Last night I was studying the letters of Ephesians through Philemon; and the theme of suffering came up repeatedly. I saw Rabbi Sha'ul (Paul) talking about suffering far more than I noticed him taking about faith or law. He spoke about suffering and the hope of Jesus on the other side of suffering, both in this life and beyond.
Then this morning I saw yet another shiney advertisement promising to set me up with the skills to get millions of followers and be a paid keynote speaker. I shook my head and scrolled past.
But then something in me paused...
I really did used to expect that one day I would have millions of followers "just like Kenneth Copeland", Pentecostal days. But instead, I found myself having emotional meltdowns and while some people found me fun to listen to, most people didn't like me. I was disappointed with that illusion... Delusion... It finally developed serious cracks when I had a full nervous system crash in 2016 (I later learned that was an autistic meltdown).
Then I remembered...
My Dad's dreams of building a mega church and how it was one of his major career disappoinments, contributing to his eventually leaving Christianity all together. He ran from church to church because it wasn't growing fast enough. Then left entirely.
When my wife died (2018), who shared that big dream with me... That dream died. It tried to reassert itself a few times in the last 7 years, but it just never had the pull it once did.
Suffering, however, has been the key force in my life that produced the fruit of Messiah in me. While I'm imperfect and frequently fail to be a good human, I've grown. I've grown in massive and transformative ways since 2016.
Widower was a new label I obtained, and it's become one of my badges. Like Paul wore the badge of Prisoner proudly, so do I bear the label Widower. It doesn't define me but it represents a key moment in my journey towards a healthier relationship with myself, and with people, the Bible, Yeshua, Yahweh, and yet my departure from Churchianity.
Mike Wolfe could never abide suffering. He ran from it. He used to say boredom was his most painful experience. At the end his life even left the hospital "because they didn't have Netflix and he was bored", which directly led to his death a few months later, in January of 2025.
Some people seek "happy", and avoid the pain of transformation distracting themselves with humour or silly television shows or entertainment. These are all good things, joy is also part of the human experience, but if they are exclusively sought in avoidance of the hard things, they create a plastic life.
If Mike (Dad) would have leaned into instead of away from that feeling, he'd have had the opportunity to experience transformation. Instead, he died alone and without any genuine connection to others or to himself.
He still had a few, very few, people who loved him around, but he was incapable of genuine connection, because connection requires getting comfortable hardship, it requires being comfortable with both the joyful but also the yucky parts of the human experience.
If there is another attribute I've earned, it's the ability to sit with people during the hard stuff. I am easily distracted by my busy inner world, but when I encounter a human who is suffering, I find myself snap into a different internal space. I become fully present.
Suffering has become synonymous with growth and transformation for me.
I still rebel against it inside. Anyone would, nobody wants to suffer or see someone else suffer. It's a yucky messy experience.
But I'm also not afraid of it anymore. I lean-in to the suffering and look for the growth.
Ex: When my work was in chaos, my team leaned-in and created massive opportunities for growth and building something new and better.
In Colossians, Paul picks up the same theme from Philippians and his other letters. In Colossians (1:24), Messiah’s suffering was being completed in Paul’s body on behalf of Messiah’s body (the ekklesia). As with most of his letters, Paul is focused on God’s ‘secret plan’ to unite Jews and Gentiles, and his own suffering is part of that mission (v26-29). He’s uniting the factions, and his suffering is the soil that brings about this harvest. The theme of suffering is littered throughout Paul’s writings, probably more than ‘faith’ or ‘law’ even (just a impression from my reading last night). This is an important topic for him, and one I’ve largely ignored because it didn’t make me comfortable.
“Paul speaks of affliction and suffering per se over sixty times” — Scott J. Hafemann, “Suffering,” in Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, ed. Gerald F. Hawthorne, Ralph P. Martin, and Daniel G. Reid (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 919.
Yancey wrote about this in his book "Where is God when it hurts?" Which remains a book I think about often over the years since I read it.
I visited a Buddhist Temple recently, and I found it a peaceful experience. If "church" were more like a Buddhist Temple, I'd probably still go. Ironically, ancient Judaism and early Jesus Followers were more like that Buddhist Temple than modern Churchianity environments.
600 years before Rabbi Yeshua's trek on earth, Siddhartha Gautama identified a key issue with the human experience: Attachment
He noticed people like my father becoming worse as they built attachments to things, accomplishments, and even unhealthy attachments to people. His answer to these was to unattach himself entirely. He left his wife and kids and life as a wealthy individual, to seek enlightenment through detaching from it all. He found a measure of pace through this.
However, I have found, and modern Psychology through Attachment Theory has found, that the real solution isn't detaching entirely but in building healthy attachments. Both over and under attachment are harmful to humans. It is living in the tension between these that true transformation has been found in my life.
Boundaries 101, I need to allow you to own your journey, not trying to fix you for you, I need to own my journey, not trying to get others to regulate me when I'm responsible for regulating me. That's the tension where healthy attachments reside. I'd forgotten those lessons the last few years, only recently re-centering on them and regaining my Shalom.
