You Will Call, and I Will Answer

I was alerted to this very raw and honest interview with William Stuntz, well-loved Harvard professor of criminal law, who suffered from chronic pain and cancer, by one of his students. But before I give you the link to the interview, I would like to share a portion of the testimonry he gave at Park Street Church, Boston.

This is an excerpt of his testimony as recorded by Timothy Dalrymple of Patheos.

First, he said, God redeems, working through the curses of our lives to bring about blessing. "I may never know precisely what form that redemption takes, and that's fine with me. It's enough to know that I do not, and we do not, suffer pointlessly. Our God delights in taking the worst things in life and using them to produce the best things in life." This is essential to God's identity, and "it's an incomparably large gift."

Second, God restores, returning to us a portion of the dignity our afflictions have stolen from us. The sights and smells of cancer, he said, were foul. Sometimes it felt "as though the clothes I was wearing were soaked in sewage. Long before it kills, cancer steals the dignity and the beauty from life. It is as though tumors inside me were attacking whatever small pieces of good and decency that were in me." Yet the thief of cancer, the destroyer of suffering, does not have the last word. God entered into the pain and ugliness of our condition, and this changes everything. "It's part of this world's deep magic that when the One Man, who is so supremely beautiful that his existence defines beauty—when that one man took on himself all the worst ugliness this world has to offer, he changed forever what it means to live in the midst of that ugliness, to live in the midst of pain and loss and hardship. My disease may be ugly . . . But I am not, and thanks be to God for that. I no longer need to wear those foul clothes that cancer spun for me. God the Son gave me cleaner clothes to wear, clothes I did not buy and do not deserve. He elevates all he touches, and he has touched ultimate suffering and he has also touched me." This too is an incomparably great gift.

Third, God remembers, holding us in his heart even in the worst of our sufferings. "Memory for God is not a matter of recall; it's about a love so passionate and powerful that it overwhelms all it touches." God "remembers each one of us in our worst moments the way the Prodigal's Father remembered his lost son, the way a lover remembers a long-lost beloved." [He then] cited what had become a favorite passage from the Bible:

You will call, and I will answer. You will long for the creature your hands have made. Surely then you will count my steps but not keep track of my sins (Job 14:15-16).

His voice began to break as he read those words. Think, he said, about the second sentence. "God not only forgives my many and awful sins. He longs for me, and he longs for you too. And he will not rest until he has us secure in his hold."

He concluded: "Standing with us in the midst of those curses is the God who longs to redeem and restore and remember and wrap you in his arms. And if there is one thing I have learned in the midst of cancer and chronic pain, it is this: God is larger and stronger and more powerful than the worst disease."

Professor Stuntz is now with our Lord Jesus who had entered into his pain and the ugliness of his condition; he is now with the God who longed for him. He died March 15, 2011. Here's the link to the interview.