Jeremy L. Berg

I know several families who are walking through dire health situations at the moment. I have a friend in the hospital right now who is awaiting a heart transplant. Talking with him brought back our long, faith-stretching 30 days in the ICU with Isaak in 2023. He asked for some Scriptural encouragement, which led me to this reflection I wrote from a dark and scary hospital room on Romans 5:3-5. Let me post it again today for anyone who may need to hear it. -JB

“Suffering reveals,” I said to my pastor friend recently. It’s been a month of driving back and forth to Children’s Hospital to spend long, isolating hours in a room of beeps and buzzers and poop and vomit and tears and prayers and short-lived triumphs and soul-crushing set-backs. Life will deal most of us a major trial, a bout of suffering at some point. This will be one of those experiences that forevers marks our family. 

Keri and I have both said we will only begin to process this ordeal once we have our Isaak back home and life returning to normal. But the work of processing is an especially high priority for me, as a pastor and theology professor who spends my everyday life thinking about such things as soul growth and character formation, faith and prayer, evil and suffering, why there is so much bad in a world created by a good God, and how to walk through dark valleys clinging to the light of faith. One hopes in such moments that they will be able to practice, however imperfectly, what they have so often preached! 

I’ve held off theologizing on the Caring Bridge, and given myself permission to just write and emote as a weary father rather than an inspiring pastor or insightful theologian. But I suspect the reflections will eventually come as I begin to process. For starters, a dear friend has asked us the question, “What does hope look like for you today?” I’m not sure what’s behind this particular, carefully worded question, but I know it is profound and comes from a very thoughtful person who has themselves spent their share of long nights in the hospital. 

So let me take a stab at the question by riffing on a Scripture about hope we discussed as a church (coincidentally or providentially?) earlier this fall: Romans 5:3-5. 

“We also celebrate in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces patience, patience produces a well-formed character, and a character like that produces hope. Hope, in its turn, does not make us ashamed, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the holy spirit who has been given to us.” (Romans 5:3-5 NTFE)

The problem with this beloved verse is that many conclude that Paul is stating a universal fact or decreeing a divine promise, when he’s more likely inviting us to move toward the hoped for possibility and best-case-scenario for a mature believer in Christ. He says, “suffering produces patience” and “patience produces a well-formed character” and “a character like that produces hope.” But not always. It doesn’t have to. The chain of reality for many facing suffering may look far less rosy. 

For some:

Suffering produces weakness/anger/fear….which produces a depression or despair or …which produces emotional trauma or loss of faith or anger towards God, etc. 

For others:

Suffering produces cognitive dissonance or rage…which produces growing cynicism and eventual loss of faith…which produces an atheist.

Still for others:

Suffering produces greater dependence on God…which produces a more active prayer life…which produces stronger faith in God and a glowing testimony of God’s grace on the other side of suffering. 

Suffering reveals and produces, yes. But what? For me, this ordeal has revealed and produced a mixed bag. More active prayer life of late? Yes. Despair or loss of faith? No. Some angry shouting matches with God at certain times? Yep. Increased patience and more well-formed character on the other side? I can hope. 

When I taught this Scripture at church recently, I noted that suffering reveals the quality of our character, which itself is being shaped overtime by the narrative we’ve adopted, by the health and truthfulness of our inner dialog and self-talk that shapes our general outlook on life. Some people have a hopeful outlook. Some have a gloomy, doomsday outlook. Some have a poor-me victim outlook. Some have a God is working out a mysterious plan for all suffering outlook.

As I see it, Paul’s hoped-for scenario is that people of faith, when tested by suffering, might bring a more hope-full outlook into that trial, and that this more faith-filled, God-saturated outlook might lead the sufferer down “Love Boulevard” into “Hopeville.” 

But suffering might just as easily lead someone into “Shame Circle” to take up residence in “DespairVille”. In my take on Paul’s words, “Hope, in its turn, does not [necessarily] lead us to shame [but it could!], because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the holy spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). 

For nearly 30 days, we’ve been surrounded by people of faith who remind us that we inhabit a story where healing is possible, where suffering is redeemable, where God’s strength carries us in our weaknesses, where death has already been conquered so need not be feared (as much), and that God can and will bring good out of this bad. But not every family in every one of these rooms inhabits this hopeful story.

Keri and I have also have spent 40 years living ever deeper into and out of a story where God is not indifferent or distant in our suffering, but rather has come to dwell among us in human flesh to share in our human condition, and will “pour his love out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” But not every person in this hospital has this divine love pumping through their spiritual veins—yet.

So, “What does hope look like today?” For me, hope isn’t a wish or happy thought, a longed for result or creedal confession. Hope is the atmosphere of grace, the still waters we swim in on good days and bad. Hope is the neighborhood where we’ve built our spiritual house and are trying to raise a family. Hope is a spiritual address. We live in Hopeville on Hope Street. We breathe its pure air. We run across its soft grass. Hope’s water bubbles up from the spring of Living Water and runs out our faucet. We have planted our family’s fortunes in Hope’s rich soil. Like a person who lives their entire life and dies in the same small town, we live in Hope and someday we will die and be buried in Hope. 

Hope looks like clinging to a God who is not capricious or distant or indifferent, but a God who enters into our pain and suffering in Christ through the Spirit, who sits with us in the pit, and who will never leave nor forsake us — even while I shake my fist at Him sometimes asking, “How long, O Lord?” 

But Hope is not a feeling. 

Hope is not a belief. 

Hope is a person.

Hope has a name. 

Hope is Jesus the Christ. 

“And Hope [aka Jesus] does not disappoint” (Rom. 5:5).