It's not lost on me that Yahweh often gives people the things they desire after they come fully into letting that desire die so that "God is their God", not the desire. That's the story of many characters through the biblical narratives. Suffering is to be embraced as part of the human experience. The eastern biblical authors meditated on the human condition, as did the Buddhists. They pondered the joy and the brokenness, seeing the tension in them. When one reads Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job as books in conversation with one another, rather than isolated texts, that picture becomes clear.
The Shema is the single most sacred prayer of the devout Jew to this day:
Deuteronomy 6:4 (RHGB2E):
שְׁמַ֖ע יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֵ֖ינוּ יְהוָ֥ה ׀ אֶחָֽד׃ — Shema Yisra'el, YHWH 'eloheinu, YHWH 'eḥad.
Deuteronomy 6:4–5 (NET):
Listen, Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! You must love the Lord your God with your whole mind, your whole being, and all your strength.
My Modified Translation:
Listen, Israel: Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one! You must love Yahweh your God with your whole mind, your whole being, and all your muchness.
The Shema is the ancient biblical authors' reach for a human experience that transcends the pain of brokenness.
But that's just the thing. If I ever got a "platform" it would only be sustainable for the very reason that I don't need it anymore. It would be because I have meaning and purpose and value aside from anything I "accomplish" in this life. That's the heart of Shema, ultimately. It's the core of Shalom.
My meaning and purpose is to become whole, centered, regulated, in myself, and to do as much good as I can for others in my circle of influence, even if that's just the cashier I meet that day would doing life things. I often miss living in areas with public transportation because it gave me the opportunity to help a complete stranger feel seen and heard. It is those 'divine encounters' that have become the hallmark of my experience. The Breath of Yahweh, HaRuach, comes alive in me when I truly encounter another human being's soul.
The poor, needy, outcast, immigrant, prisoner, the sick and broken.... These are Yahweh's, Rabbi Yeshua's, and HaRuach's very heart ( which is why the entire ethos of MAGA is anti-Messiah).
If I only ever impact a few people deeply, I am satisfied. Yahweh can do the big global 4-D Chess moves that produce change for millions. I'll just be the pinky toe in his body. I'm totally at peace today remaining in obscurity and simply being transformed by The Way of Rabbi Yeshua.
Rabbi Yeshua impacted thousands during his lifetime.
Only thousands.
Not millions.
It was the movement that came as a result of his impact that led to fundamentally transformating the entire Roman empire over the next 300 years, and led to millions claiming to be his followers 2,000 years later, and to my studying him in a school dedicated to that study.
Like most movements, it lost its way over the span of time, and continues to require reboots and revivals, bringing it back to its core truths. Suffering is often the means of these reboots.
While the followers of Yeshua in the third world are intimately aware of suffering, and embrace it as part of their journey, the vast majority of the developed world have a shiney plastic veneer in place of the authentic Way of Yeshua. It was that plastic veneer that my Dad sought until it broke him.
We've seen the veneer crack time and time again.
-Mega church pastors end up exposed as having rotten cores.
-Catholic schools killed indigenous children and buried them in mass graves, in vain attempts at conversion.
-Big so-called "Christian" movements like MAGA produce nothing but rotten fruit, worthless plastic platitudes, and they bring violence and death, all while claiming to speak for Jesus, who would have called them a brood of vipers, a den of snakes.
It seems inevitable that good things become corrupted and evil.
During his trek through earth in the body, Rabbi Yeshua only ever impacted a few thousand people in a few towns in a backwater part of the Roman empire in the reject province of Judea. Yet, his ethos still inspired me 2,000 years later to embrace suffering as part of my human experience.
Rabbi Yeshua's message heavily leaned into suffering as transformation and reward. It is the "poor in spirit...".
Suffering is the key to an inner world that brings transformation.
This is not to belittle the experience of suffering. If someone is in deep pain reading this, it may sound hollow and trite. I understand, and I sympathize. And like Yancey noted in his book, suffering doesn't always end in recovery. For some, suffering just persists, gets worse, then they die. This is an awful truth of a broken world. This too is evil.
Many do, however, find transformation and Shalom right there in the middle of the storm.
We see a guy with no arms or legs becoming a public speaker who teaches hope in adversity, and we can't help but feel a little inspired.
I don't call myself Christian anymore. The label didn't fit. It's too closely tied with Churchianity, which I completely rejected as a psudeo Jesus-Follower environment. It's also associated with 2,000 years of superimposed western misreadings which are foreign to the eastern biblical authors. Like Augustine and Calvin and Luther, to name a few.
But... The Way of Rabbi Yeshua... I still find it compelling. It is the Eastern Worldview, not the later Western Worldview imposed on it, that I find compelling.
Suffering is a core part of the human experience, and I have come to embrace it when it visits me. I become a better human when I come through a season of suffering.
Shalom Bright Hearts,
Darrell Wolfe, Storyteller
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