Beautiful Suffering: Finding Purpose in Your Pain

By Kevin Richelieu, Dr. Sabine Elisee and Rob Rodriguez

What if God was in the business of healing the soul just as much as He was in the business of healing the body? What if that diagnosis you received was not because of a lack of faith? What if the call to have fellowship with Jesus also requires that we have fellowship with Him in His suffering? What if the inevitability of pain and suffering was able to bring about something beautiful in our lives?



If you are in a place where you are needing a practical theology of the idea of how to face suffering when it comes, Beautiful Suffering might be something that you should read to give you hope and strength to endure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kevin Richelieu
• Release date: Apr 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9780578265124

Book preview

Foreword

Beautiful Suffering. What Beauty can exist in suffering? The statement itself feels contradictory, even peculiar, for only in the economy of God does this oxymoron can make sense. As you read through these pages, though, you will find that the suffering you are facing is not pointless. 

In this book, Pastor Kevin Richelieu boldly shares his personal story of suffering and the suffering of others. This suffering took him on a journey to discover what he never expected. These experiences of suffering are paired with key Scriptures that Pastor Kevin clearly explains, highlighting the origin, seasons, and purpose of suffering.

I have had the privilege to watch the author journey through stages of development that have built in him character and compassion. In 2002, as one of his youth leaders, I saw Pastor Kevin—a precocious adolescent—commit himself to examining life through the lens of who God says He is. This stage of development and study in his life laid the foundation of self-identity reinforced by the power, promise, and truth of God that prevails past circumstance and emotion—an unyielding foundation that anchors our existence and prepares us for when (not if) suffering occurs. Pastor Kevin did and continues to do the personal work that fortifies his foundation and filters life through the acknowledgement that God is for me.

As his friend during Kevin’s teen years, I observed him wrestle with and walk through the suffering of what if. During that stage of his life, he began to plan the pursuit and courtship of his now wife Deborah. Like many young men embarking on the journey of love, the possibility of rejection, scenarios of what if, or feelings that were not mutual would frequently distress his thoughts. Suffering the unknown can feel both tormenting and paralyzing, causing missed opportunities and the expense of emotional strength on scenarios that may never occur. Yet his decision to walk through that suffering brought about an opportunity to join his life with Deborah’s, establish their family, and discover the beauty that followed a period of the unknown. 

Now as his friend and medical physician, we have journeyed together through his suffering of health. I say all of this to reassure you that the author of this book writes empathetically. Empathy is often confused with sympathy, but you can only be empathetic toward a person who has fallen off a bike if you yourself have fallen off a bike. Likewise, the beautiful suffering Pastor Kevin shares about in these pages can encourage us and give us guidance in the solitude that comes with pain. It is a place he has uncovered and in which he has attained the beauty present in suffering. 

Are you suffering today? Have your tears become your food? Does the angst of the unknown keep you up at night? Do you wonder if there is some unknown sin or wrongdoing in your life? Have you searched high and low, looking for solutions that only leave you with more doubt and questions? Could it be that you too are in the midst of a beautiful suffering?

As you read through these pages, you will begin to see your story of suffering on display but now with deeper insights. I expect that you too will know for yourself that your suffering is not in vain, that your tears are not lost or unseen in your moments of desolation.  Just as David ran toward Goliath—the cause of pain and suffering to David and his family—in Beautiful Suffering, Pastor Kevin Richelieu reminds us that although walking through the journey of suffering is difficult, it is a journey we must walk to discover the beauty in suffering.

Acknowledgments

My journey through beautiful suffering has not been easy, but having some key people in my life has made a huge difference. I would like to acknowledge a few of them in this moment.

I first want to thank my beautiful wife, Deborah Richelieu, for journeying with me through such a difficult season. God truly gave me His best when He allowed me to marry you, Deb. I cannot imagine the weight you had to carry not knowing what was going on with me in my health.

Thank you, Pastor Tom and the Christian Life Center board of trustees, for approving my taking a sabbatical. Pastor Tom, I know it must have been tough being a pastor to me while also prioritizing how the church needed to move forward if I was not going to make it back. Caring about me individually while also making sure the church is taken care of must have been absolutely a weight to bear.

