Following is a list of guidelines for walking through suffering with God. Find the ones that are helpful to you.
- Focusing on destiny helps to overcome trials. Spend a couple of minutes each day picturing your destiny in the perfect community of love with God and his followers.
- Honestly express your heart to God. Find Psalms or other passages that express your heart and use them to pray to God. If you are truly angry with God then respectfully express it to him with your emotions.
- Spend at least 20 minutes in solitude twice a week in order to become aware of the thoughts and feelings that are coming up inside. You can just sit and let them come or ask yourself some questions. When they come up then you can begin to process them. This will help keep the flow of your heart flowing freely and not bottled up.
- Suffering often includes grief so remember that the usual stages of grief are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. (The last four can be found in the Psalms.) They can overlap, repeat, and follow different progressions. You need to let your soul go through what it needs to go through.
- Do not accept the advice to just praise God and rejoice. This does not fit with Scripture and it is disrespectful to give this advice to someone in substantial suffering. Hopefully, you can reach the point of praising God but it is important to practice the honest interaction with God that we find in the Psalms and other Scripture first.
- Suffering almost always leads us to surrender something to God. Try to discover it and surrender it as soon as possible.
- While you have the pain, don’t keep mentally trying to push it out of you. It isn’t really possible. Also, this will drain you and weaken you against temptations.
- Find an individual or group that will sympathize with you, encourage you and even provide wisdom for you. Hopefully, you can encourage each other. This may be very hard to find especially for men but it is very powerful. It is a huge gift for someone to give you sympathy and encouragement.
- Be aware that some people will give bad advice to those who suffer, as Job’s friends did. The longer you suffer the worse this becomes. If the reason for the suffering isn’t obvious some think you must have some fault. Some will tell you to constantly thank God and rejoice. Some will keep insisting it is demonic oppression even though you can’t find any. Some will get frustrated at their inability to help you and begin to avoid you because they want to avoid feeling their weakness. Some don’t want to be around sincere believers who are suffering because it weakens their faith.
- Look for the good thing that might come out of the suffering or painful event. Continually, thank him for what he can do through the suffering.
More coming next week.
