Creative Suffering or Destructive Suffering?

God’s Healing for Life’s Losses:
How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting

Post 42: Conclusion—

Creative Suffering or Destructive Suffering?

It’s clear that there is a typical way to respond to suffering. That typical way does not typically factor God into the equation.

It’s equally and biblically clear that there’s a better way, God’s way to respond to suffering. We can face suffering face-to-face with God and we can empower our spiritual friends, parishioners, and counselees to do so if we will follow a biblical theology of suffering—a sufferology.

This biblical sufferology uses sustaining trialogues to help our spiritual friends to move from candor, to complaint, to cry, to comfort.

It uses healing trialogues to encourage our spiritual friends to move from waiting to wailing, to weaving, to worshipping.

Biblical sufferology helps us to find God in the midst of our suffering, to glorify God by how we respond to suffering, and to become more like Christ as we face our suffering.

Select Bibliography of Biblical Sufferology

Adams, Jay E. A Theology of Christian Counseling: More Than Redemption. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979.

Aden, L. “Comfort/Sustaining.” Pages 193-195 in The Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counseling. Edited by R. J. Hunter. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990.

Eyrich, Howard and William Hines. Curing the Heart: A Model for Biblical Counseling. Ross-shire UK: Christian Focus, 2002.

Graham, L. K. “Healing.” Pages 497-501 in The Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counseling. Edited by R. J. Hunter. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990.

Kellemen, Robert. Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007.

Kellemen, Robert. Soul Physicians: A Theology of Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. Third revised edition. Winona Lake, IN: BMH Books, 2007.

Kellemen, Robert. “Spiritual Care in Historical Perspective: Martin Luther as a Case Study in Christian Sustaining, Healing, Reconciling, and Guiding.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Kent State University, 1997.

Kellemen, Robert. Spiritual Friends: A Methodology of Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. Revised third edition. Winona Lake, IN: BMH Books, 2007.

Kellemen, Robert. Sacred Friendships: Celebrating the Legacy of Women Soul Care Givers and Spiritual Directors. Winona Lake, IN: BMH Books, 2009.

Kellemen, Robert. What to Do After the Hug. Crown Point, IN: RPM Books, 2009.

Keller, Timothy. “Puritan Resources for Pastoral Counseling.” Journal of Pastoral Practice 9, no. 3 (1988): 11-44.

Lake, Frank. Clinical Theology. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966.

Lewis, C. S. The Problem of Pain. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962.

Powlison, David. Seeing with New Eyes: Counseling and the Human Condition through the Lens of Scripture. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2003.

Powlison, David. Speaking the Truth in Love: Counsel in Community. Winston-Salem, NC: Punch Bookstore, 2005.

Tripp, Paul David. Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2002.

Waite, Terry. Taken on Trust. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1993.

Wangerin, Walter. Mourning Into Dancing. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992.

Our God Is a Time God

God’s Healing for Life’s Losses:
How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting

Post 27: Our God Is a Time God

When we cry out to God; He promises His comfort. However, He does not promise “quick answers.” He is a “time God.” He does not come before time. He does not come after time. He comes just on time. And . . . He comes in His way for His glory and our good.

Stage Six: Wailing

So, when His time and our timing are light years apart; we wait. We resist the temptation to regroup and to fix things on our own.

But let’s be honest, that brings more pain. So we are tempted to deaden the pain of waiting for healing, for hope, for cure.

In “stage” six of the grieving process, we move from deadening our pain to wailing: longing for heaven and living passionately for God and others while still on earth.

Deadening Described

The barren Shunammite woman of 2 Kings 4 helps us to picture deadening. After years of barrenness, she bears a son who fulfills a lifetime of hopes and dreams. Tragically, he dies. Life sent her two caskets, the first her inability to conceive, the second the death of the child she finally bore.

Rather than face her groaning, she repeats five times, “It’s all right.” Her heart is sick, her soul vexed, yet she keeps insisting, “It’s all right. I’m all right.”

She eventually screams at Elisha, “Did I not say to you, ‘Don’t deceive me! Don’t get my hopes up.’” Deadening refuses to ever hope again, to ever dream again.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick. Hope hoped for, received, then lost again, makes the heart deathly ill. Fragile. Needy. We hate being there, so we block it out. We deaden ourselves by refusing to hope, long, wail, or groan because groaning exposes us for the needy people that we are.

