When Will the Pain End? Parents' Call to Be Sorrow Bearers

This is another early excerpt from my book-in-progress, When Christian Parents Hurt. But it's relevant for every Christian--not just parents. This chapter discusses an aspect of faith I rarely hear anyone discuss, though Dietrich Bonhoeffer addressed it in The Cost of Discipleship: The call of the Christian to be a sorrow bearer. Pain and spiritual angst are necessary parts of being a faithful believer living in a fallen world. Because of the sin around us, our hearts will break and keep breaking, but still, we are called to join in the sufferings of Christ to love and to keep on loving.

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Parents often want resolution with their wayward child and their child’s full salvation in part because they want the pain they feel over their children’s spiritual state to end.

But what if it doesn’t?

What if our call as parents is to bear the sorrow we face over our children instead of eliminate it?

Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4), speak of a call on the people of God that Christian teachers don’t talk about very much—the call to lament and grieve over the evil in this world. Ezekiel was told, “Go throughout the city of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of those who grieve and lament over all the detestable things that are done in it” (9:4). God counted only those who mourned as faithful. Because we are called to live for truth and beauty we must, by definition, lament sin, lies, and corruption. It’s in our new spiritual nature to do so.

Here’s the thing: in this world sin, lies and corruption will continue, so the sensitive Christian life will remain a life of mourning. We will have much joy in the Lord, but we must endure much sorrow in the world.