Not the Way Things Were Meant to Be

[This post is in a weekly devotional series called Everything New. Sign up here if you’re interested.]

When I visited Esther in her tin shed in a Nairobi slum, I found myself talking to the person closest to Job in the Old Testament that I’d ever met. I didn’t know at that moment that she was within a couple of weeks of dying from AIDS.

This slum on the east side of the city is a cluster of huts and sheds made with odd-shaped pieces of corrugated sheet metal, or stacks of sharp black stones. Tens of thousands of people are crammed into this area. A meandering path takes you through the clusters of shacks and you step over the trickling streams of putrid open sewers. Children stare as you walk past. Adults give a glance and even a friendly greeting. My Kenyan host, Jane, who runs an amazing ministry of mercy for mothers with AIDS, led the way into the 6×8 foot shed that was Esther’s and her daughter’s home.

Reclining on her bed, and too thin and weak to do more than raise herself on one elbow, Esther greeted us with a smile. I sat on the corner of her daughter’s bed near a couple of pots and an alcohol stove on the ground. Jane had Esther flip through the yellowed plastic pages of a small picture album, which brought smiles to Esther’s face as she briefly identified who was in each picture. There was one of Esther on her wedding day, a tall and strikingly beautiful woman wearing the cleanest white and beaming the whitest smile, standing outside in the Nairboi sunshine. It was hard to believe this was the same person lying, emaciated, in that shack. A few pages over was a photo looking straight down on her husband’s wooden casket lowered halfway into his grave by men holding two ropes. He contracted HIV and developed AIDS first. Esther contracted the disease from him. Mercifully, their daughter has tested negative for HIV.

Esther’s arms were covered with sores. She blinked slowly and weakly; her voice was raspy. But she spoke of the good things with joy. I learned that even when she was quite sick, she had given her testimony in church, and that she never gave up loving the Christian songs she had led her whole life. The women, like Jane, who helped her get good nutrition and who were genuine friends were visible signs of God’s grace flowing amid the sewers. When she had been strong enough, Esther worked with the other HIV mothers in a small warehouse making beautiful rugs. Someone was helping her do something constructive while she had strength, instead of consigning her to the number of the cursed.

“Curse God, and die,” Job’s wife had told him when he was in a similar situation. Others do give up faith. But untold numbers reach the extremes that Esther did and cling to God right to the last moment. Those who choose atheism relinquish the only hope we have when all other hope is gone.

When we look at Scripture, the overarching truth we find is this: suffering is not the way things were meant to be, but God is moving things toward redemption.

There are numerous sources of suffering in the world. First of all is Satan’s destructive intent-that malevolent evil force at work in the world. It’s a voice that comes through the crafty serpent of Genesis 3: “Did God really say, you must not eat from any tree in the garden?” Untold suffering has happened in the world because people have chosen to succumb to temptation no matter the harm that may come to others. In the story of Job, Satan says that he has been “roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it,” the picture of a pure predator. The Bible teaches that there is an Evil One who has an interest in all human suffering. When the apostle Paul is talking about a “thorn in the flesh” that he had, which was most likely a physical impediment, he calls it a messenger of Satan. Paul asked God to take it away-a prayer that we are always permitted to pray. Three times he pleaded with God. And even this apostle, who knew more about the power of God and the reality of evil than most of us do, knew this pain might be taken away and might not.

He came to believe that God was giving grace in many other ways and that God’s power would be seen in his weakness.

That story can be told many times over. Some of the people with the strongest faith show that strength at the hour of their greatest weakness. That is why evil does not have the final word. Evil may delight in pain, but evil never cashes in on pain.

Excerpt from Putting the Pieces Back Together: How Real Life and Real Faith Connect. Free DVD available now.

Next time: the damage human beings cause.