Feast in Famine—Celebrating God’s Goodness in Suffering

I

“The MRI showed an advanced brain tumor. The doctor said time is of the essence, and wants to operate in the next two weeks.”

In March of 2017, during a visit to meet her newest granddaughter, my mom expressed annoyance about an issue she’d been having with her jaw. She attributed the stiffness and numbness around the left side of her mouth to a combination of an oral surgery many years earlier and a recent facial massage. By May, she couldn’t move the left side of her jaw at all, and her orthodontist discovered severe muscle atrophy. Her symptoms were worsening, so she called me—her son, the nursing student.

I quickly ran through assessment questions. Frequent migraines? Yes. Vision loss? Yes. One-sided facial numbness and paralysis? Yes. Hearing loss and balance issues? Yes.

“Mom, you need to go to a doctor right away. You’ve either had a stroke, or you’re having a neurological issue.” That phrase, neurological issue, was sanitized code. I was loath to speak the dreaded words brain tumor, to invite those unwelcome guests to my table. But the words crouched in my mind like a malignancy themselves, gnawing hungrily at my spirit, giving me a taste of the emptiness that lay ahead.

II

“The surgeon could remove only 40% of the tumor, and the lab is saying it’s not benign but it’s not fully malignant either. The doctor wants to start radiation ASAP.”

Just over a year prior, I attended the funeral of a man who’d fought a long battle with cancer. I had once worked with his wife and taught his daughters in my English and music classes. As he dealt with the disease, I watched his life from afar on social media. He wrote about the special care he had taken over many years to get to know each of his daughters, their likes and dislikes, and he used his remaining time on earth to create special memories tailored to each of them. His wife shared how diligently he romanced her from the beginning of their relationship to the very end. He used his illness as a springboard for declaring the goodness of God in his life, to urge others to make the most of their time. For him, every day presented another chance to feast on God’s blessings.

As a young husband and father, I craved examples of intentional living from wiser men. I often found myself in a tug-of-war between my schooling and my family life, and I was ashamed to admit that school had the upper hand. When it came to time with Dad, my family was on a starvation diet.

Life on this earth is short, as the axiom goes, but Christ offers life in abundance (John 10:10). Sitting at that man’s funeral, I knew that I wanted to taste more of those abundant blessings in my own home while I still had the days to do so.

After Mom received her diagnosis, I thought back to that man’s suffering, to the hurt his family felt after losing him. Though I wondered how I would handle my own mom’s death, the idea seemed far away. I had attended church my entire life, and, in my lack of personal suffering, had made an orderly, comfortable theology. I carelessly lobbed scriptural truths like grenades at the suffering of others, primarily because I did not plan to ever suffer myself.

When I received the news in July 2017 that Mom’s surgery had been only partially successful, I found myself angry at God. My 40-something mom—one of the most significant figures in my life, who was just barely getting started being a grandmother to my girls—should not be facing the prospect of an early death. All the theology of suffering I’d spent years carefully working out in my head seemed emaciated in that moment.

Why would a loving God let this happen? Of course, I could recite all the “right” answers. Because of Adam’s sin, pain and disease and death entered God’s very good creation (Genesis 3), and we’re living out the nightmarish consequences of that original trespass. Adam’s sin—original sin—is our sin too, and it’s compounded by our own transgressions (Romans 5:12–21). Suffering and death are nothing more than what sinful humans deserve (Romans 6:23) apart from Christ.

I knew all these things, but deep in my unspoken thoughts, I believed that suffering was supposed to happen to someone else. I was supposed to be the caring Christian who offered a hug and a prayer to the suffering, and then returned home to my healthy and happy family. Like David and Job, I uttered anguished prayers, some indicting God and asking what I’d done to deserve this, others begging to understand why it was happening to my family. These prayers weren’t always rational, but pain doesn’t always allow us to think clearly. I took God at his Word that I could come boldly before his throne, respectfully and without pretense (Hebrews 4:16). And anyway, he already knew my every thought (Psalm 139:3).

I was also afraid. Life suddenly felt very fragile as I began grieving a loss that hadn’t even occurred. My dreams became filled with visions of loss: losing my wife, losing my children, losing my parents. I would wake up crying out in the night as I mourned the death of a loved one in a nightmare. For the first time in my life, I started taking an antidepressant. For the first time in a decade, I abandoned daily Bible reading and prayer. My suffering had consumed me.

III

“The tumor grew significantly since the surgery, and the radiation oncologist can see blood vessel growth. He’s increasing the radiation to treat the tumor like it’s malignant.”

During one of my more emotional conversations with Mom, she expressed the possibility that she might not go through with surgery or any treatment at all. Her oncologist told her the risks of adverse side effects were high, and that she would likely live with chronic pain, vision problems, and facial paralysis the rest of her life even with successful treatment. In my mind, there wasn’t a reality where my mom did not pursue the best treatment available and experience full healing or at least extra years. I’m in the healing arts, and I had come alongside many patients and families as they exhausted the options to save or extend life. Why wouldn’t Mom want to do the same?

Not long after that conversation, I learned that my wife’s grandfather had chosen not to continue treatment for an illness that eventually took his life. Sitting at the dining room table, my father-in-law shared about his dad’s choice to stop dialysis. “He had dialysis appointments several times a week, and he was exhausted on those days. And then suddenly, he decided he was done going to dialysis. He told me he was ready to die and go home.” Rather than deal with complications from major surgeries and constant hospital visits to prolong life by a few years, he chose to make the most of the time he had left with his family. My father-in-law explained that his dad had feared death immensely for a long time, but once he finally understood the gospel, he looked forward to meeting his Savior.

