We’re 9 months into the year no one wanted to have–a year where my sister Heidi, 31 years old with 4 little kids, is very, very sick with a rare blood cancer called MDS. Along the way, the treatments or tests or what-have-you ruined her kidneys, and now the very dialysis that’s keeping her alive is preventing her from getting the bone marrow transplant that could actually save her from the cancer.

For a while, there was much blogging. Heidi and I both wrote updates and posted them to social media. There were tears, but there was praise. We felt certain that God would be near us. I wrote about this in a whole series of deeply-felt posts (you don’t have to look too far back on my blog to find them). As the waves of sorrow rolled through me, I trusted that somehow, God was doing something beautiful. We just couldn’t see it yet. I clung to hope. I clung to Scripture. I clung to God and he clung right back.

Fast forward to now. The transplant Heidi was supposed to get in March of this year is nowhere closer to happening–is in fact, further away than at first. Heidi is exhausted. And not sure if the fight is worth it, or for how long it will be. She’s in pain, and nauseous, and anxious. As we’ve been facing a possible end to this story that we so desperately didn’t want, two weeks ago, I lost it. I started falling apart at work in a ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ situation and then kept right on falling apart.

It’s like all the stress and pain from nine months crashed down on my head and I was trapped in the cruel grip of a world that keeps grinding on. A life that won’t stop for me, no matter how bad it gets. I’m never off the hook–I have to keep going to work, making meals, dropping kids off at school, reading them stories, attending to their minuscule and seemingly never ending needs. Nothing stopped for me. And how dare I expect that? What made me so special? Nothing. I wasn’t special. Everyone lost people. Everyone suffered. How dare I lose it like this.

I cried the whole way home with my daughter in the back seat. And the first little whispers starting coming into my head–I should hurt myself. Maybe kill myself. At the very least start thinking about how to do such a thing.

The old-fashioned phrase of what I experienced that day, culminating with a horrific night after the kids were in bed, might be nervous breakdown. Uncontrollable weeping. Self-hatred. Shouting obscenities and hitting myself in my back yard. I hated myself. I hated life. It felt like plummeting down that first hill on a roller coaster. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. More than something I did, it felt like something that was happening to me. Of course I did it–I said those regrettable things and no one else–but from a place of such weakness that my self-control was utterly gone. There was nothing to hang onto. I was free-falling. I started threatening to cut myself–I wanted to, desperately.

Adam just listened. And listened. All night, he listened as I cried and raged and lashed out. I said terrible things to him, and to God. Ugliness spewed out of me. I had so much anger and disappointment and rage at God for leaving us here to suffer without him. And then he demanded praise anyway? No. He was not getting that from me. He was supposed to carry me through this, to shoulder my burdens, but he didn’t. He left. He left me.

Shattered.

Broken.

Those words are in the lyrics of so many songs. But I never knew what it really felt like to be broken until that night of madness.

Why was I so desperate to hurt myself? Because I wanted to brandish my physical wounds and say, See? THIS IS HOW MUCH I’M HURTING. You think I should be volunteering for school functions and committees. You think I should smile at you and make small talk because we’re polite, functional adults here. You think because I show up at the office dressed with my hair combed I’m coping. You think I should be fine. But I am not fine. I am breaking. I CAN’T. I’M DONE.

I’ve had overwhelming sorrow and doubt during this journey already. But nothing like this. God turned his back. How could he leave me in this state? How could he let me shatter to pieces in my back yard like that? Why won’t he make himself felt? Where is the comfort of the Spirit?

How could you, God?

That night, I lost my mind. I literally went crazy. I couldn’t bear that the same God we tell ourselves is always there and never leaves you, was gone. That night, I couldn’t bear myself either. Every bad word you can think of, I called myself. Because what was my problem that I couldn’t take the same pain that everyone else on planet earth has to taste? I was disgusting, and weak, and self-destruction seemed like the only possible relief for the fire in my soul.

