TABLE READ: What If God Doesn't Explain WHY We're Suffering (Ch. 3)

Pull up a chair, and let's ask the hard questions about suffering and surrender. If you're holding out on surrendering your situation to God because your hurt is so overwhelming, this is the heart balm you need to hear. 

As always, we love to hear from you. Click "Send Us Fan Mail" above and leave a voice memo. And, for the love of hosting, please weigh in with your thoughts about washcloths!

Oh, and we've got the graduation update you've all been waiting for!

It's a great listen for the drive to your next summer adventure.

Transcript

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Whether right now in your life you are on a peak or you are down in a valley, or perhaps you are like me and it's a little bit of both. There's some peaks going on, but there's also some really difficult valleys. I know that the temptation in the valleys, especially when you are so acutely feeling pain and hurt and anger and sadness and loneliness, is to ball up your fist and shake it at God and ask, why? Why is this happening to me right now? Number one, let me assure you, you're not alone. We all feel that pain and we all want to have that answer. And today on the pod, we're going to talk about why we don't necessarily get that answer and what our energy would be better spent on when God does not answer why in the midst of suffering. Also, for those of you who have been following along, there's a big old long update about graduation and how it went at the end of this. I love this community and I'm so thankful for you guys caring and following along with my family. Let's get started. Pull up a chair. Welcome back to the mentors table, a place where you can pull up a chair for deeper discussions about spiritual and emotional health with an uncomfortable focus on surrender. I'm Joy. Welcome. Today we are talking about chapter three of my book. I've labeled this series table read because we're going to read through a little bit of my book. But more than reading through, I'm actually just kind of summarizing and talking a little bit about the subjects covered in each chapter. Today's chapter is especially difficult to hear and to metabolize in your soul and to actually live out. But I think it's super, super important. I don't know about you, but I have been inundated recently with messages about surrendering and obedience and doing what God is leading you to do right away, not just holding on until you understand it or know how or why. And today we're going to talk about that word why. But before we get started, as always, let's take a moment to set ourselves and be still before the Lord. So take a deep breath in, release it slowly. Lord, we welcome you to this place. We open our hands, our hearts, our eyes, and fix them on you. We open our ears to listen, to truly listen and hear what you have to say.

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Amen.

