W hy in the world is there such staggering suffering in this heartbreaking world? 

It was four Lents ago now, that I’d been sleeping beside a hospital bed for 12 days, been sleeping alongside the brave 300 children curled and splayed in stacked floors of beds under the sign: Hospital for Sick Kids.

Maybe what we need is more than good answers in the midst of suffering — what we need is good people  to walk through the suffering with us. 

How many times had the hallways buzzed with Code Blue, Code Blue?

How many times had a child’s cries and begging no’s seized us down these hallways and we cracked wide open with prayers for all these little children caught in the land of the suffering?

Surgeons had cut through our daughter’s sternum before dawn on that third Friday of Lent. You do whatever you have do to get to a broken heart, to heal a broken heart. 

I had sang “Jesus loves me” into the curl of our little girl’s ear till the very last second, till they took her from us, till they rolled her into the operating room, sang that one line over and over again: Little ones to Him belong, they are weak but He is strong,” kept singing it after I thought my legs would give out.

Our favourite Lenten Wreath from the Keeping Company
A beautiful family Lenten tradition: Cradle to Cross Wreath from the Keeping Company

How many caffeine-drunk prayers can you murmur for the surgeon who is holding your daughter’s half-heart in his willing hands?

I desperately want the whole world healed and whole, I want us all to walk out of this Lent and into the rising.

But I know: There is no healing until you get down to the heart of all our heartache, till we figure out what to do with the problem of all our heartbreaking suffering. 

I had stopped short, mid-riser, somewhere on the stairs between the 3rd and 4th floor.

Under the lights of the OR on the 2nd floor, there was a surgeon bent with a scalpel over our daughter’s pulsing inferior vena cava and there’s this cutting through everything down to the tender heart of our being here in a broken world:

Our greatest stress in life is more than suffering — it’s suffering alone.  Our greatest stress is more than suffering — it’s estrangement… estrangement from our Maker and our people. 

Maybe in the midst of all our suffering, we don’t so much need a solution to the problem of pain, as much as  need sojourners to walk through the pain with us.

Standing there in the Hospital for Sick Children, in the midst of all kinds of suffering children, aching for God to come quickly, aching for relief from all kinds of pain, I had held the thought gently:

The cause of our deepest distress is all that keeps us estranged from God. 

And Jesus got down to the heart of our heartbreak: The very heart of our pain are all the things that keep us apart from God. 

God, do surgery — just do whatever it takes to heal our hearts and everything that keeps us apart from you. 

There are so many problems that we collectively, as a society, can work together to effect real change, and we have agency to better protect and take care of each other, especially, the most vulnerable of us, our children, and still, ultimately, as all our hearts are breaking, we still dare to hold on:

Humanity’s greatest problem is more than the problem of suffering — it’s the problem of sin. And Jesus comes with His whole surrendered heart to solve that problem with His own suffering on the cross. 

Maybe, in the midst of suffering, more than needing an explanation of why — we need an experience of Love. 

Jesus could have just healed our bodies — but in this broken world, our bodies would have just broken again, and our bodies will keep breaking again — but Jesus came to completely, once and for all, heal the deepest brokenness and aloneness  in our own souls.

Maybe what we need is more than good answers in the midst of suffering — what we need is good people to walk through the suffering with us. 

Maybe, in the midst of suffering, more than needing an explanation of why — we need an experience of Love. 

And Jesus, Love Himself, comes to co-suffer with us. 

And Jesus’ people, we get to come to walk through the suffering with each other. 

Lenten Wreath from the Keeping Company

Six interminably long hours of a surgeon working painstakingly in the chest cavity of our daughter, six hours of pacing, six hours of praying through this moment —  and then the next moment.

When I see her surgeon walk into the waiting room looking for our faces, we are on our feet again. He’s smiling, reassuring –  talking about a fenestration and lateral tunnel through the heart versus an extra cardiac Fontan but I just keep staring at his hands: His hands held her broken heart. Those hands.

When you need to see God’s hand, look at the hands all around you. 

In a world of suffering, dare we tenderly believe, even when our hearts are breaking: A God who is beyond great, must, by definition, work in ways that are beyond our understanding.

Maybe in the midst of all kinds of suffering, we don’t get all kinds of clarification — what we get is all kinds of comrades through the suffering. 

After surgery, all the days bleed into streams of nights through those final weeks of Lent, the Farmer and I kept vigil beside our daughter’s bed in CICU, refusing to take our eyes off her heart rate, her oxygen, her heart beat pulsing across a screen.

Every recovering breath through her oxygen mask sounds like raspy hope.

Tubes from her chest bleed and drained away in all this surgical aftermath. Hope is always painfully messy, unbelievably hard, fiercely resilient. And every fighter deserves a witness.  

When anyone has to bear pain, they deserve someone to at least bear witness to it. When our hearts are in all kinds of pain, the body of Christ can be a buttress for us against all kinds of pain. We’re here for it, here for her, here for all of it. We’re but one of the bleary-eyed huddle of parents barnacled to the side of a child’s bed in ICU.

In a world of suffering, dare we tenderly believe, even when our hearts are breaking:
A God who is beyond great, must, by definition, work in ways that are beyond our understanding. 

