Suffering Love

Written by Erin Richer

“Hey kiddos, sorry, you need to stop what you’re doing and get the house straightened up. Karen is coming.” There was a sourness to the way her name flowed out of my mouth. 

Immediately, I heard the Holy Spirit ask, “Did you hear that?”

I had heard it. The way it dripped caught me by unpleasant surprise. What if someone said my name that way before I arrived? This woman never actually asked if it was convenient for her to come and stay. Frankly, her coming for a spontaneous visit once or twice might have delighted me, but she comes every week at the same time and stays longer than is convenient. I was interrupted two more immensely inconvenient times that afternoon, followed by some bad news that my life might soon be greatly encroached upon by someone who is conspicuously irritated by me. It was this last bit of news that elicited such a strong response inside of me that I immediately replied to the Holy Spirit’s earlier question with: “Alright, I’m listening. What are you trying to tell me?” And suddenly a train of thought came rushing through the station in the form of a one-thousand-frames-per-minute montage of all the things God has slowly been pouring into me over the past several weeks since I began praying a guttural prayer for more of His love. The prayer has been, “Lord, increase the capacity of my heart for your love, dig the well deeper and fill it to overflowing to love others as You do.”

For weeks, I’ve been praying for more of Jesus’ love—to experience it, to be filled with it, to overflow with it toward others. For weeks, we’ve been studying Jesus in the Gospel of Mark and I’m amazed that the crucifixion was only part of Jesus’ suffering. The flesh of Jesus endured constant jostling by the smelliest, dirtiest, nastiest people in the land (so much so that he didn’t know he was touched by a woman who had been vaginally bleeding for 12 years); suddenly, I realize how much I hate to be touched! I don’t even like to be bumped around by people I married and gave birth to and who have showered every day! And I’m claustrophobic!

Jesus had served so long one day He incurred the kind of exhaustion that allowed Him to sleep through a brutal storm. He was likely soaked and asleep, that’s how tired His man-body was. Yet even though He needed sleep that much it was still interrupted by the needs of His disciples calling upon Him to intervene—just one example of the thousands of interruptions and requests for His interventions in His three-year ministry on this earth. I’ve been noticing these interruptions in every passage in Mark. My tolerance for interruptions is disgracefully miniscule. 

Jesus was never fully understood. I spend my life trying to communicate well. I hate the feeling of being misunderstood. In fact, the degree to which I feel understood by someone is directly proportional to how close to I feel to that person. Not Jesus. He loved these people deeply despite never being fully understood by them. 

Jesus suffered greatly, as God wrapped in flesh, long before the cross.

The day all of these interruptions happened was the same day as our last Dive study meeting. The passage we studied on Tuesday ended with this verse:

“If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me and the gospel will save it. For what does it benefit someone to gain the whole world and yet lose his life?” (Mark 8:34-38 CSB)

The montage ends and The Holy Spirit asks one final question quietly and unassumingly, “Do you really want it? Do you really want to be filled with my love? To love like I do?”

“Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn't love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that.” (Ephesians 5:1-2 MSG)

Do you really want to be filled with my love? Do you really want to love like I do, because to love is to suffer. To love like I do doesn’t require me to fill you with more of my love, it means to be emptied of your self.

I don’t know that I could have known the meaning of the prayers I’ve been praying without my loving Father drawing these things out for me. I’m so grateful He has responded so compassionately by not simply changing me in a flash to the Christ-likeness I’m asking, but is rather showing me the extravagance of His love, the length to which He has gone and continues to go to love me first. He often asks His disciples questions to make them think more deeply, and I know that’s what’s happening here. 

Did I even realize I was asking for suffering when I asked for more of His love? No. I didn’t.

Do I actually want this kind of suffering love I’ve been asking for?

My answer is this…

In my flesh—I recoil at the thought of this kind of patient love, this suffering. I’m selfish, I hate interruptions and changed plans. I don’t want to be touched and jostled and I desperately want to be understood. No. I could never, ever love like Jesus.

In my faith—my whole soul cries, “YES!” I know your Spirit can do this in me. If it means more of You. If it means all of You, then yes, I want the cross.

I’ve sat down to write this weekly truth probably five times and had my train of thought interrupted at least a hundred more. This never happens when I sit to write these. (No one will ever convince me God doesn’t have a sense of humor.) After one interruption in which I almost flipped my ever-loving lid, the Holy Spirit stopped me and I smiled genuinely at my daughter as she showed me work over which she was beaming with pride. 

A moment of victory. 

But these last words are typed on a ferry because yesterday as I was wrapping up this article, more plans changed and some expectations shattered and I handled it with the grace of a toddler who just had a popsicle stripped from her hand—a full-on hissy fit. I literally left the mainland to go to a remote island to have a come-to-Jesus moment over all of this. I think I’m finding myself in a season of testing. Or maybe sifting? Or maybe spiritual warfare. Whatever the case, my current conclusion is this: Jesus has created me with all of the capacity I need to hold His love, it’s just that right now, I’m filled with my self. 

“Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that's how freedom grows…My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God's Spirit. Then you won't feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness.” (Galatians 5:13, 16-17 MSG)

Being emptied of my self is not an overnight task for me to do, it will undoubtedly be a life-long work of God’s Spirit, but I believe that’s where both inexplicable freedom and love lies. Every moment Jesus suffered was endured because of the expectation of what was to come, the finished work of God dwelling in and with us once and for all. I can’t fathom what is to come if and when He does work in me, but I trust that it’s true. There’s an expectation settled deep inside that with the filling of this suffering-love will come a joy more intense than I’ve ever experienced, an intimacy with Jesus for which I could never have hoped. I so deeply want this. So I search for where flesh meets His Spirit to cooperate in the perfect sanctifying rhythms of His work. I know this with everything in my being: He is able…especially when I am not.

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