“The first thing you need to know is that you must not put a dead body on the roof of your car.”

This was lesson number one that my cultural helper shared after months of plodding along working at the village health clinic. The man was an elder in our local church, wise and trusted in our community. He knew well that death and dying, of the young and old, were a part of everyday life in this marginalized, forgotten part of the world.

And he knew that we Westerners did not always know how to handle it.

Landing in that place, the village whose name means “the end of the road”, was a crash course in wrestling with God through suffering. Even now, I have flashbacks from that season in which my wife and I had two young children.

• Dead bodies in the middle of the switchback roads, the result of overloaded vehicles colliding with equally overflowing motorbikes
• Malnourished children who sucked on glucose bags to assuage the pain of hunger
• Alcohol bags littering the yard from neighbors who had lost all hope
• Countless children dying in pain from sickle cell disease, where we historically had one of the highest concentrations of sickle cell trait in the world
• Buying medicine and supplies for the clinic, knowing that children would likely die that day if we had shown up without them
• Amulets hanging from trees and babies’ waists to ward off evil spirits
• The line of people that would show up at our front door in the morning asking for financial assistance or wanting medical help

Thankfully, we had not yet made the mistake of putting a dead body on the top of our car, but we certainly had made similar blunders.

What do we do with death and dying, pain and suffering, when it seems endless?

A few years and two more kids later, we were living in Kenya and working at a rural Christian mission hospital. I was working in the Casualty Department, and it was not uncommon for family members or ambulance drivers to bring a sick patient into the waiting bay and then suddenly disappear.

Sometimes, nurses or other staff would rush off if they sensed that a patient was actively dying. You did not want to be implicated in someone’s death or thought to be working against something that was fated to happen. There was a culture of fear, suspicion, and anxiety wrapped up in someone actively transiting from the physical world to the spiritual one.

Those who had encountered Jesus, however, had a completely different outlook on the situations that came through the doors of our hospital. These were the ones who personally knew the God who had conquered death, who dispelled darkness with light, who commanded the winds and waves and yet cared enough to give breath and life each and every day. Some of them were chaplains, some nurses, some janitorial staff who diligently washed our sidewalks during the night, offering prayers in the breezeway. 

These saints knew the power of the gospel, and they knew that Jesus was the ultimate healer and redeemer of the most helpless situations. They knew that prayer was as powerful as medicine, and that no intervention would save a life outside the will of God. 

Because they knew that each of us had a pre-determined number of days to be on this earth, I found myself chastised on more than one occasion for anticipating that a patient would not survive their illness or severe injuries. 

“How do you know what God is going to do? Do you claim to be more powerful than Him or have a special knowledge of His will?” a nurse would ask me with an astonished and convicting look.

They were right. Do we live under the pretense of knowing or understanding God’s purposes for someone’s life? As image bearers of Christ, we are called to enter into the liminal space between heaven and earth and use whatever wisdom and grace He gives us to alleviate suffering and proclaim hope—regardless of the outcome. No situation is dire in the Kingdom of God because grace flows down to the lowest point in the valley of the shadow of death.

The Testimony of G.

One day a patient named G. arrived by ambulance to the waiting bay. He was an 18-year-old young man in need of dialysis for his chronic kidney disease. When he was removed from the vehicle, he was unresponsive and did not have a pulse. A nurse was providing rescue breaths with an ambu bag, but that was the only intervention he was receiving.

Having recently finished teaching another life-support class to staff in the hospital, I immediately jumped on the stretcher. I began doing chest compressions while several others pushed the stretcher uphill and through the outdoor breezeway of the hospital toward the ICU. 

Crowds parted like the Red Sea and astonished onlookers were baffled at what they were seeing. A hospital that intervenes when someone has already died?

It was unknown how long G. had been without a pulse, but after several rounds of CPR, they were able to get one back and subsequently hook him up to a ventilator. It wasn’t until after this time that the medical team began questioning if their interventions were the ethically right thing to do in this case.

Did they just save someone only for him to have an anoxic brain injury?

Does his family have the resources to afford a prolonged ICU hospitalization?