As I struggled in my emotionally stunted way to understand why God had allowed my mom to develop a brain tumor, those conversations kept coming back to me. In a way, they refreshed my parched spirit, like discovering a trickle of cool water in a hot and desolate land. Sometimes, I realized, the best path forward is not using every available option to circumvent suffering; sometimes, the best path forward lies in the suffering.

By December, Mom had completed her course of radiation. The oncologist treated the tumor as malignant, but the lab downgraded the tumor to benign status. We didn’t know it at the time, but that downgrade would end up being a life-changing error.

Because of her vision problems, Mom couldn’t drive and struggled to use electronics. But her illness drew my family closer together than we had been in years. Instead of our usual route of remaining silent for fear of embarrassment, we started choosing to say what was on our hearts, to focus on what mattered. I spent less time on homework and more time communing with God, loving my wife, and getting to know my daughters. Mom wasn’t out of the woods yet, but God was leading me out of the wilderness and back to him.

IV

Two Years Later

“Son, you need to come home today. If there’s any way for you to come now, I would not wait.”

I can remember that phone call more clearly than any call I’ve ever received. My dad’s words still ring through my head, their mournful tones drawing me back to the pain of that week. God had given us two more years with Mom. I was a fully-fledged nurse, and the more experience I gained, the more readily I could see the signs of her decline. Her oncologists monitored the tumor, but because her charts all said benign, they didn’t intervene. By the time they realized their mistake, Mom’s only options were risk-filled experimental clinical trials. Unsurprisingly, she turned them all down.

My theology of suffering had matured significantly by this time. I thought back to the man who had decided to live life to the fullest. I had learned that, for Christians, life can mean more than merely extra time. For Mom, living those additional years in crippling treatments would be like gnawing on dry bones. The richness of fat and muscle could be found only in the spiritual abundance of God’s blessings—blessings that took on flesh in the form of her husband and five children. As she looked forward to delighting more fully in her Savior in the future, she delighted in her family in the present. God had shown me his fullness in suffering, and I now understood Mom’s decision, but that understanding couldn’t spare me from the pain of losing her.

As she neared the end of her life, Mom was completely blind, mostly deaf, and her face became more disfigured each week as the tumor filled her skull’s every crevice. When I arrived home on March 8, 2020, she was rapidly losing motor control and was frequently disoriented and confused. She didn’t always know who we were. Even though I was coming to terms with Mom’s impending death, I felt weighed down with regrets. I’d left home at 17 and saw my family infrequently, with years passing between visits. I had attempted to rectify this with more frequent trips to see her and with weekly phone calls. But my final phone conversation with Mom had been difficult and discouraging. After I arrived home, during that last week of her life, she mostly slept and didn’t seem to fully recognize me. She hallucinated frequently because of the pain, so we never really knew what to expect when she was awake. I really wanted to tell her my goodbye when she could understand and respond.

Late one night, as I sat on the couch watching her sleep in her recliner, Mom suddenly stood up.

“Mom,” I said hesitantly, unsure if this was another hallucination, “are you okay?”

She jumped. “Steve, what are you doing here?”

“I’m here to visit you, Mom.”

She reached out for me, and we wrapped our arms around each other. “I’m glad you’re here. I love you, honey.”

“I love you too, Mom.”

We hugged, and I helped her lie back down. She quickly fell asleep. That was the last conversation we had. God is a good father. He knows what we need, and he doesn’t give us stones when we ask for bread. He heard my cries and gave me a sweet gift of grace. Even here at the end, he was revealing to me his presence in Mom’s suffering and even in mine.

A day later, Mom slipped into a coma, and on March 15—a Sunday morning—she went home to the Lord. I understood in that moment that her suffering wasn’t in vain. My family—saved and unsaved—watched Mom run her race and remain faithful to the end. Her worst day on earth was also her best: she closed her eyes for the last time in this life and woke up in the arms of Christ.

V

“The Christian cultus [worship], unlike any other, is at once a sacrifice and a sacrament. In so far as the Christian cultus is a sacrifice held in the midst of the creation which is affirmed by this sacrifice of the God-man—every day is a feast day.”—Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture

In one of my favorite books, Josef Pieper, a German philosopher, writes that for the Christian, “every day is a feast day” as we delight in Christ, meaning that because of the finished work of Christ on the cross, we have no reason not to celebrate each day. It’s a sentiment I have held dear since the first time I read it.

That final week leading up to Mom’s death was rife with pain and tears and more dread than my imagination could ever conjure. Though it felt like an emotional and spiritual famine, I was still called to feasting. And oh, did we feast! Only a few times in my childhood did we sit down as a family to eat together, but we made up for it over those seven days. We tucked into delicious meals in the living room, seated around Mom’s bed. We chewed on childhood memories as she slept. Like sucking marrow from a bone, we drew up every last remembrance we had of her infectious laugh, her quirky humor, and her warm embraces. We savored her presence and treated her to Scripture readings and worship music. We told her everything we ever wanted to, not holding back even the merest morsel, trusting she heard every word.

Even in that valley, with death hovering on the fringes, we sat at a table overflowing with blessings.

Psalm 23:5 resonates with me in a different way now than it used to: “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” Death is the enemy, but Christ has conquered the grave. Our Creator never intended suffering to be part of life on earth, which is precisely why suffering is painful. But he uses those painful times to form us, to increase our appreciation of the banquet of grace and peace he spreads before us. We may not feel joy at the table, but we can feast on God’s grace in the famine.