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All about surrender. I always welcome comments from you. I know some of you have been so gracious to either send me a voicemail or a voxer if you know me personally, or text and give me some feedback on what you think about the things that I'm talking about with my book. And I just want to remind you that it is so easy to do that, and I really, really love hearing from you. So if you go to the show notes wherever you listen to podcasts, at the very top it says send us fan mail. It's a hyperlink. You just need to click on it in a couple of easy steps. You can leave a voicemail that comes directly to me and let me know your thoughts and responses. I love hearing from you. And since we're in the summer and we're going at a slower pace and maybe life is looking a little different, and you're having a little bit more bandwidth to do something like that, would you take a moment and send me a voicemail and give me some feedback? I would really love to hear from you. Today we're going to dig into chapter three of my book. And I'm playing around with some ideas for the title of this chapter, but the idea is an invitation to stop demanding why. And we're going to talk about why that's important and what that has to do with surrender. And to set the stage though, I just want to connect with you as a listener and recognize that all of us are dealing with a world that is broken and dark and continually feels like it's getting worse. You know, I believe that everybody listening is dealing with something, if not some things, many, many things that are really hard, that hurt, that leave you feeling lonely, that leave you questioning your faith or your walk with God, that don't come with easy answers, that feel very justified in spending your time trying to figure out why, why are we here? Why are we feeling this way? Why did this happen? I believe that everybody here is dealing with one or more of these things: sickness, suicide, and maybe it's not you necessarily that's dealing with it, but somebody close to you. And it's so hard to be alongside them and to continue to point their eyes to God in the midst of it. Maybe somebody is dealing with or knows somebody dealing with a deep depression, maybe a rebellious child that is causing constant hurt to the family. Maybe it's divorce that has broken up a family, especially one that you always thought they're the ones that are gonna make it. Maybe it's an abortion or it's some sort of sexual misconduct on the part of somebody that you know, maybe it's abuse or unexpected bills, as my pastor would say, too much month left at the end of your paycheck. Maybe it's surgeries that have gone wrong, and there's questions about why are we here having to talk about another surgery when this has already been taken care of? Maybe it's miscarriage or an unexpected death of a loved one. Maybe it's an inability to get weight off, maybe it's natural disasters, fires, or storms or flooding that have affected where you live or where your loved ones live. Maybe it's some sort of a housing crisis, just an inability to find something that can safely and adequately house you or your family or your loved ones. Maybe it's some sort of unfaithful spiritual leader that has really disappointed you, a role model that you've looked up to, and all of a sudden you're questioning everything that came out of his or her mouth. Maybe it's a misunderstanding with friends, and all of a sudden you find that lifelong friendships or what you perceived as lifelong friendships are suddenly completely broken and there's no communication whatever. Maybe it's broken relationships in your family. The list could go on and on and on. I know that we're all dealing with really difficult, complicated, hard to explain situations, and it doesn't bring any comfort. But I know to be true is that it's because we live in a broken, broken world where Satan is still given jurisdiction over our lives. So many times when we blame and shake our fist at God, it's because we think that He is in control and purposely doing all of this stuff or allowing all of this stuff, and we forget the role that Satan has to play. We forget the role that this broken world that God spent the whole Bible outlining how he is going to redeem and renew and bring us a new earth on those last pages of Revelation. So there is hope, but sometimes we think that we're living in that or we should be living in that revelation version of the earth now, and the reality is that we don't. I find that in those moments when things happen or when things just continue to happen, and there doesn't seem to be a break, or things start to pile on, it's so hard to surrender to God. You know, some of those things maybe it happens quickly, or maybe it's happening at a distance, and it feels easy to surrender it to God, but that is not a guarantee for any of the pain in our life. Some of it does feel easier than others to surrender to God, but that doesn't mean that just because what you're facing is really, really, really, really hard to surrender to God, that you shouldn't, or that you should get an answer to why first, and then you'll surrender it. I believe that this idea of if I know why, it promises things that just are not real, but it feels so real that we go ahead and hold on to this belief that if I just know why, then I will be able to find some comfort in this situation. If I just know why, then I know a way to figure out how to explain what happened again with the goal of getting comfort because I have some explanation. If I just know why, I think of it like a like a destination on a map. Okay, if if y is the red X that I am headed towards, then I can figure out how I got there. I can see where I was before it happened, I can see the red X that I hit, and so I can start to find routes and roads and turns and choices and decisions that I took that got me to that place. Ah, there is comfort. Because what? Why do I think that that's comfort? Because I think that somehow then I understand my own motives or my own blame or somebody else's motives and where the blame goes. Because if that person hadn't done that thing and I hadn't said that thing, then there wouldn't be the pain that happened, and so now I can blame and somehow knowing who to blame or what to blame offers this empty promise of comfort. But the reality is that none of these things actually bring us comfort. In fact, knowing why is just another version of taking control of the situation because if I know why, then I know how to make sure that doesn't happen again. If I know why, then like I said, I know who to blame, or I know what to blame, I know what to avoid or who to avoid, and therefore I'm gonna make sure that that doesn't happen again. But the reality is that that is a move towards control, not surrender, and we've talked about this so much before, but control is an illusion, it is not something that you actually can get a grasp of. It is something that we are going to spend so much time and energy trying to get, but the reality is the best way, God's best way for living, is instead of white knuckling and gripping on and forcing the steering wheel of your life to go the way that you think is gonna cause the less the least amount of pain, that that is an illusion. We really have no control. For any of you facing any of the hard things that I've already listed off, you know that those were a