The Key to Coping with Tragedy

[This is the third installment in a series of columns I'm doing for our local paper. It deals with a Christian response to suffering and tragedy.]

She was dying of cancer.

"Are you angry with God?" I asked her.

"I was at first," she answered honestly. "But then I remembered that He's right here with me. Somehow that helped me."

Because of the recent murder of Marcus Feisel and the Comair crash, events that have affected many in our community, I've written two columns on the realities of suffering and tragedy in our world.

In one, I talked about how, in the face of evil or after a tragedy , it's understandable that we ask, "Why?"

The answer, that this world is under a pall of alienation from God which allows evil and tragedy to exist, may explain things. But the explanation doesn't take our grief away.

In another column, I pointed out that, while God hates to see us suffer, He paradoxically, allows us to live in a world where suffering is possible because of His compassion for us. The moment that God ends the life of this world in which He allows us to say Yes or No to His love, He'll also have to forever end our capacity to decide whether to put our dukes down and let Him be our Lord.

The woman, we'll call her Mary, who was dying of cancer, a member of the northwestern Ohio congregation I formerly served as pastor, knew that once we get past the anger and asking "Why?," another question must be addressed as we deal with the suffering that affects us.

It's a simple one: Now that this grief has befallen me or my community, my family, or my church, how do I handle it? How do I cope?

Mary found a way to cope with the cancer that ultimately took her life. She relied on the God Who fully revealed Himself to all of us in Jesus Christ. Mary appreciated that Christ, God in human flesh, understood her situation and could help her more than anyone.

Seven centuries before Jesus was born, the prophet Isaiah wrote of Him, "He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity..." (Isaiah 53:3)

Monty Python satirizations aside, Jesus Christ doesn't tell us to "look at the bright side of life" when we suffer. "Compassion" is a compound word that means "to suffer with." Jesus is compassionate and suffers with all who turn to Him. (Although He never forces His company on anyone!)

Compassion explains why Jesus wept in grief over the death of His friend, Lazarus. It also explains why He wept in sadness over the hardness of heart He saw in Jerusalem, as people in the very center of religious life among God's people, refused to follow Him.

The Savior the Bible calls "the suffering Servant," promises that those who entrust their lives to Him will live beyond death. Romans 14:8 in the Bible's New Testament says: "If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s."

How do we cope with suffering?

Above all, by placing our lives in the hands of Jesus Christ. On a daily bases, we ask God to forgive us for failing to love Him completely and failing to love our neighbor as though she or he were another self. Then, assured that our sincere turning from sin is honored in heaven, we ask Jesus to have His way in our life again today. "Your will be done," we pray. We put ourselves at Christ's disposal and in Christ's hands.

It doesn't answer all the questions. But it does help us cope with the mysteries and to look to the future with undying hope.