For the past few days my son and I have been down with strep throat. It’s the sickest I’ve been in years. When you’re well it’s hard to remember what it’s like to be sick. Let me remind you: it’s awful.

With strep throat you of course have a sore throat, but that’s only the beginning. You also have a high fever—almost 104 in my son’s case, and me not far behind—causing chills and constant pain in all your joints. When you’re well, 104 sounds much the same as 102 or 100. But when you’re at 104 you don’t need a thermometer to tell you you feel way beyond normal awful.

You feel every sound coursing up through your ribcage: the beep of the microwave, the shutting of a door, a gale of thin laughter coming from the TV. The aching in your joints drives you into a constant, conscious cycle of adjusting your limbs and body. You try to remain perfectly still to ease the pain, then feel that moving a leg or ankle will ease it, then try to stay still again, then feel the need to adjust again, endlessly, not for an hour or two but for hours upon hours, more than a couple of days this time around. Time never moves more slowly than when you are ill. I am usually surprised at how quickly my days pass, but at one point during this bout I guessed two hours had passed when in fact it had just been half an hour.

Thankfully, it is possible to sleep even with this level of discomfort, but only after hours of doing the fever dance, and even then your dreams are filled with vague, repeating, agonizing images of irresolvable conflict. I read Plato before falling asleep on Saturday night, and my dreams—if you can so call these half-waking horrors—were somehow like dialogues between various parties arguing for lying on my right side or my left or face first, legs twisted one way or another. No side ever won.

After a day or two, the sore throat and fever are joined by a grinding headache that alternates between the base of the skull and the crest of your brow. Even the tiniest of lights makes a pinprick of pain and can spell the difference between wakefulness and sleep. You try to rub away the pain in your neck and it seems to help ever so slightly, then your hands quickly become cold, and chills draw you back into a huddle.

After a couple of days we were over the worst of it. We got diagnosed and dosed, and now a day later feel mostly better. Plus a new GameBoy cartridge arrived yesterday; there’s no better medicine, if you’re not too sick—101 or less, let’s say.

It was an awful experience, but I know I’ve had worse. Yet something about this illness coming at this point in my life made me think more realistically and theologically about sickness and suffering than I ever have.

Does God Respond When We Need Him?

The second night was the worst. I was up at 1 AM, couldn’t sleep, and the minutes felt like hours. I was in too much pain to sleep yet too tired to do anything else. I prayed desperately—if God had eyes that could be looked into, I looked into them and said: “Heavenly Father, please relieve this headache. Please help me fall asleep and sleep soundly until morning.” I prayed, too, that the girls—my wife and daughters—wouldn’t get sick.

I can’t remember now whether it was an hour later or just seemed like an hour later, but at some significantly later point in time I still had a splitting headache—not even to bother mentioning the chills, aches, or throat—and was not sleeping. My prayer was not being answered. I confess I was disappointed. I was, in the immortal words of Phillip Yancey, disappointed with God. Not for the first time, either. But this time was hitting home in a rather HERE and NOW way.

Eventually I did fall asleep. I did sleep well—a solid four hours, dreamless, the first good sleep in two days. But I thought about my prayer and God’s response. I asked the old question every child asks (and the best of us, I think, keep on asking): How is it that Jesus, and later his disciples, went around healing people like crazy, while here in our modern age the only Christians who seem to be able to heal anything always seem to be hoaxers?

What was stopping God from simply taking away my headache, or my whole illness and my son’s with it for that matter? Was I lacking in faith? Relative to some of the people Jesus healed in the Gospels—some of whom were really clutching at straws—I don’t think so. Would it have cheapened my faith, diverting it to the wrong focus? No: I’ve seen bigger miracles than that, and not so different from it. Was there something I had done to repulse God’s kindness? I certainly sin, but I don’t recall any looming sin that would warrant the cold shoulder treatment, nor do I think God’s compassion works that way.

Although I didn’t become an atheist during my suffering or contemplations, it occurred to me that there can be no more atheizing experience than unmitigated suffering. If you have no solid experience in your life pointing to the existence of God and you are suffering, nothing could seem more reasonable than to say that God is not answering your prayers because God isn’t there to answer them. You would say, How could this God who showed so much compassion through Jesus so fail to show it to me? Either he never did what they say he did through Jesus, or whatever God did those things through Jesus buggered off sometime between then and now. About the time of the Inquisition would be my guess.

The trouble I have, though, is that with all I have experienced, it would be silly for me not to believe in God—and the God of Jesus, to be exact. It would be as silly as you thinking you can chew your own earlobe if you just swing your head hard enough. It just wouldn’t be rational.