slap in the face, reminding you how little control you have. I have dealt with a lot of death in the most recent years of my life, and both my best friend who died after a laundry list of chronic sickness and disease took over her body at the young age of forty-three, as well as losing my dad to an accident, something that happened so quick and then it was over, is a constant reminder that no matter how much control I think I have, the world is going to remind me once again that it's an illusion. It can, as the author of Ecclesiastes says, it can all be gone in a moment. Life is like a vapor or a breath. And so if I spend all my time toiling and trying to get back control, I am spending my energy and time on things that are fruitless, where God has called me to surrender and obey what He puts in front of me, and that actually brings about fruit. That actually opens the door for God to continue to bless me. In chapter three of my book, I talk a lot about Job. I used to hate this book of the Bible. I saw so many people use it as a justification to say that no matter what good you do, God can still throw you under the bus and hurt you or make you sick or take everything away so that he can teach you a lesson. And we talk about this in my book. Actually, Job confesses in the book that he opened the door to this because he says, What I greatly feared has come upon me. He was living in fear, he was not surrendered to God, he was trying to control his situation, and so what he feared was dictating what he was trying to control so that things would not happen to him, and they happened anyways. But we also see that at the end of Job, that when he finally falls on his knees and opens his hand in surrender and says, I don't have any of the answers. I was the I was wrong. I was shaking my fist at you, demanding a why, but you are God and that's all that matters. And when I surrender to you, then that is all I need to do. Because as God so beautifully answers him, he doesn't answer why. And I truly believe that one of the reasons he doesn't answer why is it would take being all knowing, which is something that only God is to fully be able to grasp and connect all the dots to understand the why. So instead of spending our time and our energy toiling and trying to connect the dots and figure out why, Joe finally realizes oh the best thing to do is to fall on my knees and open my hands and surrender to God because He knows the why and He is in control and He is trustworthy, and without Him I am nothing. That is the best way to face our pain, to face our loss, to face our confusion and our hurt and our guilt and our shame, to recognize how big God is. If you need a reminder of how big God is, then I would recommend that you go to the end of the book of Job, skip through and get to Job 38. God begins to not answer Job's why, but to give him some perspective of how big and good and in control that he is. And from that, Job is able to understand. This is too big for me to understand, and that's okay because I don't need to. And once he surrenders, then God is able to move. I truly believe that for many of you listening right now, you have had a constant invitation to surrender, an invitation to stop asking why, and open your hands and trust God. And I'm here to say that, like Job, if you will take that invitation, if you will get your physical body involved, falling on your knees, opening your hands and speaking out of your mouth, God, I surrender. I'm so sorry. I'm not gonna try and control this anymore. I don't understand why, but I do know that you are good, and so I trust you to guide me through this. When you do that, like Job, you are going to see how the doors of blessing are getting opened in your life. And I'm not telling you this as a recipe, like if you do this, this, and this, then you're going to see your miracle. Because often we take that to mean that in our timing, when we do this, this, and this, then immediately or the way and the time when we expect it to happen, God is going to, like Job, bring back double the portion of what he had before. And so when we surrender and when we give it to God and we fall on our knees, we are not guaranteed that the blessing is gonna come in our time. That does not mean that we don't bother surrendering. In that surrender, we We also acknowledge that God has our best interests in mind. He is our designer. And so he knows and he can help. And he knows the best time for that blessing to come. And so in surrendering, we're also surrendering the timing of God's response. But we know that we know that we know that God is faithful. Like I said before, I've dealt with a lot of death lately. And at the end of this chapter, I'm not going to talk about it here in the pod because I really want once I get this book published for you to go and read it yourself. But there was a really tender moment when God revealed something really transcendent about surrender after I lost my best friend. It's a moment that I have gone back to often and I pull comfort from and I pull some encouragement to keep surrendering from. Because if I keep that in front of my eyes, both physical and spiritual, and I can remind myself, and we go back to that beautiful spiritual discipline of remembering, I can remember why surrender is so much more important. So as I finish up this book this summer and I start querying agents and I start reaching out to publishers, I want you to get excited because there are truths in here that I am so excited to share with you. Truths that I learned the hard way that came about through a lot of pain. And I so desperately desire for you to be able to have a chance to grasp those truths without going through the amount of pain that I went through to get to where I am today. Okay, it's the update you've all been waiting for, or at least in my head, that's what you've been waiting for. We did it! We graduated our first daughter. It was actually a really great time. Um, let's start with we did the graduation party at the house. I had most of the food catered in so that I didn't have to be prepping that, and beautiful decorations from a friend of mine, and mostly was planning to be outside, but turns out it was pretty chilly that day. Good old Wyoming summer weather is pretty unpredictable. So we were able to use our house, and honestly, that's a beautiful thing in a praise report because we had a house that was big enough to entertain all those people. We had a really great turnout, it meant the world to my daughter as well as to us that people would make the drive. It is a little bit of a haul from Jackson, and man, we just felt so loved. I actually pulled my daughter aside at one point and I said, look around, see how loved you are. The room was just brimming with people, and I actually got choked up when I said that to her. It was just a really good moment of growth for me to be present and in the moment and appreciate what God had provided for us. And I was so thankful and hope that that is a core memory for my daughter as well. Um, and I gotta say a little note to those of you who haven't graduated a kid yet. Doing the graduation party before graduation and before all the family arrives was a huge win. Um, there were quite a few graduation parties the weekend after graduation, and my daughter was feeling the exhaustion of it all. They had already kind of been partied out, and I'm really glad that we got in on the front