Our pain can draw people to Jesus when it changes us so we can deliver the message about the afterlife in a way God himself would want it to be communicated. When we first become Christians, we’re not exactly the most ideal candidates to handle public relations for the Almighty. If the president of the United States searches far and wide for the best and brightest people to serve as his go-between with the public, you would think that the creator of the universe would copy his idea, but God seems quite content using people like you and me.

I often wonder why Jesus didn’t commission angels to be his spokespeople. In the Old Testament, when God wanted to communicate a message that he didn’t want to get messed up, he always sent an angel. In fact, the Greek word in the New Testament that is translated “angel” is angelos, which actually means “messenger.” When God needed to get an important message to Abraham and Sarah about the birth of their son, what did he do? He sent angels. When he wanted to communicate battle plans to Gideon? Same thing. When he announced the birth of Jesus, who did he send? You got it, angels. So why the change of plans? After his crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus told his disciples, “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” (John 20:21), and every eyebrow in the room had to be raised. “What? You’re sending us? No angels?” What was Jesus thinking? Why send Joe Smith from Atlanta or Brian Jones from Philly or Jane Doe from Indianapolis when you have angels like Michael and Gabriel on standby? Angels never get scared and rarely forget their lines. There is also the added benefit that angels can’t be beaten up or killed.

My guess is that Jesus knew that the decision to become a Christian would be more genuine if a human being learned how to do so from another human being. Perhaps Jesus didn’t want people to feel coerced into signing up to follow him and knew that sending an intimidating creature the size of a middle linebacker wouldn’t really accomplish that. Yet he also had to know the potential for communication problems. He knew that we humans tend to be arrogant and petty and that we could dilute the message or change it altogether.

For example, when we lived in Ohio, we had the opportunity to visit another church in our community. During the service the pastor announced that it was time for the children in the church to come forward for a children’s sermon. As our daughters went forward and sat near the podium with the other children, I smiled and thought, This should be nice. We don’t do this at our church. I noticed that behind the pastor was a hammer dangling by its two claws on the edge of a table. Attached to the handle of the hammer was a piece of string that dropped down to the floor and then ran up the pastor’s leg and into his pocket. A Barbie doll was directly under the hammer.

The pastor started his sermon by asking, “Boys and girls, can anyone tell me what the word sin means?”

One girl raised her hand and said, “I have a new hamster!”

The pastor smiled and said, “That’s nice, Samantha” and offered his own definition. Then he asked if anyone knew what the word Hell meant.

I whispered, to no one in particular, “These are preschoolers. Where is he going with this?”

No one could provide an answer to the pastor’s second question either, so he provided his own. Five minutes into this “children’s sermon,” the pastor said in a loud, commanding voice, “Boys and girls, this is what happens when we sin against God and refuse to become Christians!” and he pulled the string attached to the hammer. The children lunged backwards and screamed as the hammer crashed down on top of the doll below. My wife, whose view was blocked, leaned over and asked, “What happened?”

I said, “God just killed Barbie.” I thought about standing up and interrupting the guy, but my wife talked me out of it. After his message I grabbed my kids and we walked out the door, praying that there weren’t any non-Christians in the room that day.

When our youngest daughter was six weeks old, she came down with what we thought was a severe cold. We took her to the doctor and he told us to take her immediately to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with RSV (respiratory syncytial virus). Doctors told us RSV is easily treatable but that she had such a bad case she needed to be hospitalized.

Later that night as I stood next to the plastic bubble my daughter had been placed in, I asked the respiratory therapist giving her breathing treatments if RSV was deadly. “Tell me the truth,” I said.

“Honestly, her condition is serious,” she replied. “About twenty-five hundred children die from this each year. Rather than worrying, though, why don’t we let the medicine do its work and let God do the rest?” But for the next two nights, Lisa and I were beside ourselves with worry. I can honestly say I have never prayed as forcibly as I did during those forty-eight hours.

She survived. Soon after her hospitalization I visited a young mother in our church whose newborn son had been placed in pediatric critical care in a different hospital across town. Doctors believed her son had bacterial meningitis, a disease more threatening than RSV. Watching her baby through the same type of plastic bubble she had been in, the mother asked me, “Have you ever seen this part of the hospital?” I told her that we had been in a pediatric critical care unit not too long before with our own daughter. Then I said, “I believe this is the part of the hospital where God hangs out.” She looked at me and nodded, and then we stood there for the longest time without saying another word.