The problem is, God made us longing, thirsting, hungering, desiring beings. So we follow a trillion different strategies for deadening our desires and shutting out the wail of our soul. We live as if this world is all there is. We refuse to hope for something more. We make it our goal to satisfy the flesh in order to quench the ache in our soul.

Staying Alive to Life When It Crushes Us to Death

How do we stay alive to life when it crushes us to death? That’s the question we probe tomorrow.

Miserable Counselors?

God's Healing for Life's Losses:

Post 2: Miserable Counselors?

For far too long some biblical counselors have highlighted confronting the sinning, but minimized comforting the suffering. But if we are to rightly call ourselves biblical counselors, then we must address what the Bible addresses. And suffering is everywhere in the Bible from Genesis 3 to Revelation 19.

Frank Lake explains the implications of the Bible’s emphasis on suffering and sin.

“The maladies of the human spirit in its deprivations and in its depravity are matters of common pastoral concern.”

True pastoral/biblical counseling not only studies depravity—the sins we have committed, it also must examine deprivation—the evils we have suffered.

When we talk about sin and not suffering, then we become like Job’s counselors, who Job labeled “miserable comforters.” They mistakenly called his suffering “sin” and cruelly claimed that he was suffering because of personal sin.

The World, More Compassionate Than the Church!?

Oddly, the world at times seems more compassionate than the church!

While we in the church have been like Job’s miserable counselors, the world has at least tried to address human suffering. Unfortunately, their approach is incomplete and inaccurate.

Students of human grief have developed various models that track typical grief responses. However, their models fail to assess whether these responses correspond to God’s process for hurting and hoping.

Without getting too technical, we must understand something about research in a fallen world. At best, it describes what typically does occurs. It cannot and should not, with assurance and authority, prescribe what should occur. Their attempts to understand the human nature are thwarted by the fallenness of our nature and of our world.

DABDA (The Acrostic of the World’s Five-Stages of Grieving)

The best known approach is that of Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. In her book On Death and Dying, she popularized a five-stage model of grieving based upon her research into how terminally ill persons respond to the news of their terminal illness. Her five stages, which have since been used to describe all grief responses, are:

Denial: This is the shock reaction. “It can’t be true.” “No, not me.” We refuse to believe what happened.

Anger: Resentment grows. “Why me?” “Why my child?” “This isn’t fair!” We direct blame toward God, others, and ourselves. We feel agitated, moody, on edge.

Bargaining: We try to make a deal, insisting that things be the way they used to be. “God, if you heal my little girl, I’ll never drink again.” “If I’m very good, then God might relent and be very good to me.” We call a temporary truce with God.

Depression: Now we say, “Yes, me.” The courage to admit our loss brings sadness (which can be healthy mourning and grieving) and hopelessness (which is unhealthy mourning and grieving).

Acceptance: Now we face our loss calmly. It’s a time of silent reflection and regrouping. “Life has to go on. How? What do I do now?” With one’s own impending death, it’s a time of quiet contemplation almost void of feelings. Sometimes it includes contentment, other times despair.

These various stages in the grief process claim to record what does typically occur. They do not attempt to assess if this is what is best to occur, or if it is God’s process for hurting and hoping.

Is it God’s process?

Return tomorrow to learn the rest of the story…

God's Healing for Life's Losses

RPM Ministries is excited to announce their newest one-day conference:

God’s Healing for Life’s Losses:

How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting

Experience engaging PowerPoint presentations, relevant biblical teaching,
personal healing, and equipping to minister to your hurting friends.

Presented by Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., LCPC

Bob is the Author of five books, including God’s Healing for Life’s Losses: How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting (BMH Books, 2009); Chairman, Master of Arts in Christian Counseling and Discipleship Department, Capital Bible Seminary; and Director of the Biblical Counseling and Spiritual Formation Network for the American Association of Christian Counselors.

Attend and You Will Learn How To:

*Apply to your life a four-stage biblical model of facing life’s losses with courageous honesty.
*Apply to your life a four-stage biblical model of finding healing hope by finding God.
*Apply proven biblical principles to help hurting people to move through the biblical stages of hurting and grieving: candor, complaint, cry, and comfort.
*Apply proven biblical principles to help hurting people to move through the biblical stages of hope and growth: waiting, wailing, weaving, and worshipping.
*Practice skillfully the biblical counseling and soul care arts of sustaining and healing.
*Build healing communities where Christians find courage and comfort in God and each other.

