Mable's Suffering

        One of the hardest things about belief in God has to be the suffering in the world. Whether it is the philosophical probabilistic problem of evil or an emotional problem brought one by the loss of a loved one or for tribulations we face in our lives, suffering sucks. This is something most of us in the 1st world really only experience in small doses and where suffering and pain and evil is what keeps most of us in the first world from belief in God, in the third world it is the complete opposite. 

        I, myself, have endured some horrible things that I wouldn't wish on anyone. But I know that it was through suffering I was brought to God and through suffering I came to belief, through suffering I have been strengthened and through suffering I will be sanctified. My story is one you don't hear everyday and this story that I am posting now is one that is different and ultimately inspiring. It brought tears to my eyes, and I for one can't wait to meet Mabel so I can let her know just how much her example of endurance helps me to persevere through my own challenges. This is taken off of a transcript of one of William Lane Craig's Defenders class over at the Reasonable Faith website.  

In Christ

P.L.

In weakness, God’s power is displayed most manifestly. So Paul accepted all the more gladly the weaknesses and the sufferings that were his lot because God’s power is made perfect in weakness.

I can think of no better example of this than the story of Mabel, which was shared with me by one of my former colleagues at Westmont College, where I taught for a year. Some of you may have heard this story when we talked about the problem of evil, but I want to share it again because I think it illustrates the point that I am trying to make here about the perfection of God’s power in suffering.

Tom, my colleague, had the habit of visiting nursing homes in the area where he would try to bring some cheer into the lives of the people who were there. And he talks about how one Mother’s Day he visited a particular nursing home. He says:

On this particular day I was walking in a hallway that I had not visited before looking in vein for a few who were alive enough to receive a flower and a few words of encouragement. This hallway seemed to contain some of the worst cases. Strapped onto carts or into wheelchairs and looking completely helpless.

As I neared the end of this hallway I saw an old woman strapped in a wheelchair, her face was an absolute horror. The empty stare and white pupils of her eyes told me that she was blind. The large hearing aid over one ear told me that she was almost deaf. One side of her face was being eaten by cancer. There was a discolored and running sore covering part of one cheek and it had pushed her nose to the side, dropped one eye and distorted her jaw so that what should have been the corner of her mouth was the bottom of her mouth. As a consequence, she drooled constantly. I also learned later that this woman was 89 years old and that she had been bedridden, blind, nearly deaf and alone for 25 years. This was Mabel.

I don’t know why I spoke to her. She looked less likely to respond than most of the people I saw in that hallway. But I put a flower in her hand and said, “Here is a flower for you, Happy Mother’s Day.” She held the flower up to her face and tried to smell it and then she spoke and much to my surprise her words, though somewhat garbled because of her deformity, were obviously produced by a clear mind. She said, “Thank you, it’s lovely, but can I give it to someone else? I can’t see it you know, I’m blind.”

I said, “of course,” and I pushed her in her chair back down the hallway to a place where I thought I could find some alert patients. I found one and stopped the chair. Mabel held out the flower and said, “Here, this is from Jesus.”

It was then that it began to dawn on me that this was not an ordinary human being. . . . Mabel and I became friends over the next few weeks and I went to see her once or twice a week for the next three years. . . . It was not many weeks before I turned from a sense that I was being helpful to a sense of wonder. And I would go to her with a pen and paper to write down the things she would say. . . .

During one hectic week of final exams, I was frustrated because my mind seemed to be pulled in ten directions at once with all of the things that I had to think about. The question occurred to me, what does Mabel have to think about? Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, not even able to know if it is day or night. So I went to her and asked, “Mabel, what do you think about when you lie here?”

And she said, “I think about my Jesus.”

I sat there and thought for a moment about the difficulty for me of thinking about Jesus for even five minutes. And I asked, “What do you think about Jesus?” She replied slowly and deliberately as I wrote, and this is what she said,

I think how good he has been to me. He has been awfully good to me in my life, you know. . . . I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied. . . . Lots of folks would think I’m kind of old-fashioned. But I don’t care. I’d rather have Jesus, he is all the world to me.

And then Mabel began to sing an old hymn:

Jesus is all the world to me,
My life, my joy, my all.
He is my strength from day to day,
Without him, I would fall.
When I am sad, to him I go.
No other one can cheer me so.
When I am sad, he makes me glad.
He’s my friend.

This is not fiction. Incredible as it may seem, a human being really lived like this. I know, I knew her. How could she do it? Seconds ticked and minutes crawled, and so did days and weeks and months and years of pain without human company and without an explanation of why it was all happening – and she laid there and sang hymns. How could she do it?

The answer, I think, is that Mabel had something that you and I don’t have much of. She had power. Lying there, in that bed, unable to move, unable to see, unable to hear, unable to talk. . . , she had incredible power.

I think that that is such a beautiful illustration of this point: God’s power is made perfect in weakness and manifested there. So we are, indeed, walking sticks of dynamite; but this may not evidence itself in great triumph or great success in some persons, who are called upon to suffer for the Lord. It may manifest itself in incredible strength and perseverance in hardship.