side. I'm also really glad that because our family is so far away, they don't have any knowledge or relationships with any of the people that we were inviting to the party. So it was really great to have the party and we could just focus on the people that we knew, and then separately the family came in and we could focus on the family and not have to be constantly like you know, introducing people and making sure that family was entertained and taken care of while all the other things were going on, and we were trying to like host a party as well. So that was a big win and something that my family and I have talked about. We'll definitely repeat for the next girls. And then the graduation ceremony itself was lovely. We had lovely weather, we were able to get lots of beautiful pictures, and honestly, I it still hasn't sunk in. I don't feel it doesn't feel real. My daughter and I have both been saying that quite a bit, and so I'm just learning this is part of it. There is so much going on, and with hosting family and with going to graduation parties and all the things, there isn't a whole lot of time to feel. So I think that that is part of it, but I also think that the biggest feelings are gonna come when she moves out because the feelings right now of graduation the next day feels the same because she's still living at home. And actually, over the summer, I think we're gonna see her a little bit more than what we saw her over the school year, because over the school year, school time mixed with gym time, mixed with job, mixed with homework, mixed with meeting up with friends and church and all the things added up to almost all of her time being outside of the home and without especially that big school and homework component. Now she's home. She has jobs and she has friends and things going on, but she actually hopefully will be home a little bit more for the summer. So I'm gonna try and drink that in as much as possible. Also, if you were wondering, I did have 12 family members in our house at the same time as our five family members for a total of only one night, actually. It worked out pretty well. My family came in stages, and the first family that came only overlapped two nights with the second big group of people who came, and one of those two nights there was a camping trip that my daughters and a couple of my nephews were able to go on, and so we didn't even have them in the house for that one night, so there was just the one night that everybody was there and it worked out, it worked out great, guys. I don't remember if I told you this, but I was definitely on the train of being overprepared and giving myself really unrealistic, ginormous expectations. I just talked to my counselor about this today. She was like, wow, like you definitely are still in the I wanted it to be the best experience ever for these people. And she was like, it's also okay for good enough. So you can be in the moment and have your expectations at a place that is realistic that you can actually be present in. So I'm learning, guys. I'm still learning, but along those lines of over-preparing and expecting for it to be the best ever. I had mattresses for everybody, I had bedding for everybody, I had pillows for everybody, I even had towels and washcloths for everybody, and I was actually gonna be a few washcloths short. And so ahead of time I went to Costco to stock up on washcloths, and my options were two washcloths that came with two hand towels. I didn't need hand towels, or 24 washcloths for the same price as the two washcloths. So, guys, about 24 washcloths in preparation for this whole thing, and then some of my family showed up with their own linens, and I was like, no, no, no, don't use your own linens. I literally bought lens so that everybody would be covered. Please use my linens. We've used like two, maybe three of the 24 washcloths, but I'm set now. So if you want to come and visit, this actually leads me to a really random question. And this is something that I would love to get your feedback on. You can just click send us fan mail. Do you use washcloths? I can't tell you the number of times that I have set out a towel, like a bath towel and a washcloth for my guests, and the majority of the time the washcloth doesn't get used. And it baffles me. I thought everybody used washcloths. Similarly, I have been a guest in many people's houses and they've had a bath towel but no washcloth offered to me. And I honestly didn't know what to do with myself. What is the consensus? Tell me now. Do you use washcloths? If you don't use washcloths, what are you doing? I don't understand. Help me understand so that I can be better prepared for my guests. That had nothing to do with graduation, but I did it, guys. One daughter graduated, two more to go. I feel really good about it. I had a one of the standout moments from this whole experience is the night after everybody left, all the family left, all the parties and all the ceremonies were done. My husband and I went out for our usual date night, and we just spent some time processing what just happened. This is something that I actually got from my pastor. And whenever we finish a big event at church, he talks with the staff about the biffs and the stomps. And I believe those are skiing terms. Biff is bad. That's when you biff or fall or uh get tripped up. And stomps are good. Stomps are when you have full control and can stomp stop in the snow. At least I assume that's what it means. I do know the stomps are good. I don't know why. Anyways, um, so we just went over the biffs and the stomps of what just happened, whether it was how we arranged people in the house, when we had our graduation party, what food we provided, what food we didn't provide, what choices that we made uh to take the family with us, what choices that we made to be at home. There was a myriad of things that we did, and uh we talked about what went well, what didn't go well, what didn't go well, how would we edit it for the next time, and I wrote those edits down, which I think is a key component so that I have something to look back on and remind myself. Oh, next time I'm gonna do this differently. So one random example, we had our daughters all sleep in our bedroom. Um, we had plenty of room for air mattresses in our room, and so we set up air mattresses so that they could stay in our bedroom. And while that went fine, I realized, oh, I really need a place to retreat to that I'm alone or just with my husband. And so next time we will arrange bedding differently so that we have our own room and put the girls somewhere else because that was really important and something that we learned would have been helpful for conserving energy and being able to show up as our best self. So just some food for thought if you have not hosted a graduation before. Those are the kind of things that we were processing that we took away from it. And I am just overall very thankful. I know a lot of you were praying for me or thinking of me and have checked in and looked. If you go on Instagram at joyabod.com, the dot is spelled out, D-O-T. You can see a couple of reels recapping that and see some great pictures from that time and celebrate with me. And if you were following along and praying and thinking of me, thank you. I felt it, I really appreciate it. Okay, guys, that's it for this week. We will see you in a couple of weeks here at the mentor's table. Bye for now.