How will his chronic condition complicate his recovery? What if we have caused prolonged suffering?

Did we use valuable resources on someone who only has a small chance of surviving?

Later on that day, while still debating the wisdom of this decision, G. began to move. He began making purposeful movement. He began trying to pull out his breathing tube. Within a few hours, he was alert and extubated, and able to talk with the ICU team.

Subsequently, G. was moved to the regular medical ward, where he shared a room with about thirty other men who were being treated for various illnesses. He was visited by a hospital chaplain who explained to him what had happened and how God had saved him for a purpose. He shared the good news of the gospel with him, and G. received new life.

In the days ahead, G. began reading the Bible given to him by the chaplain. The chaplaincy team returned and continued to pray for him and encouraged him in his new faith. G. became stronger and began sharing his testimony with others on the male medical ward.

By the time G. was discharged, those who had questioned the ethics of intervening in his demise were convinced that it was truly God who had saved him. The resources used were His. The knowledge needed to intervene came from Him. The miraculous recovery and G.’s rebirth in Christ were all at the hand of a good and loving God who has purposes beyond our wildest imaginations.

Standing in the Gap with Hope

The Bible is honest with its good and hard, tragic and triumphant stories that are woven all throughout Scripture. From the first murder of Abel to the martyrs in the book of Acts, we see iniquity as a constant theme woven throughout the story of humanity.

The enemy’s insidious claim in the face of this brokenness is that either God isn’t actually good or He isn’t actually powerful enough to stop the unending flow of pain in this world. And to be honest, some days it feels easier to believe the lie than to hang on to what I know is true.

Working and living in a low-resource, marginalized part of the world, the needs steadily flow like a river outside your doorstep. Sometimes the river floods its banks, but never does it dry up. Unfortunately, there are too many endings that are not like G.’s.

Too many people die from preventable diseases.

Kids fall out of mango trees.

They get hit by motorbikes on their way to school.

Toddlers fall into a cooking fire.

Cancer is not caught until its late stages.

Diagnoses get missed due to lack of funds or lack of resources.

Many days feel like more of an opportunity for lament than for praise. But can the two go hand in hand without one expression diminishing the other?

I would argue that not only they can, but they must. Bringing our anger, exhaustion, confusion, and complaints before God joins our heart to His, which itself burns against injustice and breaks with compassion toward the suffering. When our spirits groan inwardly with His (Rom. 8:23), we are showing up at His table, answering His invitation to take up our cross and follow Him.

The reason we know the character of our God is because He came down to us, indeed became one of us. He humbled Himself in the form of a servant, and bore the weight of all of our sin when He suffered and died on the cross. The Father’s complete wrath was poured out on the Son so that now we, His beloved creation, no longer have to suffer without hope. Death has been defeated.

1 Peter 4:12 tells us, “Do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.” God does not leave us with the bitter taste of suffering and death in our mouths. Jesus’ resurrection reminds us that, regardless of the outcome, His grace is doing a good work through even the worst circumstances. His very presence, though admittedly hard to feel at times, is pushing back the darkness, dispelling the enemy’s contagious lie. His Spirit is sustaining us, producing the fruit of humility, patience, compassion, and hope.

But we cannot endure the suffering of this world alone. Mark 1:13 tells us that when Jesus was in the wilderness, even He was being ministered to by angels. And when He established His ministry of ushering in the Kingdom of God, He chose twelve to join Him in the work, and many others to participate in supporting it. Certainly He could have accomplished the job on His own, but He was demonstrating that the Kingdom is a community that reflects the triune nature of the God we serve.

We need one another.

I needed my Ugandan friend to show me the way when I felt lost and overwhelmed. G. needed someone to share the gospel with him and provide him with hope and purpose. The staff in our hospital needed to see that God has given them tools to physically rescue someone from death.

We all need the body of Christ with which to regularly break bread, lament, cry out, and offer praise together. In so doing, we accept the invitation of our triune God to sit at His table, eat of His body, and usher in His Kingdom to a hungry, broken, and gloriously beautiful world.