How Suffering Can Shape Spiritual Formation
Last year, I had a wonderful conversation with a young, vibrant, and engaging local pastor. Near the end of our talk, he earnestly asked, “What has been the most spiritually formative thing in your life?”
Based on our conversation, he fully expected me to respond with “the Bible.” Instead, I immediately replied, “Suffering. Bar none, suffering has been the most effective catalyst in my quest to become more like Jesus.”
He may not have considered me much of a follower of Jesus after that, but some truths cannot be read. They must be experienced.
I have mentioned before that I live with a chronic illness, though I rarely write or speak about it publicly. Yet suffering and spiritual formation have become inseparable parts of my story. If suffering truly has the potential to help form us more like Jesus, it is worth exploring how that might happen—and why suffering sometimes softens one person while hardening another.
The Illness That Wasn’t Supposed to Exist
In September 2023, I began experiencing random and unsettling physical and psychological symptoms. At first, they appeared every few weeks. By Christmas, they had become more severe and frequent. I spent all of January and most of February homebound, leaving primarily for a flurry of medical appointments.
At some point, I made a list of everything I was experiencing. It included bouts of debilitating depression and anxiety, digestive problems, muscle pain, heart palpitations, raging hunger without the desire to eat, and a persistent sense of being physically “amped up” for no apparent reason. It seemed that any bodily system was fair game for whatever was attacking me.
I spent six months bouncing from specialist to specialist. I was tested for adrenal tumors, blood disorders, cancer, and various other possibilities. Time and again, doctors shrugged and diagnosed me with anxiety, which sometimes seems to be medical shorthand for, “We don’t know.”
When I politely asked what might have caused this sudden and debilitating mental illness, they suggested I see a therapist.
Frustrated by the lack of answers, I eventually ventured outside the traditional medical system and found a physician who approached the problem more like a detective. After additional rounds of testing, she concluded that I had chronic Lyme disease, along with several bacterial friends commonly called co-infections.
I was relieved to have a plausible diagnosis. I was less excited to discover that the medical community vigorously debates the existence, diagnosis, and treatment of chronic Lyme disease.
Lucky me.
When Suffering Is Met with Skepticism
Chronic illness often brings two kinds of suffering. There is the illness itself, and then there is the burden of trying to convince other people that the illness is real.
Writer Ross Douthat has described the recurring pattern in which chronic conditions are initially dismissed as hysteria or hypochondria before medicine develops better ways to understand them. People living with Lyme disease, chronic fatigue, long COVID, and other poorly understood conditions may contend not only with physical and psychological symptoms but also with skepticism from doctors, friends, family members, and employers.
There is a peculiar loneliness in suffering from something other people cannot see. A broken leg is obvious. A body that unpredictably produces exhaustion, panic, pain, mental fog, or depression is harder for others to interpret. We may look normal while using nearly all our energy simply to remain upright and engaged.
Illness also confronts us with the limits of our control. The body that once cooperated becomes unreliable. Carefully constructed plans disappear. Identity, work, relationships, faith, and the future all become less certain.
That disruption can become part of the inward journey with God, because suffering exposes ideas and desires that ordinary life allows us to keep hidden.
The Choice Within Suffering
It has now been several years since I first became ill. I have made good progress. I am far more functional, have learned to manage unpredictable symptoms, and have become reasonably adept at keeping my mind in a healthier place. There are still many things I cannot do, but there are also many things I can.
Anyone who has lived with chronic physical or mental illness knows that at some point we encounter a choice. Perhaps we make it once, but more often we make it repeatedly.
If I am going to spend time in suffering, how will I respond to it?
I am not sure how I would grade myself—or how Jessica would grade me—on how well I have dealt with this illness. But I know one thing: shared suffering is considerably easier to bear than suffering in isolation.
Perhaps that is the real choice. We all suffer, but do we invite trusted people into our suffering so that it can be carried differently? Or do we remain silent because we do not want to expose weakness, uncertainty, need, anger, or vulnerability?
Suffering does not automatically make us better. It can just as easily make us defensive, bitter, controlling, isolated, or hard. Its formative power depends partly on what we do with it and whether we permit other people to enter it with us.
The Difference Between Privacy and Isolation
A friend led a small group in his church for many years. One day, a long-standing couple suddenly announced that they were separating and intended to divorce.