Thank you, Pastor Nadine, for always speaking life into me as I am constantly plagued by a spirit of fear and a sense of inferiority. Thank you for always seeing God in me and calling me upward. Thank you for meeting up at Starbucks that day; it meant the world to me.

Thank you, Julia, for providing sound and transformative Christian therapy. God has used you to completely change my entire morning routine.

Thank you, Dr. Sabine, for providing medical care by combining the physical and cognitive.

Thank you, Rebecca, Jenn C., Dr. Crosby, Danielle, Stephanie, Peter, and Jenn U., for allowing me to share your beautiful suffering stories in this book. May your stories bring hope to many people all over the world and for generations to come.

Thank you, Tim and Rob, for the support in getting the art direction for this book. You really helped bring this book to life creatively.

Thank you, Lois, for helping with the final rounds of editing this book. You were a complete joy to work with.

Thank you, Hugh, for being there for me at several hospital visits. I still remember you even being willing to bring your laptop and work at the hospital while I completed an EMG and an MRI. I am so honored to have you in my life. I am still believing we will both live to a good old age; just don’t forget to take your lunch break so we can make it.

Thank you, Rhyann; I felt all of your prayers.

Introduction

I thought I was going to die, not realizing I had been dying for over a decade. Not having any answers to what was going on in my body led me into a mild depression. It felt as if I was suddenly on my way toward the last days of my life. Upon further examination and a series of physical and mental assessments, I realized that I had been making small, poor decisions that over time grew to this point where I am at now. Some painful moments in life are all of a sudden, and others result from different factors over time that go unaddressed.

I could not understand why God would allow me to suffer. I have been a Christian since 2001 and have never turned away since. I had experienced so much favor from walking in the will of God for most of my life. Wouldn’t that exempt me from having to go through suffering? I mean, shouldn’t the ‘bad’ people suffer? Why would God, who wants good for me, allow me to go through such a bad situation?

I know you may be wondering what exactly happened to me. Later on, I will get more into that, but I realized that it was not so much what was happening to me as much as it was what was happening for me. I realized that I needed to walk through this season of pain. What felt like the longest and worst season of my life became probably the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

Could anything good come from suffering? Are there insights that we get to lean into through our pain? Is there a way that God can be glorified even as we suffer?

I began to notice that many people in the world going through pain and chronic illness are viewed as having a lack of faith. Some of the most faith-filled people have an incurable disease. In many cases, their faith is more refined and stronger than those not experiencing the discomforts of living with a chronic illness. If anything, many who have gone through immense suffering become those who love more extravagantly.

This made me realize something. Suffering can be beautiful when we learn to surrender, and some of the most ‘sick’ people in the world are more ‘healed’ than those who perhaps are not ‘sick.’

This issue goes beyond physical sickness. I wonder if we have been limiting the Christian life to the ideology that Christians should not suffer and that the Christian walk must be void of suffering.

Have we reduced the gospel to a life of happiness, bliss, and prosperity? Have we made the good news a trivial concept of living happily ever after? Are we missing out on opportunities to rethink how we view suffering?

Before we go into my personal ‘beautiful suffering’ journey, I would like us to look at the origin of suffering. Attempting to live a life void of suffering can lead to disappointments and frustrations. Suffering is inevitable. However, if we can learn to surrender to God in the midst of the sufferings we experience in life, good can come from the suffering. After we look at the origin of suffering, I will share some insights I have gleaned from a tough season of suffering I had to endure. I pray that these insights I share will help you normalize the inevitability of suffering and reframe how you see it, in order that God can be glorified in it.

Chapter 1

The Garden of Eden

The word suffering in Greek is pathēma, which means hardship, pain, or affliction.¹ To truly understand the nature of suffering, we must go back to the beginning.

Before we dive deeply into beautiful suffering, let’s take some time to set up a framework for where suffering began and to help us understand why suffering is inevitable. Suffering originates in a garden that predates the Garden of Gethsemane. To understand where suffering came from, we must go back to the Garden of Eden, where God placed Adam and Eve to dwell. That garden was a form of paradise (Eden means paradise in Hebrew), in the sense that man and woman were there to have communion with God and dominion over everything He had created. There was no sickness, childbirth, blood, sweat, and tears—just glorious days in a glorious garden with a glorious God.