So I’m left with a tough nut to crack. But as I sat there that morning, continuing to suffer, I did come to two conclusions.

God the Parent

I think it is a sound principle that God, as a good father, at all times wants to push down to us, his children, as much responsibility as he can. This is not a new idea but it deserves recalling.

A good father airs up the tires on his child’s bike when the child is little. But when the training wheels come off the child airs up his own tires; if he fails to, the bike doesn’t ride. A good father lets the toddler help him scoop horse feed into the trough. In a few years the child feeds all the animals without being reminded; if he forgets, the animals get sick or even die.

Is the father cruel, imparting such responsibility? Hardly. Have you never seen a child throw a tantrum after getting help he didn’t want? Or have you never heard that most delighted of childish exclamations: “I did it all by myself!”? Humans are made to grow. We crave it and deserve it. M. Scott Peck goes so far as to say that growth is the very essence of all things good. The child who is never asked to do anything hard, or is bailed out whenever things begin to go wrong—that’s the child that stirs our pity.

There’s a hard balance there, maybe the hardest balance of parenting, to give neither too little responsibility nor too much. This is God’s predicament with each human on the planet, and he’s always navigating it, with more care and finesse than we can imagine.

Given that principle, we can surmise that history reveals the same sort of thing happening with the church. In fact, we can do more than surmise: we can observe. First, Jesus performed miracles. Then he had the disciples help with performing miracles—being waiters and busboys at the feeding of the 5000, for instance. Then he had them go out on limited, closely supervised excursions such as the sending of the 70. Then, throughout the book of Acts, he had them go out on their own, yet still wielding lots of divine power and receiving specific direction from the Holy Spirit. Later, the church developed a greater understanding of God’s character and work through the gathering of the books of the Bible, and God continue to grant them more responsibility while giving them less “artificial” help. Now, 2000 years later, the church is expected to do God’s work with a great degree of maturity and confidence.

It’s the parenting pattern. First, Daddy did it himself. Then he let us help. Then he let us do it ourselves—with supervision and close assistance. Then he let us do it independently—but with him bankrolling us and calling every day. Slowly both the calls and the cash became less frequent. Now we still can get specific direction and cash deposits when we really have big plans, but we’re expected to run the business and make it a success. It’s not OK to act like children anymore.

What does all this have to do with suffering? Everything. Because the “business,” you see, is the business of giving life. Spiritual life, yes. Afterlife, yes. But ordinary, blood-and-arteries life, also yes. Jesus proved this the minute he started healing people by the thousands. Ironic, isn’t it, that whereas the crowds of Jesus’ day couldn’t see past the physical blessings he offered, we modern middle-class American Christians are so comfortable and wealthy we consider any blessing that isn’t spiritual rather “tacky.”

My first conclusion, then: God didn’t heal my son’s and my strep throat miraculously because he has delegated that job to the church. At this late stage of human history, this principle almost always applies: What the church fails to do, doesn’t get done. This underscores for me how wonderful it is when Christians give their support, energy, genius, and time to hospitals and medical research. God bless the Presbyterians for the hospital my daughters were born in, and the Baptists and Methodists for the hospitals my family members have been healed in at various times over the past several years. And God bless the scientists who dedicate their lives to healing people and easing their pain, whether they know there’s a God or not.

Compassion Wakes

As I lay there miserable for several days, I thought how horrible it must be for someone who is really sick not for just a few days but for weeks or months or years—sometimes in much greater pain than I was. And it’s not just the pain that’s so bad about illness. I’ve had to cancel several important meetings including a visit from an old friend who hasn’t visited in years. My work was delayed. My children missed me. And I felt so lonely, like I haven’t felt since I was a kid. When you’re sick you just want to be touched and held, but you can’t because you’re contagious. I simply forgot human life could be as bad as it is when you're really ill.

Miserable as I was, the truth struck me that millions, maybe billions of people on this planet—people who feel and think and wish and deserve just as much as me—feel just as bad right now as I did with strep. Old people, tiny babies, starving people, people with chronic and terminal diseases, people struggling with depression and grief, all over the world. For me, the bad feeling was just a little interlude in an otherwise comfortable life. For millions of them, the only thing waiting for them on the other side of weeks or even years of misery is death.

I could have realized this obvious fact at any point in my life, but something about this illness at this point in time—as I said before—opened my eyes. Now I want to do anything I can to help anyone who is suffering right now. And not hours from now, when they’ve been through that many more hours of suffering, but now.

The trouble is, now that I’m starting to feel better, I’m starting to forget what it was like. Compassion, remain great within me.

The girls haven’t gotten sick yet.