It’s scars that mark a soul with otherworldly strength. 

I had watched her tracking monitors, her dripping IVs, through the night watches and trust the ways of God:

For our Father to have created a world without suffering — would our Father then have had to create a world without us? For a world without suffering to exist at all — would humans get to exist at all? 

Maybe a world without suffering changes the DNA of everything that would leave a world without us?

Isn’t a life of suffering that can still lead to eternal life better than creating a world where there may be no human life as we know it at all?

It’s scars that mark a soul with otherworldly strength. 

There is a world of suffering out there, but there is a world of indestructible hope within us.

When our daughter’s surgically-traumatized heart then jolted into a wild gallop of an arrhythmia, and her room filled with a dozen of the cardiac team just after midnight, explaining to us the risks of this arrhythmia… the risks of the medications to reign it back into its steady pace, I had just kept stroking her hair back, keep hoping for morning with her here.

Slow and steady, Braveheart. There is a world of suffering out there, but there is a world of indestructible hope within us.

They had tracked her rhythm with EKGs, measuring beats — and five times throughout the night, they administer medications through her IVs, trying to shock her relentlessly racing heart into slow and steady, slow and steady. My heart aches with praying.

Suffering has to have enough purpose in the world if God Himself daily purposes to endure suffering with us. He who names Himself “God with us” never stops suffering with us.

This is a broken-hearted world but we are a lion-hearted people.

We roar prayers and love large.

And the Lion of Judah Himself enters into the suffering with us, staying with us, forever living to intercede in prayer for us.

Even Friedrich Nietzsche has to concede that “the only satisfactory (answer to the problem of suffering)” is that “the gods justified human life by living it themselves.”

And I believe it here beside her with heart pounding hard at breakneck speeds, here with hundreds of Sick Kids struggling to breathe, to sleep: He who names Himself “God with us” never stops suffering with us.

Suffering has to have enough purpose in the world if God Himself daily purposes to endure suffering with us.

Whatever unbelievable suffering crosses our path, Jesus suffered through that and worse at the Cross — so we can believe the problem of suffering is solved by the plan of salvation.

And the night before the nails, as Jesus approaches the cross, the God Man confesses, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow, to the point of death” (Matthew 26:38).

Whatever unbelievable suffering crosses our path, Jesus suffered through that and worse at the Cross — so we can believe the problem of suffering is solved by the plan of salvation.

Our estrangement is solved by the strange grace of the Cross.

And we are saved from purposeless suffering — by our Suffering Savior.

The God with us, He feels all the suffering that’s with us.

“Mama?” Our little girl had whispered to me, reaching for me from the hospital bed. “How we get there?”

I think she’s asking about how, in the midst of monitors and leads and oxygen, to get to down the hall to the playroom?

“We can just walk to the playroom, baby? One step at a time?”

But she puts her hand on my cheek:

“No, how we get there? How we get out of here and get home? HOMMMMMEEEEEE.” She looks so fragile, her eyes begging mine.

As soon as your heart is stronger, I promise — we will go home.” My eyes try to calm hers.

“Can you make it all go faster, Mama?” Her eyes keep searching mine. I kiss her forehead gently.

What if our problem of suffering in the world is really our problem with the strange ways of God?

When I don’t understand God’s timing, my heart will keep time with God’s heart.

On the evening of the 13th day, when her cardiac team feels sure she is safe, this brave beating heart rerouted and healing –  this new beta-blocker medication which will hold our girl’s post-operative heart in a steady rhythm, and we’re discharged to walk out the hospital door — I stop at the bottom of the stairs, her grinning, and the Farmer holding her the tightest, and I brave a smile through everything brimming.

Home. She gets to go home.

It’s true – this heart journey of hers is a story that never ends… a warrior road that will always be hers to bravely walk… but she smiles. This chapter is now finished and she gets to go home. 

How we do all survive all this survivor’s guilt?

Why do we get another morning, why do get the grace of days, why do get to breathe at all? We got the last hour — why do we get more?

Why in the world did we get the miracle of now — and how do we steward the miracle of another day?

Is the only way to survive survivor’s guilt — is to help more survive their suffering?

Since our daughter’s heart surgery that Lent four years ago now, I have walked around carrying that one thought:

The only way to survive survivor’s guilt — is to help other’s survive their suffering.

The only way to survive survivor’s guilt — is to help other’s survive their suffering.

If we have survived — how can we not do something, anything, practically, somehow, someway, to show up to help others survive their suffering. 

Bake the cookies or order the pizza, pick up the phone or send the text, copy and paste an actual verse that’s a true lifeline to let them know that the God of the heavens keeps His promises, stop what you’re doing and earnestly pray, advocate, show up somehow in solidarity. 

Maybe in the midst of all our suffering, we don’t so much need a solution to the problem of pain, as much as  need sojourners to walk through the pain with us.

It happened again this week, as we move through Lent this year, just as I tucked our little girl into bed — she took my hand and laid it over her as I her scarred heart and I nodded, so tenderly moved, as could feel her heartbeat, and the beat of the coming Holy Week and all these holy moments:

This is a broken-hearted world but we are a lion-hearted people who give each other withness and witness and there is nothing now to fear.


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