people out there in television land.
He said, "I want you people to understand that God has nothing whatsoever to do with
suffering, and that God, God doesn't have anything to do with death. Death is something
that intrudes into the creation of God." And of course, this minister went on to say and
to assign all pain and all suffering and all illness and all death to the devil. And as
I listened to that, to be honest with you, I wanted to throw something through the TV
screen. And now I tried—I try to understand what would possess a minister, whether he's
a television minister or any other kind of minister, to stand up and tell people that
God doesn't have anything to do with suffering or that God doesn't have anything to do with
death, and the only thing I could come up with was that this minister somehow wanted
to answer the problems that people have when suffering comes upon them because some people
get mad at God. A lot of people get mad at God. They say, hey, you know, this isn't fair.
How can You let this sort of thing happen to me? Again, Why? Where is God in all of
this? And what the minister on television was trying to do so carefully was to absolve
God from all guilt and all responsibility for ever allowing anything unpleasant to befall
one of His dear creatures. Just like the philosophers used to say that if God is really loving and
if God is really powerful then He couldn't possibly allow all of the tragedy and the
pain and the suffering and the sorrow that happens in this world to happen. And so, the
minister on television neatly tied it up in a package for us and said, "God simply doesn't
have anything to do with this." Now I'm sure that what he was trying to do was to make
people feel comfortable because they couldn't … didn't want to think about a God who might,
in fact, be involved with their pain. But two things jumped into my mind at that point.
The first thing I thought I wonder if this man has ever read the Old Testament. I wonder
if this man's ever read the New Testament, because the God of Judaism, the God of Christianity
is a God who majors in suffering. The whole history of Israel is the history of the sorrow
and the pain of a people who were in special relationship to God. In fact, how did the
Jewish nation begin? Do you remember your history? It began when a group of semi-nomadic
people were pressed into slavery, and you've all heard of the exodus out of which a nation
was formed under the authority of God. How did it happen? The Biblical record says this
that when the people of Israel were locked in bondage in Egypt they began to cry. They
began to groan. They began to express their pain and we read these words. "And God heard
the cries of His people, and God said, 'Let My people go.'" That's how it all started.
And from that moment forth we see a history of a Deity who is intimately involved in the
pain and in the suffering of His people. It's not by accident, ladies and gentlemen, that
in the New Testament Jesus is identified as a Man of sorrows who's acquainted with grief,
and He is called the fulfillment of the prophet Isaiah's future expectation of One who would
be known as the Suffering Servant of Israel. So far from the idea that God doesn't have
anything to do with death or God doesn't have anything to do with suffering is the Scripture
is that God is the Lord of life; He's the Lord of death; He's the Lord of pain; He's
the Lord of suffering. And rather than that being bad news to me, that's good news because
the simplest of all theological lessons that we could learn from this is that if there
is a God who is sovereign over all of life over all of death and over all pain and over
all disease and over all illness and over all sorrow that what that means is that it
is flat out impossible that any pain could ever be without purpose. If God is, then there
is no such thing as meaningless sorrow. I don't know what the individual suffering means
or why a particular person is called to suffer in a particular way at a particular time.
I don't know. I cannot read the mind of God, the secret counsel of God; but I do know something
about the character of God. And I know that He is sovereign. And it's when pain comes
and when disease comes that sovereignty suddenly becomes more than an abstraction, doesn't
it? Because that's where the struggle is. Can I trust God in this or not? Now, I was
talking with one of the members of the staff here of N.D. Anderson about problems that
people experience when they are afflicted with cancer. And when the diagnosis is first
made there're all kinds of human emotions that are expressed. There's anger, there's
fear, but one of the stronger emotions is surprise, because we like to think that these
kinds of diseases and this kind of suffering can never or will never come into our lives.
And that surprise becomes all the more accentuated when we hear ministers out there telling us
that, you know, if you believe in God and you believe in Christ you never have to worry
about pain and suffering. That's just not true. That does not comfort us when we need
to be comforted. The shock of pain and disease changes. I have a little grandson that's three
years old and he's, you know how kids are, they're so oblivious to all of the sorrow
that's in the world. They're enjoying life. And then all of a sudden, they bang their
fingers with a hammer or they fall down and they scrape their knees and then this little
one will come in and he's crying crocodile tears and I'll say, what's the matter, Ryan?
He says, "I have an ouch." And I say, "Well what can I do?" Or he says, "Well I want an
A-Band." Or he wants me to kiss it, because if I kiss it then the ouch will go away and
it will be all over. And that's the way a lot of the pain and sickness and disease in
children turns out, not for everyone. We can go here to the pediatric ward at M. D. Anderson
and see children whose illnesses cannot be kissed away. But for most people our childhood
diseases are over as quickly and as suddenly as they came upon us. And we sort of distance
ourselves from more serious pain. I remember when I took our daughter in to have her tonsils
out and, oh, what a wonderful experience. You know, you're going to go to see the doctor,
and we read all the books and promised her all the toys and presents. You can have ice
cream; you're going to have all these wonderful things. And she came into the pediatric ward
in Pittsburgh and they gave her the toys to play with nice pleasant roommate and so on.