Comprehensive, Compassionate, Culturally-Informed
Biblical Grief Counseling

Students of human grief have developed various models of typical grief responses. However, these models fail to assess whether the responses correspond to God’s process for hurting (grieving) and hoping (growing). Dr. Bob Kellemen, in God’s Healing for Life’s Losses, equips you to apply eight scriptural stages in your response to life’s losses—helping you to find hope when you’re hurting. Bob will also empower you to minister healing hope to others so that they can face suffering face-to-face with God.

Attend the God’s Healing for Life’s Losses Seminar To:

*Experience personal healing and biblical hope.
*Encounter God in the midst of your suffering.
*Empathize with hurting people more compassionately.
*Encourage suffering people more competently.
*Empower your congregation to become a “hospital for the hurting.”

God’s Healing for Life’s Losses Seminar Schedule

8:00-8:45--Registration and Continental Breakfast
8:45-8:55--Praise and Worship
8:55-9:00--Greeting and Prayer
9:00-10:30--Session One: Launching the Journey of Grief: Honesty with Yourself and with God—Candor and Complaint
10:30-10:45--Break
10:45-12:00--Session Two: Inviting God to Join Your Journey: Finding God Even When You Can’t Find Answers—Cry and Comfort
12:00-1:00--Lunch Provided
1:00-1:15--Praise and Worship
1:15-2:30--Session Three: Deepening Your Journey During the Dark Night of the Soul: On the Road to Hope—Waiting and Wailing
2:30-2:45--Break
2:45-4:00--Session Four: Traveling with God on the Journey of Faith: Joining the Larger Story—Weaving and Worshipping
4:00--Closing Benediction
4:00-4:30--Optional Book Signing

RPM Ministries, www.rpmministries.org, rpm.ministries@gmail.com
PO Box 270, Crown Point, IN 46308, 219-662-8138
Changing Lives with Christ’s Changeless Truth
Comprehensive, Compassionate, Culturally-informed
Biblical Counseling and Spiritual Formation

In a Coffin in Egypt

In a Coffin in Egypt

Consider the contrast between the first five and the last five words of Genesis. “In the beginning God created” (Genesis 1:1a). “In a coffin in Egypt” (Genesis 50:26b). Life east of Eden and this side of Heaven is guaranteed to be replete with suffering.

Though we intuitively and experientially recognize this reality, for some reason we shy away from it theologically. Theologians have developed well thought through models of Creation (anthropology), Fall (hamartiology), and Redemption (soteriology). Notice what’s missing? Sufferology—a biblical theology of suffering.

Of course, a brief e-news snippet is not the place to present a fully developed theology of suffering. But perhaps it could be the place today to whet our appetite, to encourage each of us as biblical counselors and soul physicians to delve more deeply into a practical theology of suffering.

In the early 60s, British Christian psychiatrist, Frank Lake explained that “clinical pastoral care has, as its introduction, the task of listening to a story of human conflict and need. To the extent that our listening uncovers a situation which borders the abyss or lies broken within it, we are nearer to the place where the Cross of Chris is the only adequate interpretive concept” (Clinical Theology, pp. 18-19).

Is any place closer to the abyss than a coffin in Egypt? God creatively uses suffering, separation, dying, and death to form us into His image. Walter Wangerin, in his healing book, Mourning Into Dancing, expresses more insight into death than any mortician. “Death doesn’t wait till the ends of our lives to meet us and to make an end. Instead, we die a hundred times before we die; and all the little endings on the way are like a slowly growing echo of the final Bang! before that bang takes place” (p. 26).

So why would our Good Shepherd shepherd us with suffering and sorrow? What are these “guides” supposed to teach us? Throughout Mourning Into Dancing, Wangerin explains that suffering and death are meant to teach us our need again. All the mini-casket experiences of life are God-sent invitations to depend upon the One who is the Resurrection and the Life.

The Apostle Paul says its best. “We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead (2 Corinthians 1:8-9). Life’s coffins cause us to cling to Christ and to celebrate His empty tomb.