No one in the group knew their marriage was struggling. Their friends were stunned and deeply saddened that the group—a place the church described as a center of community and discipleship—had not become an environment where the couple felt able to reveal what was happening.
They suffered in silence and isolation until the marriage was collapsing.
That does not mean every private struggle must be shared publicly. Vulnerability should never be demanded, and no community is entitled to unrestricted access to someone’s life. But there is a difference between healthy privacy and profound isolation.
When no one knows what is happening within us, no one can listen, grieve, pray, encourage, challenge, or help. We can be surrounded by people and remain entirely alone.
Douthat has humorously admitted that illness caused him to lose his social filter. When people asked how he was doing, they received more information than they expected. Yet his openness often caused others to reveal hidden suffering in their own lives.
That experience taught him how common pain is beneath the polished surface of successful lives. We know abstractly that people age, become ill, suffer, and die. Yet much of that reality remains concealed in ordinary conversation.
Suffering shared with tenderhearted people can become strangely healing. It reminds us that we are neither uniquely defective nor entirely alone.
This is why we need Christian communities capable of holding our actual lives, not simply discussing information together.
The Fellowship of Suffering
I suspect this is part of what Paul meant by the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings.
Suffering connects us with Jesus in an embodied way. Betrayal, rejection, abandonment, physical pain, emotional anguish, unanswered prayer, and apparent silence were not abstract theological subjects for Him. They became part of His human experience.
Our suffering does not become good simply because Jesus also suffered. Illness, abuse, betrayal, and death remain enemies. We are right to seek healing, justice, protection, and relief.
But suffering may draw us into forms of communion that comfort cannot produce. We discover aspects of Jesus’ heart that cannot be grasped entirely through study. We begin to know Him not only as the One who removes suffering but as the One who enters it.
We also discover fellowship with other human beings. Pain can strip away the performances through which we establish value and status. We may become less interested in appearing impressive and more capable of recognizing the quiet burdens carried by others.
Suffering can make us gentler—though only if we allow it.
When Prayer Becomes Impossible
Strahan Coleman, author of Beholding, has written about years of undiagnosed illness and the loneliness, anxiety, and depression accompanying it. At one point, his theology began to collapse under the pressure. He could no longer pray as he once had, understand what was happening, or maintain an idealized spiritual life.
Eventually, he gave up—not on God, but on his attempts to perform his way into God’s heart.
His realization was painfully simple: God either loved him or He did not. If God’s love depended on his ability to pray well, remain productive, or perform the expected Christian practices, his illness had left him in serious trouble.
Suffering often exposes our hidden bargain with God. We may consciously affirm grace while living from the idea that love depends on usefulness, strength, discipline, clarity, or spiritual performance.
Illness dismantles that arrangement because it may take away our ability to do the things through which we once reassured ourselves. We may be unable to concentrate while reading Scripture, attend church regularly, serve, work, pray coherently, or summon the emotions we associate with faith.
What remains when our usefulness disappears?
Perhaps this is one of the hardest invitations in the relationship between suffering and spiritual formation: receiving love when we have little to offer in return.
Surrender Is Usually a Process
Coleman’s story is beautiful, but I am not entirely there.
Surrender, for me, has been a process rather than an event.
Some days I am able to receive the limitations of illness without fighting reality. Other days I bargain, complain, strategize, and imagine that one more doctor, supplement, treatment, schedule, or discovery will allow me to regain complete control.
Seeking healing is not opposed to surrender. We should pursue wise care, ask questions, experiment responsibly, pray, and remain hopeful. Surrender does not mean becoming passive or pretending that suffering is pleasant.
It means releasing the demand that reality must conform to our plans before we can experience God as present and good.
This is difficult because control often functions as our protection from fear. Illness reveals just how little control we possess, so we naturally try to recover it. We monitor every symptom, search for explanations, arrange life carefully, and fear whatever might disrupt the fragile stability we have achieved.
Some of these practices are prudent. Others slowly become a way of organizing life around fear.
The question is not whether we pursue healing but whether healing has become the condition we place on living with God now.
Suffering Exposes Our Ideas About God
Illness has a way of revealing the difference between our stated beliefs and the ideas from which we actually live.
We may believe that God is good while feeling abandoned by Him. We may believe He is present while experiencing only silence. We may affirm that He loves us while wondering why He permits the pain to continue.
