Suffering Is Not Strange

I want to say something about suffering that might sound cold at first but is actually the most compassionate thing I've learned: suffering is expected.

Not pursued. Not glorified. Not something to enjoy or pretend doesn't hurt. But expected. And the sooner we stop treating it as an anomaly, the better equipped we'll be to endure it — and to help others endure it.

I lost my wife Percy to cancer in October 2022. I run a palliative care organization where I sit with people in their final days. I pastor a church where people bring me their worst seasons. I've lived in suffering. I'm not writing theory. I'm writing from the middle of it.

Five Kinds of Suffering

Over the years, I've come to recognize at least five distinct types of suffering. They overlap. They compound. But distinguishing them has helped me respond more wisely — both to my own pain and to others'.

The cost of choosing what's right. When you stand for truth or integrity, you will be misunderstood. Opposed. Sometimes isolated. This isn't a sign you've gone wrong. It's often a sign you've gone right. The loneliest seasons of my life have been the ones where I refused to compromise, and the people around me wished I would.

God's refining work. Delays. Unanswered prayers. Waiting that stretches past what feels reasonable. Grief that doesn't resolve on your timeline. I know this kind intimately. After Percy died, I wanted fast healing. I wanted clarity. I wanted the pain to mean something immediately. Instead, I got silence and slow, grinding transformation. The refining doesn't feel like love while it's happening. It feels like abandonment. It isn't.

The consequences of foolish choices. This one requires humility. Sometimes I suffer because I made a bad decision. I overcommitted. I trusted the wrong person. I moved too fast. This kind of suffering isn't punishment — it's consequence. And the path through it is honest self-assessment, not self-pity.

The warning of sin. When we're on a path that's destroying us, suffering can be the alarm bell. It's not meant to crush — it's meant to redirect. I've seen this in others' lives and in my own. The pain that comes from living out of alignment with what I know to be true has a different quality to it. It's restless. It won't let me settle.

The brokenness of the world. Illness. Injustice. Loss that has no explanation and serves no obvious purpose. Children who suffer. Good people who get cancer. Systems that fail the vulnerable. This is the suffering that makes people lose faith, and I understand why. I sit with patients at SEEDS who did nothing to deserve their pain. There is no neat theological answer for a woman dying in agony because she can't access morphine. There's only presence, advocacy, and the stubborn insistence that this is not how things are supposed to be.

What Rejoicing Actually Means

Peter writes that we can rejoice even in suffering. Paul writes it too. This is the most misunderstood instruction in all of Scripture.

Rejoicing does not make pain disappear. Let me say that again for every person who has been told to "just praise God through it" while their world was collapsing: rejoicing does not make pain disappear.

Rejoicing reframes the pain.

It's the decision — and it is a decision, not an emotion — to hold two things at once. This hurts, and God is still faithful. I don't understand this, and I still trust. The suffering is real, and it is not the final word.

I've held my dying wife's hand and worshipped. Not because I felt like it. Because I decided that her cancer would not get the last word over what I knew to be true about God.

Why This Matters

If you're suffering right now, I'm not going to tell you it's all part of the plan. I don't know that. What I know is this: suffering is not strange. It's not proof that God has forgotten you. It's not evidence that you've failed.

It's the terrain of a broken world navigated by broken people under the care of a God who entered the brokenness Himself.

Stop being surprised by it. Start asking what it's shaping in you. And when you can't find the answer to that — when the suffering is just senseless and dark — hold on anyway.

That's not weakness. That's the hardest kind of strength there is.