Our own suffering allows us to speak with credibility to other people in pain because we’ve been in their shoes. We’ve walked the road they’ve walked. When we talk, other broken people listen because what we say and what we do carries weight. I’m reminded of the words Rainer Rilke used to conclude a letter he sent to a struggling young poet he had taken under his wing:

If there is one thing more that I must say to you, it is this: Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.

Years ago I started a meaningful ceremony that I conduct at every rehearsal before each wedding I perform. I gather everyone in the wedding party-family and friends-in a circle and ask them to join hands. I talk about how special this event is for the couple in the circle and explain that having the approval and support of family and friends is more important than thousands of dollars of wedding presents.

Then I ask everyone in the circle to give the couple a priceless gift-to share a word of blessing from the heart. I turn to the person on my right and ask him to begin. By the fifth person in the circle, the entire group is bawling. I’m not talking about polite crying; I’m talking about snot-dripping-down-the-shirt bawling. Everyone’s bawling-the cocky best man who isn’t a Christian and wants to get drunk that night, divorced parents who haven’t spoken in years, and especially the bride and groom themselves. It is a powerful experience.

At one wedding I performed years ago, the last person to speak was the bride’s father. What a perfect way to end this evening, I thought. He will give his daughter words she will remember the rest of her life. Instead, he threw up his hands, laughed, and said, “Ditto.” Then he flipped his head around and looked at me with a sheepish grin.

My heart broke for the bride. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what to say. I awkwardly ended with prayer, but what I wanted to do was lean over and say, “Do you have any idea what this weekend means to your daughter? Do you have any idea what your approval means to her? All you can muster at this moment is ‘Ditto’? Let’s try this again.”

I’m guessing the father soothed his conscience by reminding himself that he was sending his daughter and future son-in-law on an all-expense-paid honeymoon to Cancun. I knew the bride, however. I knew about the estrangement she felt toward her father because of his neglect over the years. I guarantee she would have traded the trip, the luxurious reception, and the tables stacked with expensive gifts, every last one of them, for just one word from his heart.

Contrast this with the time Jesus was asked what is the most important commandment. Without hesitation he answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. ‘This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Matthew 22:37-39).

I think that if Jesus had been standing in that circle with that father, he wouldn’t have hesitated, as I did, to say something. I think he would have stopped, shared that Scripture, and then graciously asked the man to speak again, this time from his heart.

Why? Jesus understood that the two most important things we do in life are to love God and love people. That’s it. When we stray from these commands, he sometimes allows us to experience trials. Trials take his place and refocus our attention on what’s important. They remind us how quickly we can lose people. They remind us that each person in our life is a gift.

When I think of people who really understand this, I always think of my friends who can’t have children. Right now it takes both hands to count the number of couples I know who can’t have children. I’ve talked with them, I’ve listened to their stories, I’ve prayed with them. For some reason God hasn’t answered our prayers. I can’t understand it. All of these couples are the kind of people you want to have kids, but for some reason it hasn’t happened for them.

If I were to take these friends into the circle at that wedding rehearsal and ask the emotionally stunted father to step out of the way, what do you think my friends would say? I know what would happen: My friends would clear their throats, reach into their pockets, and gently put on a special pair of glasses-lenses and frames shaped by years of frustration, endless cycles of infertility treatments and miscarriages. These glasses firmly in place, they would look the bride squarely in the eyes, smile, and then share an unending stream of blessings that would have made that young woman’s heart dance.

Trials have a way of doing that. Trials have a way of allowing us to see what’s really important in life.

Frederick Buechner once said, “Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it’s like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.” That’s what it’s like to have Jesus’ heart for people.

Soon after I began to ask for the compassion of Jesus, I noticed an imposing stone building that stood a few hundred yards off a major road near where we lived. A sign said “The Stillwater Center.” I had driven past the place four or five times a day, and it had never occurred to me to find out what it was. Now I thought it had to be some kind of nursing home, and if so, then maybe our church could reach out to the residents in some way. I knew that having Jesus’ heart is not just about having a warm feeling for people in pain but is designed to prompt us to alleviate whatever pain we encounter. With this in mind, I pulled into the driveway and navigated the winding road that led back to the building.

When I entered the foyer, I introduced myself to the receptionist and inquired as to what service the facility provided. She must have thought I was a reporter doing an investigation, because she quickly said, “Hold on, I’ll get the director.” A few minutes later a man greeted me, and I told him I was a local pastor and that I had driven past the facility hundreds of times, wanted to know a little more about the center, and wondered if there was any way our church could serve there.