God gave Adam specific instructions that he could eat from any tree in the Garden except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This would seem an easy guideline to follow, considering there must have been much beautiful agriculture for Adam and Eve to enjoy. Why would God not want them to partake of this one tree, and why would they want to, if they had access to everything else in the Garden?

Our human nature tends to crave what we cannot touch. Once a restriction is put on something, our flesh automatically takes our eyes off what we can have and only focuses on the things we cannot have. This is why in the Book of James it says that when we are tempted, it is our own desires that entice us. God is not tempting us.

When tempted, no one should say, God is tempting me. For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death (Jas 1:13-15, NIV).

Satan, represented in Genesis as a serpent, knew this and that all he needed to do was challenge what Adam had been told. He did so by playing with their desire to touch the thing they were forbidden to touch. Eve takes a bite, then gives the fruit to Adam, who takes a bite, and then right there, sin enters the world. It did so because God gave humankind the free will to choose to obey or disobey, and they disobeyed. God intentionally allowed free will to exist even in paradise because He wanted humankind to have the choice to love and obey Him without being forced. We clearly see that free will when God gives Adam the rules and regulations of the Garden of Eden but still allows Him to name different things in the Garden. God could have just not given him a choice, or He could have taken away human desire to eat of the tree.

However, God gave them the choice.

God knew that for our love for Him to be authentic, we had to have the choice to love Him and follow His commands—or not. We live in a world where we all, in our human nature, like to have a choice in our decisions. In fact, when we feel that someone or something has stripped us of our choice, we tend to rebel and demand that we have a right to make our own choices. We want to choose what we eat, how we vote, what we drive, where we live, where we work, what we wear to work, where we go to church, what type of music we want to listen to—and the list goes on and on. We must have it our way; otherwise, we do not know how to exist when things do not go our way.

We must realize that when God decided to give humankind free will, not only did that give us the choice to decide to love Him or not, but as evidenced in the Garden of Eden, that free will opened the door to sin. Sin came about because humankind could choose. I do not want to rush past this because I want to both break some myths in the Christian faith as well as help renew our perspective of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Much of what we face results simply because of the sin that exists in humanity, which causes suffering to be inevitable.

God did not cause sin, but He chose to give people the choice to love Him or not. Because within ourselves we possess a sinful nature, we tend to rebel. God was still willing to allow choice because having an authentic relationship with Him as opposed to a mechanical relationship with us was worth it to Him. Since free will leads to choices, human choices led to sin. Now, as a result of sin existing, we have to accept that pain and suffering is inevitable. Suffering is simply a part of life for us as God’s creation. When we do not properly grasp this reality when we do suffer, suffering becomes strange. This is why Peter says: Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you (1 Pet 4:12, KJV).

Suffering becomes strange to us because we have bought into a utopian version of the Christian faith where we believe that things should go our way and that any pain and suffering we experience is the enemy attacking us. I firmly believe in spiritual warfare, and I truly believe a spirit realm exists by which Satan wages against God’s people to get them to renounce their faith and walk into a life of apostasy. Simultaneously, not everything we face comes as an attack of the enemy. Much of what we face results simply because of the sin that exists in humanity, which causes suffering to be inevitable. The sooner we grasp this concept, the sooner we can learn to step into the process of beautiful suffering.

For God, the Creator of the universe, the relationship with humans is always about love. He ever perfects His love in us, and our love cannot be perfected without facing the reality of pain and suffering as followers of Jesus Christ.

John Mark Comer, whose ministry has truly impacted my life, believes that some suffering is senseless, not serving any purpose but rather existing as a byproduct of human depravity in sinsational earth. As simple as that may sound, I believe that view can help many people. I know some people out there get frustrated every time they are inconvenienced with something and may ask themselves, Why is God allowing this to happen to me?

For example, I hate going to the DMV. In fact, I hate having to work on any aspect of paperwork or important documentation that comes with being an adult. One thing I hate about going to the DMV is when I am missing the necessary documents. I sometimes feel that the person at the front desk enjoys watching you have to go home because you are missing documents. I remember a time when I needed to renew my license. I was not bothered by it because I knew