Under the Power of Melting Grief

Under the Power of Melting Grief

At times stringing together the words “grieving” and “ministry” can be oxymoronic. My mind recalls one pastor who lost his wife while she was giving birth to their second child. Because of congregational and peer pressure to “keep it together” and “be a good example,” outwardly he displayed no signs of grief. He even officiated at his own wife’s funeral.

Inwardly, privately, what a difference. He experienced ongoing hallucinations of his deceased wife and barely was able to care for his own needs, let alone those of his two children.

Where was this pastor, where are we, recruited into the unbiblical nonsense that grief is, well, unbiblical?

Biblical Sufferology

Many have developed splendid systematic theology models that counter this hideous idea that grieving is somehow less than Christian. Rather than duplicate their studies, in the brief space that we share together in this column, I’d like to share the true story of a prince of preachers and his response to the loss of his dear wife.

Many know the name Richard Baxter (1615-1691) as one of England’s foremost pastors, authors, and theologians. Fewer know of his wife, Margaret (1636-1681). Twenty-one years younger than her more-famous husband, Margaret struggled throughout her life as a fear-ridden, highly strung, overly-sensitive, painfully perfectionistic soul.

After nineteen years of marriage, Richard lost his soul mate when she passed at age forty-five after eleven days of delirium. Her reason had almost wholly left her, as she had longed feared it might.[1]

Less than a month later, her grieving husband—the world-renowned pastor—wrote to tell the world of his grief. First published as A Breviate of the Life of Margaret, The Daughter of Francis Charlton, and Wife of Richard Baxter, John T. Wilkinson reprinted it with the beautiful title Richard Baxter and Margaret Charlton: A Puritan Love Story.

Baxter prefaces his memorializing with the candid admission that it was, “. . . written, I confess, under the power of melting grief.”[2] Knowing the likely criticism for such openness, Baxter continues, “. . . and therefore perhaps with the less prudent judgment; but not with the less, but the more truth; for passionate weakness poureth out all, which greater prudence may conceal.”[3]

Did you catch his meaning? In our weakness, not only are we strong in Christ, we are all the more honest as Christians. In our grieving, we do not and should not conceal the truth of tears this side of heaven.

In Depth of Grief

Perhaps even more remarkable, it was not simply the shock and nearness of Margaret’s death that left her husband so frank. Years later in his autobiography, Baxter expresses how his wife’s death left him “in depth of grief.”[4] Interestingly, the original editor of Baxter’s autobiography suppressed this phrase. (Some things never changed.) Fortunately, truer historians have uncovered it—for the benefit of all who dare speak the truth about sorrow.[5]

Richard Baxter understood the truth that it’s normal to hurt—even for “full-time Christian workers.” His entire biography of dear Margaret is a tear-stained tribute to the affection they shared and the sadness he endured.

Mingled Hurt and Hope

Of course, Baxter also understood the truth that it’s possible to hope—for all Christians. Listen to his mingled hurt and hope.

She is gone after many of my choice friends, who within this one year are gone to Christ, and I am following even at the door. Had I been to enjoy them only here, it would have been but a short comfort, mixed with the many troubles which all our failings and sins, and some degree of unsuitableness between the nearest and dearest, cause. But I am going after them to that blessed society where life, light, and love, and therefore, harmony, concord, and joy, are perfect and everlasting.[6]

Perhaps one reason why we practice denial is our fear that entering our grief might so consume us that we will be overwhelmed with worldly sorrow. Baxter’s Christian experience reminds us that this doesn’t have to be the case.

We can look fallen life squarely in the eyes, admit the truth that it is a quagmire of pain and problems, and still live hopefully now if we also look toward life in our heavenly world to come.

In the last paragraph of his tribute to Margaret, Baxter succinctly combines these two realities. “Therefore in our greatest straits and sufferings, let us comfort one another with these words: That we shall for ever be with the Lord.”[7]

Shakespeare’s Romeo said, “He jests at scars, that never felt a wound.”

Baxter might add, “He fears facing scars who never embraces the truth that by Christ’s wounds we are healed.”


[1]J. I. Packer, A Grief Sanctified, Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Publications, 1997, p. 13.
[2]Ibid., p. 56.
[3]Ibid.
[4]Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxteriannae, 1696.
[5]Packer, p. 197.
[6]Ibid., p. 57.
[7]Ibid., p. 149.