I never understood self-loathing before. I never understood the desire to harm yourself. Now I get it. It’s what happens when God turns his back, and you stretch out your arms but all there is, is darkness.

To be continued. Which is my way of saying, God, if you care how this story turns out, you’ll have to step in and change the course of everything. Because right now, it feels like I’m hurtling into the darkness and crashing will be a relief.

Amen.

[Side note for anyone who might be very worried right now: this is not a “cry for help” post but an important chapter in a journey that, no matter how tired I am, will continue towards its conclusion, whatever that may be. Many of you have been a huge part of this story already, and I feel that it’s important to chronicle the darkness as well as the light. I am not considering self-harm or suicide. That was a one-night dance with insanity. Also, I’m seeking counseling and now have anti-anxiety medicine at my disposal. The help you can give now is to cry out to God on my behalf, because without him, it is all despair, and darkness, and horror.]

We’ve all heard it–this idea that when we’re suffering, it’s God testing us. That he sent our pain, our cancer, our circumstances, the death of a loved one, in some kind of sovereign refining plan. There are even hymns we sing that encourage this notion.

Which, I believe, could not be further from the truth. In fact, I find this idea so wrong and twisted that there are hymns I simply won’t sing at church. One of the greatest offenders, to me, is the hymn I Asked the Lord. One verse says this:

Lord, why is this, I trembling cried
Wilt Thou pursue thy worm to death? 
“Tis in this way” The Lord replied 
“I answer prayer for grace and faith”

Even typing this, I’m shaking my head. No. When I pray for grace and faith, God doesn’t rub his hands together and say, “great, now you’re going to hurt.” He does not pursue his ‘worm to death’ when I ask him for grace and faith. Instead, he draws near to his daughters and sons and walks with us through our suffering.

Does it sometimes feel like things in the world are pursuing me to death? Absolutely. But is God the cause? No. He is the remedy. He is the only one who can make that misery into something beautiful and productive. God doesn’t force me to drink a cup of suffering–Jesus already did that for me. No. God redeems my suffering.

I’m not going to make a huge argument here as to why I don’t believe that a healing God is also the hurter, and why I won’t sing about God bringing about pain to burn away our rough edges. Instead, what I want to meditate on today is this:

Suffering is a test–but not of us–of God.

Suffering is the hot iron that jolts us out of the day-to-day and forces us to ask all the big questions. Is God there? Does he care? What does this mean? How can he be good when he’s letting this happen? What promises has he actually made? What can I hold on to when everything is falling apart?

I think that God comes to our table of suffering eager to answer these questions. Eager to sit with us as we cry, and curse, and rage. Eager to simply be with us. Eager to listen, and comfort, and teach. Eager to make himself known.

In suffering, God invites us to put him to the test. The darkest place is the truest test of light–its existence, its brightness, its warmth. The saddest place is a test of God’s joy and peace. (Is is possible? It is enduring? Is it made of strong stuff?) The worst news is a test of God’s good news. (Is it better than the bad news? Is it so much bigger as to dwarf the bad news?)

Suffering is a test.

And God has already told us the outcome: He will pass the test. But he will subject himself to it time and again, because through it he proves himself to us. Makes himself known. Over . . . and over . . . and over.

Through suffering, things that we believed can become things we know. Because they are tested. Through suffering, things we hoped before can be proved true. Because they are tested.

God, in his mercy, takes our strands of suffering and uses them. He takes destructive things like cancer and uses them to build things–relationships, love, faith. He takes the otherwise meaningless and imbues it with meaning. He didn’t cause the suffering, but he has committed himself to make it worth it.

Can you imagine that? An economy of grace where God has promised to use evil for good? A God who’s not just getting rid of evil, or even erasing it, but using it? Who twists it to his purpose? Who uses it in my life as a test of Himself, by which I can know him more?

Whatever the outcome of Heidi’s cancer, I know I’ll be able to say,

When Heidi had cancer, I met God.

That is a victory worth singing about.