Beautifully Bent

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

In Dickens’ classic Great Expectations, the very poignant ending describes a reunion between a young man crazily in love with a lady who’d been bred to jerk men around, and therefore could never return his affection. It was, throughout the book, his greatest source of pain, and his occasional source of agony.

Not having seen the lady Estella for years, Pip can’t help but notice how fragile and earnest she now seems, in contrast to the arrogant, icy beauty of earlier times. And she acknowledges this by explaining she’d had some hard knocks since they last met, knocks that wounded and deepened her simultaneously. So her words quoted above are both sad and hopeful, describing her as broken but better; bent but, in character at least, far more beautiful.

Nobody could size people up like Dickens. The guy had a PhD in human nature and, like all great authors, converted the ups and downs we’re all familiar with into poetry and elegance, sketching characters we never forget. (If by chance you haven’t read Great Expectations, I hope you’ll do yourself the huge favor of picking it up.)

There’s something powerful in recognizing the shaping capacities of our worst experiences, as Estella did, and let me be the first to admit I don’t like this, even though I ultimately appreciate it. I don’t like the fact that character springs from suffering, then finding redemptive lessons and capacities as a result.

That’s true but not always fun, so I don’t have to like it. I’ve no affection for this “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” stuff, preferring instead the Joker’s dark revision “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weirder.”

But the latter is just a smart-aleck reaction to the accuracy of the former. Because it really is true – if we allow them to, the roughest parts of our lives become shapers of a deeper, more Christ-like, and far more attractive character. Hard times make you strong, provided you’ll let them. And whether I like that fact or not, I’ve sure benefitted from it.

A Time to Weep

Of course, hard times first call for tears. I’ve known so many people who survived sexual abuse, physical battering, or catastrophic early events, but never faced what profound injuries they’d inflicted, leaving them with pain and dysfunctions that were now crippling them. So they shoved it all into some little nook of the soul, hoping it would starve itself to death.

Which seldom happens, since sin, whether committed by or against us, needs to be dealt with. So there’s a time to face our pain, weep over it, and recognize
its enormity.

That’s why I get very “soap-boxy” about offering quick clichés or “just get over it” advice to hurting people. Wounds call for, among other things, compassion. (Job’s long-winded friends who pontificated when they should have comforted come
to mind).

So there’s a place for “Weeping with those who weep” (Romans 12:15), a place I wish some of us visited more often, because in any given church there’s a boatload of pain sitting next to us in the pews. People bring their wounds with them no matter how dressed up they get, and too often, they feel alone, misunderstood, or marginalized, all because they’re hurting over the blows they’ve received and are still trying to grapple with.

Pain calls for empathy. Sin and stupidity call for a kick in the butt. And is it really so hard to see the difference between the two, or the value of approaches that match the need?

A Time to Wake

But when a kid scraps a knee, Mom or Dad can only hug her for so long. At some point a good parent will, having expressed all the necessary “poor baby’s”, pat the child’s head and say, “OK, time to get moving again.”

The idea of grieving pain is to eventually rise above it’s pull, not park in it. And I say that because, honestly, if some of us are short on the sympathy factor, others seem committed to creating and sustaining a culture of professional victimhood. I may be especially sensitive to this because my work has so often focused on people dealing with some pretty serious emotional stuff, which is something I hope I
never minimize.

But really, don’t you think we sometimes get carried away with all this?

For example, I’ve known folks who were encouraged by perhaps well-meaning friends and therapists to not only face, but then drop anchor in, their pain. Adopting an identity based on early hardships, they label themselves accordingly, giving themselves permission to avoid responsibilities the rest of us have to face: the responsibility to work for a living, to invest in relationships without bailing whenever we’re let down, to not view everything as being about us, and to avoid destructive, immoral behaviors, even if they seem to briefly “medicate” us.

Some not only face but then go on to glory in their victim status, proud to be, and remain, crippled.

When thinking of them I envision a perverted sort of Academy Award show where the winner for Best Victim clutches his trophy saying, “I want to blame my mother and my father and, of course, my early teachers and all the kids I grew up with, along with my unloving spouse of 22 years and my terrible children. You’ve all made my life so miserable. But above all, let me blame God, because I’d never be the mess I am today if not for Him. Thank you.”

That’s overkill, but I think you know what I mean. There’s a time, having grieved our pain, to wake and rise. To realize there’s no honor in being pitied; no power in using our personal wounds as excuses to withdraw from what life requires of everyone else.

When I feel sorry for myself I’ll admit it’s a powerful cocktail, but I’ve never once been made stronger or happier by drinking it. That alone is good enough reason to go sober.

A Time to Walk

A better way is to see and yes, even glory in, the ways God uses hardship, personal wounds, or terribly unfair and even cruel situations to fashion us into something so much better. Even if and when we’ve no idea why He allowed them.

I’m struck, today more than ever, by the fact that such a good man as Job could be allowed to experience such completely undeserved calamity and, after finally lamenting it all, be told essentially, “I’m God; you’re not.”

That hurts and, more to the point, it puts us in our place. God is not cruel; no one who truly knows Him would ever say that. But one of the mind benders of the faith is that it requires to us trust Him when He permits things we can’t fathom to happen to us or to the people we love.

Then again, Paul never got much of an explanation for the thorn God allowed him to suffer with. Instead, a promise which now means more to me than ever, was given to the age old question Why won’t you relieve me of this burden?

“My grace is sufficient.” (II Corinthians 12:9)

And was it! Paul discovered a truth available to all of us if we’ll face and accept it: Our hardships, either external or internal, are vehicles for God’s power to manifest in us and, in the process, bend, break, and mold us into far more than what we’d be had those hardships never come.

In that sense, I guess we could all say along with Estella that plenty of what’s happened to us may not be good, but what came out of it was great.

This weekend, as I think of the people I love dealing with things that I wish they’d be spared, and of the injustices in a world so fallen, and of (sorry ‘bout the politics!) the absolutely weirdest election season I’ve ever seen, I can remember that His infinite grace is sufficient for these limited glitches.

Hope you’re having a great weekend. Thanks for being here. God bless.

Love,
Joe