The director seemed hesitant, but he began to explain that the facility cared for people with severe mental retardation and physical challenges. “We take care of people when their parents can’t take care of them or they’ve been abandoned,” he said. “The best way to explain what we do is simply to show you.” He took me through a long corridor into what looked like a large hospital emergency room. From a distance each bed seemed to hold a large stuffed animal. But walking up to one bed, the director said, “This is Stephen. He’s eleven.”

Stephen was maybe three feet long and looked like a mound of clumped flesh. He lay there motionless, his arms and fingers curled into a ball. I asked how long Stephen had been at the center.

The director replied, “As long as I can remember.” Then he turned to the girl in the next bed. “This is Laura.” I looked at Laura but quickly glanced away because she was much more deformed than Stephen. Laura had only part of a face.

The director continued talking, and I couldn’t help but notice what he did as he spoke. He took his index finger and slowly parted Laura’s hair to the side and tucked it back behind her ear. Then he caressed her deformed cheek. As I watched, I thought, If Jesus were here, he would have responded just like this man.

After the tour the director walked me to my car and thanked me for stopping by. He mentioned that he was a Christian and said something about Jesus being the only thing that got him through each day.

As I drove off, I couldn’t shake the image of him pushing Laura’s hair behind her ear. Some might say he was just born with a naturally compassionate personality, but human compassion would have worn out after two months on that job. He was intelligent and obviously skilled at what he did, but training only takes you so far when it comes to caring for people; after a while everything becomes mechanical. After a moment I realized I didn’t have to guess anymore. I knew what fueled that man’s compassion. It was his heart or, rather, Jesus’ heart. He had Jesus’ heart for that little girl.

Either that or perhaps Laura was his daughter.

Probably the most well-known story of someone experiencing God’s absence is told in the book of Job. Stripped of everything in life-his health, his family, and his wealth-Job is brought to the point of utter despair. By the end of the book, though, God replaces much of what was taken during his desert experience. However, I’m left with the impression that Job was never the same person after his trials, no matter how wealthy he later became.

I think one of the reasons this book was included in the Bible was to show us that times of doubt and God’s absence are meant to be experienced in community with others. The book of Job is forty-two chapters long. Seven of those chapters are devoted to what God did and said, while the remaining thirty-five chapters, roughly eighty percent of the book, are dedicated to the conversations Job had with his three friends Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. I believe one of the lessons God wants us to learn from Job is that navigating spiritual deserts was never meant to be a solo activity.

Two years ago I went through the third major desert experience of my life. My first desert experience occurred while I was in graduate school, which I described in chapter one. The second was as a young church planter in Dayton, Ohio, which I told about in chapter four. But my third desert experience is recent.

Our church in the suburbs of Philadelphia grew to over eight hundred people in less than four years, and I was exhausted-mentally, emotionally, spiritually. I began questioning whether I was cut out to be the pastor of a large church. The larger the church grew, the more my soul shriveled. The demands placed on me were incredibly toxic. We were adding more staff and buying more land and raising more money than I felt I could keep up with. It seemed so strange that at the same time the church was exploding, my soul was imploding. I began to question why God would “call” me to do something but not give me the necessary gifts to be able to get the job done. I became desperate and anxious. I stopped reading my Bible. I stopped praying. I went through the motions at church, feeling numb to it all. For the second time I seriously contemplated quitting the ministry, and I felt completely alone.

One afternoon I began journaling on my laptop. I typed for hours, pouring my heart out to God. In the middle of those paragraphs, I wrote a poem I called “The Awful Journey”:

Take me to the place where no one else will go
Take me to the place where despair and hope
crash into one another
Show me the person who knows the awful journey
Show me the person who knows the dark road

I’m at the ledge and have lost my footing
The rocks loose underneath my feet
Holding on to nothing but my will to survive
I look for another

Show me the person who can stand with me
Point me to the one who knows many sleepless nights
Show me that person
Let me hear you doubt out loud

A few weeks later, out of desperation, I reached out to a mentor of mine in the ministry and shared with him my thoughts from that day, including the poem. I e-mailed him and told him I didn’t want to quit being a pastor but wasn’t sure I had the strength to go on. I was afraid and alone and didn’t know what to do. A day later when I checked my e-mail, I saw his response. The few words at the beginning of his e-mail were exactly what I needed to hear. They reminded me why it’s always best to take dangerous trips through the desert with friends at your side:

Brian,
Well, I like the poem.
I’m traveling the same journey. You do know that, right?
I like your description of the awful place.
Of course, it is also an awe full place.