Both these little girls were playing, getting ready the night before. Next morning, early
in the morning, they took the girls up to give them their tonsillectomies and then we
waited in the waiting room and finally we were called to come in I came into that room
and my daughter looked at me, I'll never forget how she looked at me, like I had given her
the worst betrayal that was possible. I mean, the last thing in the world she wanted at
that moment was ice cream. Her throat hurt so much she didn't want to have anything in
her throat at that point. And she looked at me like: how could you fool me into this?
This was her first taste of real pain, the hard kind. But as we grow older then when
we have indigestion we're not sure it's indigestion. When we have a headache, we're not sure it's
just a headache. Now that life threatening diseases become clear and present dangers
and for some they hear the announcement that their disease may be terminal. And at that
moment the surprise hits. Even though we spend our lives being prepared for this possibility
it is still a surprise. And theologically it's the worst surprise because we're still
forced back to this question. Why? How could God allow this to happen? And that's why I—for
this first segment—I want to leave you with one statement from the New Testament that
I think puts it in perspective. When St. Peter wrote to his people, you don't need to look
this up. In the First Epistle of Peter, in the fourth chapter he makes this statement,
"Dear friends, think it not strange that you are suffering a painful trial as though some
strange thing were happening to you." Isn't that interesting? Think it not strange. That's
because by this point in his life Peter understood that God was intimately involved with suffering.
And that for a person to be called upon to suffer is not surprising once we understand
who God is. Now in our next segment what I want to explore with you is this—an idea
that maybe you've never thought of maybe you have. I want to explore the idea that not
only God is involved in our suffering and that God may be with us in our suffering,
but there may be times when God actually calls us to suffer, that suffering and at times
death can be the vocation of a human being. Now that may seem strange to you, but I want
to explore that as we look at a case study in vocational suffering in our next meeting
together. In this first session we looked at the very difficult question of: how do
we relate to people who are undergoing serious suffering—the person who has been diagnosed
perhaps with having a terminal illness or the situation where we get the word that a
horrible tragedy has befallen a friend or a family member, perhaps an automobile accident
or whatever. And in this first session I confessed to you my own sense of inadequacy on having
a formula to say exactly the right thing at a time like that. In fact, some of you must
be thinking well this man is a minister and he's a theologian. Certainly, he can come
up with more than simply just going and listening to someone or being with them in their presence.
When I had the experience of writing my first novel, "Johnny Come Home," I received a lot
of letters, some of whom were very, very negative and critical about that novel and the biggest
criticism that I received were people writing in to say to me they were disappointed that
the minister in the novel didn't preach a sermon to one of the characters in the book
and as I read those letters and thought about it, I thought these people don't really understand
what the purpose of a novel is. They expected an evangelistic tract or a sermon and they
didn't get what they were expecting, and I suspect that maybe you were expecting from
me to hear a more structured formula for speaking to people who are bereaved or who are struggling
with the difficult questions of suffering. But I think it really is important that we
don't have a pat formula to use in these circumstances. In the New Testament Jesus promises us that
He will send into our midst the Holy Spirit who is our comforter. Now, of course, the
original intent of that statement of Jesus was to send one who would stand with us in
the time of trial and the time of tribulation to be our defender but also, He tells us that
there is a comfort that God promises to give people in this world. Now sometimes the way
in which God brings comfort to His people is through us. Luther once made the statement
that every Christian is called to be Christ for his neighbor. Obviously, Luther didn't
mean that in a crass sense where I'm supposed to be acting like a Messiah and think that
I'm the savior of the world, but rather that I am to be the presence of Christ to those
who are in pain and to those who are frightened by being a vehicle or a conduit of His comfort.
Now what I'd like you to do as you're studying these tapes and perhaps right now if you have
an opportunity for group discussion is to deal with two questions. The first question
is this. Suppose you were called to the scene of a Judy Griese or to a home where the word
has just come that a family member had been killed in a tragic accident and it was somebody
that you knew and somebody that you cared for. First of all, how would you feel about
speaking to the family at that time, and what do you think you would say? I'd like you to
think about that and if you're in a group to discuss that among yourselves to see how
the different ways we would respond to such a situation might be. The second question
I'd like you to discuss is a little bit more personal. If you can imagine yourself in a
situation of serious pain and suffering, and one of your friends or your minister came
to visit you what would you want them to do or to say. I mean I can imagine some of you
may say to yourself well, gee, R.C., if you came to see me and I was dying of cancer,
and you said nothing, but just simply sat there and held my hand and listened to me,
I would be disappointed. I would be let down because I would be looking to you to say something
more to give me some kind of hope or encouragement with your words. Well let me ask you to try
to imagine that situation now and discuss it among yourselves saying what would you
want your friend or your pastor to say? So that we can express these things with each
other and learn how to be sensitive to other people who face this difficulty.
