three gifts from God in the midst of suffering

A talk/essay from Bill Stuntz, a Harvard Law prof (hat tip: Christianity Today)...

Survivors of some horrible plague or battle often find themselves wracked with guilt: why did I live while so many died? Though I had no battle scars, I used to feel a similar sense of guilt....Sometimes I would ask God: Why have you been so kind to me? Why have I gotten such an easy life? I don’t ask those questions anymore....

From there, he moves into his own Job-like story, before moving to the lessons to be learned from human suffering:

Such stories are common, yet widely misunderstood. Two misunderstandings are worth noting here. First, illness does not beget virtue. Cancer and chronic pain make me sick; they don’t make me good. I am who I was, only more diseased. Second, though I deserve every bad thing that has ever happened to me, those things didn’t happen because I deserve them. Life in a fallen world is more arbitrary than that....

Something important follows: The question we are most prone to ask when hardship strikes — why me? — makes no sense. That question presupposes that pain, disease, and death are distributed according to moral merit. They aren’t....

Thankfully, God gives better and more surprising gifts to those living in hard times. Three gifts are especially sweet. First, our God enjoys healing broken bodies...He also relishes redeeming the brokenness...Second, Jesus saves sinners — but that’s not all He does. By willingly accepting the worst suffering imaginable, Christ forever changed the character of living with pain and disease. Third, our God remembers us in our suffering — but passionless memory isn’t all He feels for those made in His image. Incredibly, the God of the Universe actually longs for and grieves with us in the midst of our hardship.

Consider those gifts in turn, and begin with the most surprising one: God usually doesn’t remove life’s curses. Instead, he redeems them....

From there, Stuntz elaborates on the three gifts, starting with the examples of Joseph and Jesus...