These are not merely intellectual questions. They arise from the bedrock of the heart.
Very real questions about evil, pain, and suffering may drive us away from God or compel us to seek Him more honestly. What seems increasingly difficult is remaining comfortably in the middle, where we neither reject Him nor risk bringing Him our anger, grief, confusion, and disappointment.
The hidden ideas about God that shape our spiritual lives often become most visible when suffering contradicts what we expected from Him.
Perhaps we assumed faithful people would be protected. Perhaps we believed prayer would produce healing if we had enough faith. Perhaps we pictured God as attentive when life was going well but experienced Him as absent when it was not.
Suffering does not necessarily create these ideas. It exposes them.
The Deeper Magic
Suffering can soften us, perhaps because it invites us to release the idea that God loves us primarily because of what we can accomplish for Him.
There is freedom hidden somewhere in that surrender.
Suffering can also make us more authentic. It strips away the veneers and polished versions of ourselves we so often present. We become less capable of pretending that everything is fine and less interested in conversations that remain permanently on the surface.
We also discover who our true friends are. The people who genuinely love us and seek our good will sit with us as we wrestle, question, repeat ourselves, and occasionally rail against the injustice of it all.
They may not have answers. Usually, we do not need another explanation. We need presence.
This kind of companionship resembles the environment required for sharing our stories and allowing them to become part of healing. Pain changes when another person helps us carry it—not because the facts disappear, but because isolation no longer defines the experience.
Suffering Does Not Always Produce Transformation
We should be careful not to romanticize suffering.
Some people emerge from suffering more compassionate and free. Others emerge more frightened, suspicious, angry, or closed. Some are overwhelmed by pain and need medical, psychological, relational, or financial support before they can engage its deeper meaning.
Suffering is not a spiritual technique. We should not seek it, minimize it, or impose a lesson on someone who is still struggling to survive it.
The question is not, “What is God trying to teach you?” That question can be cruel when asked too quickly.
A gentler question may be, “How is this affecting your heart, and how can we remain with you in it?”
Formation occurs as suffering is held within truth, love, community, time, intimacy, and wise care. Without those conditions, pain may simply remain pain.
The five elements of formation—time, habits, community, intimacy, and instruction matter here as much as anywhere. A person suffering deeply needs more than an explanation. They need a patient ecosystem in which healing and meaning can emerge without coercion.
Becoming More Like the Suffering Jesus
If we choose to become more like Jesus, we should reasonably expect our lives to resemble His in more than kindness, wisdom, and visible goodness.
His life also included betrayal, rejection, abandonment, physical suffering, and emotional anguish.
Yet He remained attentive to the Father, to His own heart, and to the people around Him. Even while suffering, He continued to love.
That does not mean He enjoyed pain or treated it casually. In Gethsemane, He asked whether the cup might pass from Him. His surrender included honest anguish rather than sanitized acceptance.
The goal is not to become people who no longer feel pain. It is to become people who can remain open to God and others in the middle of it.
Perhaps that is one of suffering’s deepest formative possibilities. It can enlarge our capacity to remain present—to our own grief, to the pain of others, and to a God whose presence does not always arrive as an explanation.
A Different Kind of Hope
A richer hope has slowly taken root in my heart, even as I continue asking questions that may remain unanswered. Perhaps the hope grows partly because I am becoming more willing to accept that some questions are unanswerable.
It is one thing to discuss evil, suffering, healing, and God’s goodness in a classroom. It is another for them to become part of daily reality.
Are we becoming disciples who share our suffering and invite others to do the same, even when it is repetitive and time-consuming? Have our hardships softened us and made us more authentic, or have they strengthened the false selves we use to hide and protect ourselves?
Though we wrestle with suffering and rightly pray for relief, can we permit it to draw us a little deeper, a little closer, and a little more attuned to God’s heart, our own hearts, and the people around us?
My prayer is that those who suffer might experience what happens when pain is shared rather than hidden, when surrender slowly replaces control, and when suffering becomes an invitation to move just a little closer to the heart of Jesus.
Brian Fisher is the founder of Soil & Roots and the author of Soil & Roots: Cultivating Deep Discipleship. He writes and speaks about spiritual formation, the inner life, and how people become more like Jesus from the inside out.
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