Suffering and Abuse

I’ve been thinking much about how all suffering is a form of abuse.  I do not here mean to minimize or ill-define the term abuse, as I believe strongly that it has a proper and right place in our vocabulary for a range of hurts, ills, and crimes.

However, a passage I read in a counseling work has stuck with me and seems applicable in so many situations.  Abuse victims struggle with an ability to make sense of the past and so an inability to plan for the future.  It’s certainly understandable–an unpredictable situation, never knowing when abuse will be perpetrated, an inability to understand the why, and an inability then to know the “what next” would produce just such conditions.

I’ve thought about this much as I’ve processed my own past hurts, those done to and by me.

But I’ve also seen it with my bipolar.  I can’t always know when a depressive episode will strike.  So no matter how I plan, no matter the degree of preparation, all my plans can be undone, or I can find myself incapable of carrying them out.

I’ve seen this in those struggling with chronic pain.  Not knowing when the next episode will strike leaves them unable to plan for the future.

I recently heard a similar dynamic in those struggling in poverty.  Their stress rises and actually decreases measurable intelligence, specifically the ability to make plans for the future.  All is the immediate, which is why so many in poverty cannot plan or save; it is less about a monetary amount and more about an ingrained mindset.

In that sense, all suffering is abuse, and all suffering requires a remedy far more than any program or project.  Teaching me to plan doesn’t forestall the depression.  Pain medication doesn’t forestall the episodes of crippling anguish.  Personal finance classes, debt relief, winning the lottery do not produce monetary soundness.

In that sense, all are abused, and all need the only remedy for abuse–the God who owns and takes on Himself suffering.

Because the inability to make sense of the past and the inability to plan for the future is another way to say that we cannot make sense of our story.  And without knowing our story, we can’t possibly plan for the future.  Without knowing who we are, which ultimately means knowing who we are as our Father has written the story and Jesus redeemed it as He, the elder brother, pursues us to bring us to Himself and to the Father, to impart the Spirit to seal and save us.  Without knowing, experiencing, the Triune love of God poured out in our hearts.  Without knowing how that makes peace of our past and gives peace for the future, we are all truly lost.

So on those days when I suffer, which in reality is all days, as in reality all of us suffer all days, I am reminded that God holds us in the ever-present NOW of His knowledge.  I pray for myself and others that God gives us such grace, not to remain where we are, nor to somehow think all is right now, but as a song we sing at church says, “All must be well.”