Our culture tells us to ignore suffering or downplay it. But it’s unavoidable. Fortunately, the Scriptures don’t ignore the topic. And the gospel offers amazing strength and confident hope in the midst of our honest laments. This conversation explores both those dynamics - hope and lament.

Resources:

• Elise's Blog: Waiting for True Life
• The Widow Song ministry and blog
• Greg and Elise Boro's Story
• Elise's blog posts at Family Life Today

Transcript

Welcome to Questions That Matter, a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute. I’m your host, Randy Newman. Today, I have the privilege of a good conversation with my friend, Elise Boros. But we're going to be talking about a difficult topic, the topic of suffering and grief. And I'm very sorry to say that this is a topic that Elise is quite familiar with. But Elise, welcome to Questions That Matter.

Thanks, Randy. Thanks for having me.

Great. Yes. Great to see you again. I should fill in our listeners. Elise and I have been friends for quite a long time. My wife, Pam, and I have been close to Elise for well over a decade. Elise is from State College, Pennsylvania. I think I got that right. Did I?

Yep.

And joined the staff of Campus Crusade, called CRU, after graduating, and she and her husband Greg moved down to Fairfax, Virginia, and we were part of the same staff team. Greg had a heart condition that was very unusual and very, very… just weird and caused him a great deal of terrible trial at the end of his college experience, but then they thought that it was under control and thought he was okay. And Greg and I just hit it off the minute we met each other. We met on campus very early on, when he was new in the area, and we met for coffee, and I knew this was going to be just a fun, great friendship because we talked about coffee for twenty minutes and different places on campus to get coffee and which ones are the best ones and which ones have the best cups. And at one point we just looked at each other like, “We could both talk about coffee as long as we want to,” but very quickly we moved on to bigger things, like faith and God and found a great love of C.S. Lewis in common. We would quote Lewis quote back and forth to each other, and it was wonderful.

But sadly, tragically, the heart problems came back and got worse and worse. Eventually, Greg needed a heart transplant and got a heart transplant when he was twenty-five years old. He’s got to be one of the youngest people ever to have that. And God gave him ten more years of great ministry and great life. God blessed Greg and Elise with a beautiful boy, Paul. But heart transplants don't always go the way we want them to go. And a few years ago, Greg went to go be with the Lord.

And Elise has been writing and blogging about grief and suffering, and in addition to being a really good friend, I have become a big fan of her writing. We'll put links in the show notes. She writes a regular blog called Waiting for True Life. She writes for a widows ministry. It's a blog called Songs in the Night. She blogs occasionally for Family Life Today, and, Lord willing, this is going to culminate in a book sometime, who knows when, about the issues and challenges of suffering. So, Elise, tell us…. Let’s start with why did you choose to call the blog Waiting for True Life?

When I first started writing on the blog and was putting together some of the writing that I'd already done beforehand, I was just thinking about how, for at least a year, really for eleven months, but longer than that, Greg and I had been waiting for his heart transplant, and when you're waiting for a heart transplant, you are dying. And you are waiting for a chance to live. You are waiting for an extra opportunity to have life. And at the end of Greg's journey, waiting for his heart, kind of everything had fallen apart, and he was living in the hospital, and our life had ground to a halt.

And finally, he got that second chance, but I think in the 10 years after that, we realized that we hadn’t just been waiting for a second chance at life here, that a lot of the things we wanted out of life, a lot of things that our hearts and our souls are really longing for, were never going to be met on this side of eternity. And as suffering continued—and it was very much tied to Greg’s heart, but there were other elements as well—over time, I think our longing went more from life being okay here, because we realized it probably never was going to be, and it shifted really to, “Okay. Well, someday we're going to be with the Lord, and all the sad things are going to come untrue.” That was one of my husband’s favorite things to say, and so I chose the name Waiting for True Life because we spent so much time waiting for this life and then realized that, no, there's a truer, there's a better life to come. And I'm still waiting for it. Greg's there now. And all those longings that were in this heart, like he was finally made well and whole, but on this side of eternity, we will always be waiting for a fuller, deeper life, the life that we were really made for. So that's where the name came from.

Yes. And the Romans 8 theme of all of creation groans and we groan. And yet because of the confident hope that we have, it brings a hope and a substance to the waiting. It's not just waiting. There is a confident waiting. And those are the themes I pick up in your blogs. Those were the themes we talked about that we wanted to be what people heard at Greg's funeral. Honest lament and confident hope.

Right. Yep.

So what are some things you're learning at this stage of grief and suffering?

Yeah. Well, this stage… I mean, I’m over two and a half years since losing Greg, and so grief continues on. It looks different than it did in earlier seasons. I think that, for the first time in almost twenty years, I'm not in the midst of a really, really deep, hard struggle, which I was for a really long time.

Yeah.

And yet I’m constantly being reminded that this life is still—even when my circumstances don't have me in the pit of despair, this life is still not ever going to fulfill me. I think that's the biggest thing that God has been teaching me, and I am called ultimately to faithfulness and not prosperity. I'm called to enter into hard places that He opens the door to instead of… It’s easy, having gone through so much suffering, I think, to want to just avoid suffering at all costs and avoid any sort of risk or hardship. Or self-protect and beg God to never let anything bad happen again. And trying to walk in the world hand in hand with God when I know that life is so frail and loss is so sudden and it comes so quickly.

And so one of the things I feel like God’s been really teaching me is to live like Greg did. Even though I'm healthy, I don't have any of the issues that Greg did, but he lived with this real sense that life could end at any time. and it focused him on the gospel and investing in relationships and eternity in a way that I think was really unique, because he knew…. His death was really sudden. We didn’t expect it. But he knew he was not going to grow to be old because of his heart transplant, and so it's so easy to not live like that, but I want to live with that… I want to hold on to what I learned from him in that, even if I'm not myself dealing with a terminal illness. I want to live knowing that this is brief and I should be investing in eternal things instead of just, you know, “How can I avoid suffering and get comfortable?”

Yeah.

So yeah. That’s one of the things.

Yeah. We’ve talked about this. I've talked about this with other friends who knew Greg really well. Yes. Such a strong, strong emphasis on things that are eternal. And yet, a real enjoyment of the things of this life, too.

Absolutely.

Greg loved music. He loved finding out and learning things. We did this one event on campus where we asked everybody to come. There were about a dozen of us who met on a regular basis. And we asked people to bring an object of art that is particularly meaningful to you and tell us about it. And everybody came with a book, a picture on their phone. Some people came with nothing and just talked about their favorite movie. Greg came with this huge framed picture of the sky, of the galaxies, and then gushed about the stars and the Hubble telescope. And he just loved learning things. So it’s not this, “Well, we’re only concerned about eternity.” No, this life is filled with joys and pointers to eternity, and again, that’s a theme of C.S. Lewis that we kept coming back to all the time, and Greg and I would talk about it. We also had a spirited argument one time, Greg and I, because I dared to eat a cucumber salad at the salad bar when we were having lunch. And he just thought it was disgusting. “How could you eat those things? They're so disgusting!” “Just calm down, buddy.” I miss that so much.

Well, you've said a number of times, in your writings and in conversations, that one of the things you want people to grasp is it's not the quality of our faith, it's the object of our faith. Speak to that a little bit. Tell us what you mean by that.

Yeah. Before anything happened with Greg's heart and health and anything like that, I was very confident in my ability to be a good Christian. I was really faithful in my quiet times. I was a missionary for Pete’s sake. I had studied theology. I have bookshelves full of the right resources. Like I really felt like…. I knew the truth of the scripture, that of course God drew me to Himself and all that stuff, but I really felt like I had a big role to play in my faith. Like I was doing an awesome job. And other people who were maybe struggling, maybe they just needed to get their act together and read their Bible a bit more and stop being so bad at being Christians.

Sorry. Go ahead.

Just being honest.

I’m afraid I know what you’re talking about.

Yeah. And honestly, I can remember giving a seminar and being very legalistic with students and telling them how to be better at reading their Bible and spending time with God, almost like a program. But, suffering, it really stripped me—and Greg, I would say—down to a point of realizing there was nothing in me that was holding onto God. It was easy to walk with God when I wasn't depressed and I wasn't anxious and I wasn't in the hospital watching my husband, who he was twenty-four at the time, dying, and life was going the way that I expected it to go. But it was a whole lot harder to walk with God when I was watching all of our dreams fall apart and my husband dying, and him not being able to breathe, or rushing to the emergency room because his heart rate was out of control. And it just…. All these things that I thought I was contributing, all of a sudden I couldn’t worship God. I would go to services, and I would be so angry listening to the lyrics of worship songs and just thinking, “This is lies. Maybe it's true for somebody else, but this isn't true. God’s not good to me.” Or, “If this is true and God, You’re in control or whatever, I'm so angry at the implications of this.”

And I really, really, while being a missionary, honestly, I really ran hard from God and got to a point where it was just… it’s like opening the scriptures felt like it burned, because my heart was so tender and my conception of Who God was was very much maybe influenced by this idea that if we are really good for God and we surrender things and maybe next tier, become a missionary or pastor or something, give up a lot of stuff, then kind of in return… I wouldn’t have said it, but in return, He’s at least going to prosper our ministry or keep our faith strong or whatever it was. And I learned through that that I was not holding on to God. It wasn't how tightly I was grasping onto God or how firm my faith was, because it was basically obliterated. God was holding onto me. Honestly, the only reason that I was able to walk with God through the suffering over all those years is because He never let go of me. I let go of God plenty of times. I really did. I ran from God. And all those things that I thought I had to do to be a good Christian, I learned that… I mean those are good. I'm not saying that reading your Bible is bad, but His love for me didn't change when I stopped reading my Bible. He kept after me, and I watched that happen in Greg's life, too.

Greg really went through very dark and questioning times with the Lord, and I watched. And it was scarier to watch in his life than in mine. I watched God's sustain his faith to the end, even in those moments where he felt like he was hanging on by thread. God was holding onto him .

Yeah. I remember him saying those very words.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think that that’s when I learned. And that’s what I rely on still, to this day. My faith has changed. My relationship with God has changed. It’s so much less about my feeling close to God. It used to be very much rooted in feelings, but now it's just that assurance that He is never going to let me go. That is secure. That is the one thing that I know is secure, that He has got me, and life can pretty much obliterate you a lot of times, and if it wasn't for his grip, like Him being the One that…. My faith is in Him. That’s what keeps it. It’s not that my faith is strong. It’s that faith of the mustard seed. I think realizing how small that mustard seed faith is is a pretty humbling experience.

Ah, good, good, yes. Well, I've heard you say—and I remember Greg saying—that Jesus is the hero of our story. It's not us. And I know you’ve said people have said to you, “Oh, you guys, the two of you,” or now just you, “Your faith is so great. Your faith is so strong.” And sometimes you do correct them, and certainly in your writing you correct people. “No, no. It’s not that our faith is so strong. It's that Jesus is holding onto us.” And again, and I really hope this isn't a cliche, but it's memorable and helpful: It's not the quality of our faith, it's the object of our faith. It’s the One in whom we are placing our faith.

Right.

So quite a few people—I’ve heard Don Carson teach this, I’ve heard Tim Keller teach this, I’ve heard other people say: When the nation of Israel was crossing through the Red Sea, God had parted the Red Sea. They’re walking through the red sea. There probably were some people who had a confident level of faith in God as they were walking through. They were probably already starting the singing. We know that they sang when they got on the other side. But some people already had the tambourines going, and, “Isn’t God great? Look at this! We’re going through!” And there were other people who were going, “I don't think this is going to work! We're going to die! I don't know! I just don't know!” Who made it through? Both of them, both groups. Because it wasn't quality of their trusting in God. It was the strength, the power, the One in Whom they were trusting. And that's not a minor thing. That is absolutely transformative.

And again, I do remember having these conversations with Greg. You mentioned a little bit ago. He went through some pretty dark times of doubt, and you saw it more closely than anybody, but I got to see some of it, and thanks be to God, that’s not where he ended up. At the end, there was a confident trust and hope. There was tremendous sadness in there, too, but he didn’t land in the despair and the darkness where he had gone. He said on a number of times he had to go that far down. He just had to—how did he say it? He said, “I had-

Facing it all the way down to the basement?

… to take all of my doubts down to the basement.”

Yeah.

Yeah. Down to the basement. “I had to go down to the very, very bottom and find that Jesus was there ahead of me, that there was nothing I could say or do or yell or scream where Jesus wasn't meeting me there and holding on to me.” And that's the heart, I believe, of your writing ministry, and that's why I want people to check out your blog and see your other writings, because that’s… it's liberating. In an odd way, it's liberating isn't it?

Yeah. It is. Greg would always say God can handle our temper tantrums. He can handle our anger. He can handle everything that other people can’t handle. And yeah, he would often say, when he went to the darkest, deepest pits of his soul, he always found Jesus was there waiting for him already. He thought he could go to a place that was so dark that God would just be offended or [disgusted noise], and I think people can react that way when we’re really transparent with them about how dark things can be inside, but Greg, he found God to be faithful through all that.

And it’s interesting, you were talking about at the end. I can remember even in the weeks before he died, his health was really, really bad. It was really scary, but we were not anticipating him dying. And I remember some nights when he was in bed and really struggling to breathe, and he would be wrestling with, just thinking, “I can't breathe. Something’s going to happen, and what if I'm not really a Christian.” He would struggle with that, but in that, he would just cry out to Jesus. And I remember telling him, “You would not be crying out to Jesus in this despair. If that's all that is, if all that's left of your faith is just, ‘Jesus help me!’ that's what it is. That's all it takes.”

I love the thief on the cross. We talked about him all the time, because here's a man who's dying, who's suffocating, who can't do anything but recognize that Jesus is the Savior. And that's all it takes. And I feel like, when you are…. Not that I’ve experienced it, but watching Greg, even the last day of his life, it's just that faith that was shaky. It was always shaky. Even at the end, he needed that reassurance, but it was always pointed at Jesus.

And I think watching God sustain Greg’s faith through chasing those doubts. And it wasn't that his faith stayed because he didn't think about think about hard questions. It was the opposite, like God met him in his doubt. God met him in his wanderings, in his questions, in his anger, and I’m so grateful to have witnessed that and seen God really be true to His word, to sustain him till the end.

Yeah. You know, God gave Greg an absolutely brilliant mind, and not everybody has to wrestle intellectually as much as he did. So there are some people who, okay, they don't have to take it all the way down to the basement. Or they don't have to ask every single follow-up question. But some people do. And unfortunately, I do think that there are a lot of Christians who tell those people who ask all those questions, “Hey, you think too much,” or, “You’re asking too many questions.” No. No, no. If God gave us the brains to ask those questions, then He has given some people those abilities to just keep chasing and keep chasing and keep digging, and so I think that's an important lesson we need. There are some people: “No, no. You probably need to read that 900-page book about the resurrection.” Not everybody needs to, but some people do. And I loved watching the keen mind. It caused him some difficulties for sure, but then what came through was really a deep intellectual grasp of things.

There is also the theme of not always looking to other people to help you in the darkest moments. You've had a couple of close friends, and Greg did, but there were a whole lot of people who said—and still say—some silly things. Quite a few people have observed… Why do those three friends in the book of Job get so much airtime? Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar. They say really, really bad things. And at the end, God shows up and says, “No, you guys were wrong,” but they get a lot of ink in the book. And again, I remember talking with Greg. I said, “I think that that's there, in God's word, to prepare us for the fact that ultimately people are not going to be the source of our strength and our hope. Ultimately, it can only come from God and connecting to Jesus.

I remember telling Greg one time. I said, “If you ever write a book on suffering, you should just have a chapter with quotes of all these foolish things people have said to you. And you just title the chapter, “From the Consulting Firm of Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar.” Didn’t someone say, when it was determined that Greg needed a heart transplant and you told so many people and you sent out letters, you got tons of letters and cards that were really beautiful and great, but Greg told me someone wrote and said, “You need a heart transplant. I know what you're going through. I needed a cornea transplant.”

Yes. Yeah.

Oh, no!

Not helpful. Not helpful.

Again, there’s a freedom of, “Okay. People are not my ultimate source of hope and strength and trust.” God uses some people to say some good things to us. Great. Okay. But even the best of them, they’re not always there. They’re not always going to pick up the phone or respond to a text. So I think that's a lesson. What other lessons you would really want Christians to learn about suffering and grief?

Yeah. I think one of them is, if it's somebody else, like we were just talking about how do we respond when other people are going through suffering and grief? Having walked through it myself, both long-term suffering and grief, I don't feel like I'm an expert, and I still struggle, and I’m not always sure what to say, but I think what I have found to be the least helpful is when people try to answer for God or they feel like they have to defend God. I call it crappy hope. Hopefully I can use that word on your podcast, I'm not sure. But when we give people who are in suffering or facing death, like, “It’s all going to be okay,” or, “If you just pray, God’s going to heal you. I know it.” Sometimes people promise things that God’s word just doesn’t promise, and it only makes it harder. It only makes it harder to face reality.

Greg would often share statistics. When you get a heart transplant, there's a lot of statistics involved. This percentage of people die in this time frame, and then this percent die in this…. It’s all these statistics. And he would share them, and people would rebuke him as if looking at statistics was a lack of faith. And he would say, “But God's sovereign over the statistics, too, and And I have to deal with the fact that he's probably going to work in my life like he’s worked in all these other lives.” We try to distract people from their pain, as if that's what's going to help them, and really what's helpful is witnessing their pain and just saying, “This is horrible, and I hate this for you, and I'm so like angry that you're going through this, too, and I don't know why God’s doing it. And I know He’s good and know He loves you, but I'm struggling with it. I think those are the most healing words that somebody can hear, like, “I hate this. This hurts. I'm here.” I think the three friends of Job, they did best when they just sat with him in silence and in mourning instead of opening their mouths.

That’s right. Yeah, they did great before they started talking.

Yeah. And people just need that…. You were going to say something?

Well, we are told, early on, that they came and sat in silence, and that was helpful, so there are times to be quiet and to hug and to cry alongside. And you're right. The scriptures are so, so good and so much better than how people have distorted them. Jesus hated death at the tomb of Lazarus. He cried, and it was a visceral grieving of the horror of death. And the lament songs are so graphic and so honest. And Paul talked about how we're afflicted but not crushed. perplexed but not despairing. I think we need more perplexity to allow for, “Okay. There are some things we know. There's a whole lot we don't know.”

Right. Yeah. Death is that bad. I think that's another thing… I wish that… I think as the church we just need to say, like: Death is the last enemy that's going to be destroyed. Jesus calls death our enemy, and He came to defeat death, but it's not defeated all the way yet. And so we don't have to pretend that death is good. I think we do that a lot. We want to skip over the hard part. We want to have celebrations of life instead of funerals, and I think there's an appropriate response. If the reality of death and all the things that lead to death in this world was enough for God to leave His throne and come and suffer alongside of us and walk through death, so that one day we can be liberated, then we don't have to pretend that the day that we… I mean, obviously, for a believer, there’s hope there. We’re going to be ushered into God’s presence, but man, it is a ripping apart of what God designed this life to be like. We were not created to die. We were created with eternity in our hearts, and we're still created with eternity in our hearts, and this severing of relationship, the severing of our spirits and our bodies that happen at death, it is a part of life in a broken world, but it is the ultimate brokenness in this world. And so lamenting that and calling it bad and then saying, “But we have hope because Christ overcame it, and there is life on the other side of death.” But for those who have been left behind or are thinking about the fact that they're going to leave the people behind, because they're dying, we don't need to make them be happy about it. It's okay. It’s okay to be sad. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you think through these issues really well, unfortunately because you have to. But you also write about them really well, and I'm really grateful for your writing. Let me say a little commercial about writing, about C.S. Lewis, because this is a C.S. Lewis podcast. You know, Lewis’s, probably his first apologetic book that really made it was The Problem of Pain. And that's what put him on the map. That’s how the BBC said, “Oh, he'd be the guy for us to do this radio series,” that eventually became Mere Christianity. But The Problem with Pain is a pretty logical, intellectual, rigorous examination of how we think about pain and suffering. Then much, much later in his life, after his wife died, he wrote what became the book A Grief Observed. But he didn't write that book as a book. He wrote it to process his own grief. This was private journals. He wasn't planning on getting this published. He just needed to write the process, and he found these four folios in his house. He said, “I'm going to fill those, and that's just for me.” And then people found out about them, and they said, “Jack, you really need to get this stuff published.” “No, no, no. That’s not why I wrote it.” Well, they eventually convinced him to publish it, and he published it under a different name. And we hear later that people started finding these books and gave copies to C.S. Lewis. And said, “Jack, you ought to read this. It'd be really helpful for you.” I'm pretty sure that's a true story. I think Lyle Dorsett, accounts for it in one of his books.

So then some people say, “Ah! See, this is the real, true, honest grief. That problem of pain stuff, that was just sterile.” No, no. Both sides of that are absolutely necessary, the very, very rigorous intellectual arguments—and again that's what Greg dug into because he had to—but then the very, very honest processing of emotion. And the beauty of the Bible is it doesn't pit those things against each other. It’s very, very logical and rigorous, again, intellectual and also deeply emotional. I’m. repeating myself. I’m really sorry. People who listen to this podcast say, “He does repeat himself quite a bit.” I'll try to see if I can work on that.

Elise, any final thoughts as we bring this to a close? Any other thoughts of what you really hope people can grasp about this really, really important but painful topic?

Ultimately, I hope that people can grasp, will see if they read my writing or anything like that, that God is strong in our weakness. Paul begs the Lord to take away the thorn in his side three times, and the response is, “My grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in weakness. We named our son because of that verse. We gave him the name Paul. That was our life verse together as a family. We want suffering to go away, but so often God says, “No, but My power will be made perfect in your weakness. My grace is sufficient for you.” And so I hope that people see that, no matter the depth of pain, whether it's physical, mental, spiritual, whatever the depths of the sorrows in our lives, His grace really is sufficient, His power.

Elise, thank you again for digging into this topic again with us on this podcast. We'll put links in the show notes to some of your writings, and we invite our listeners: Check out the video that we did of Bill and Will Kynes talking about the book of Job, a number of other resources on our website dealing with death and grief and suffering. Our ministry doesn't shy away from this topic because it is such a crucial, important topic, and God doesn't shy away from the topic in His word. We hope that all of our resources at the cslewisinstitute.org website are helpful for you as you seek the Lord, to love Him with all of your heart, soul, strength, and mind.

Brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute and the Questions That Matter Podcast with Randy Newman