How suffering and chronic pain can expose the toxic myths of modern faith—and reveal the perfect love that builds faith out of the pieces.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe that a loving God can allow any suffering for his children. Suffering, chronic pain, and illness feel like a punishment or a failure, a warning light blinking on the dashboard of our faith. Something is wrong. We turn inwards. We blame ourselves or our circumstances. Sometimes the well-meaning (or not-so-well-meaning) Christians around us suggest that if we were really trusting God, if our faith were really up to par, we would not be suffering this way at all.
But that’s not how God sees it at all.
In this episode of The Walk with Dr. John I. Snyder, author and speaker Sydney Bennett, author of Fearfully and Wonderfully Broken, tackles this modern faith myth. Having grown up in a pastor’s home with every answer to the problem of pain, Sydney found herself in a dark, disorienting season of sudden disability, chronic physical pain, and mental anguish.
What she discovered in those valleys was not that God had abandoned her, but that God’s presence in the middle of a storm looks very different from what we expect.
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No One Is Immune to Suffering
When we are suffering, our immediate reaction is often to question our own faith. Was it something I did? Is God punishing me?
Sydney’s story shows God’s love is not equated with our comfort. God’s sovereignty does not exclude pain, but it does reframe it. Suffering is a marker of our spiritual inadequacy. Instead, Scripture tells us that our trials put us in the refiner’s fire, where God reveals his infinite grace.
“Suffering isn’t a sign of spiritual failure, but rather a part of God’s faithful, loving presence in his refiner’s fire.”
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Recovering the Biblical Art of Lament
Sydney’s journey showed her that God never asks us to pretend like we are not suffering. While church culture sometimes makes us feel we need to gloss over our grief with passive Christian clichés, Scripture gives us a very different method: the Biblical art of lament.
The Psalms are filled with desperate honesty and heartache. Bringing your anger, confusion, and grief to God is an act of worship. When we bring our brokenness into the light of God’s presence, we discover that His shoulders are strong enough to carry our heaviest burdens.
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Held by His Faithfulness, Not Our Own
When suffering strikes, it can hit us so hard we may not even have the strength to pray. But God doesn’t demand that we muster up heroic levels of faith while we’re drowning. What holds us in these storms is not our fragile grip on him, but his faithfulness to us. In our deepest weakness, his love is unbroken. And nothing can separate us from it.
Our brokenness is not a freak interruption in God’s redemptive story. Rather, it is purposefully woven into it.
Key Takeaways from the Conversation:
- Honest Grief is Biblical: The Psalms give us explicit permission to bring our raw, unedited feelings directly before our God.
- Pain is Not Punishment: Trial is not evidence of God’s wrath or spiritual neglect, but a refining tool in the hands of a loving Father.
- Resting in His Grip: When you have no strength left to hold on to God, take heart: He is holding on to you.
Listen to the Full Episode
Whether you are navigating long-term illness, grief, or an unexpected season of deep unknowns, Sydney Bennett’s candid insights offer real, Gospel-centered hope. Listen to Sydney Bennett’s story on The Walk with Dr. John I. Snyder.
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