We all suffer, some more than others. Jerry Sittser (1950-) was new to the faculty of Whitworth University in Spokane, WA in 1991. He and his family were returning from a visit to an Indian Reservation in Idaho when their van was struck by a drunk driver crossing the centerline at eighty-five miles per hour. The ensuing crash killed Jerry’s seventy-five-year-old mother, Grace, his wife, Lynda of twenty years, and his four-year-old daughter, Diana. He witnessed three generations of his family dying before his very eyes. Jerry was suddenly left to manage his own grief as well as care for his three young, surviving children. How does a theology professor come to terms with such intense suffering?
Jerry wrote a book five years later of personal reflections, A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss. He admitted, “One of my predominant emotions from beginning to end is bewilderment. I just don’t understand why these three people died. I just don’t get it.” He observed that many people choose agnosticism or atheism when they can’t make sense of suffering. They can’t reconcile a good and all-powerful God with the experience of intense pain. Either God must be good and not all-powerful or all-powerful and not good. Jerry proposed a third option. God is good and all-powerful but, for reasons unknown to us, doesn’t deliver us from suffering. He resisted any attempts to offer a neat, tidy solution to why there is suffering in the world, “Suffering just is. But God is, too.” Jerry writes a blog on a wide range of topics, including suffering. He still wrestles with suffering after all these years. How could it be otherwise? He writes in one of his blogs: “During my morning devotions, I often pray: