The Potato or the Egg?--June 26, 2024

The Potato or the Egg?--June 26, 2024

"And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us." [Romans 5:3-5]

The old line says, "The same sun that melts the ices hardens the clay."  Or, another proverb with a culinary twist puts it this way: "Thes same boiling water that softens the potato hardens the egg." I suppose you could say, too, that the same rain that soaks into soil to make plants grow can also carve rocks and erode canyons. 

The question, then, is: how do you know which will happen to you?  What makes the difference--how can you tell whether the same stress, the same catalyst, will melt you to liquid or harden you permanently?  How do you know if you're going to end up the potato or the hard-boiled egg when you find yourself in hot water?  What makes the difference when we are going through adversity that either brings us to ruin or enables us to endure?

I ask because I want us to avoid making a dangerous mistake when it comes to our experience of suffering--one that church folk have made sometimes, at least in part because of the way they read passages like this one from Romans.  We hear Paul start on his little daisy-chain progression of how suffering moves to endurance, and endurance to character, and we can end up thinking that suffering by itself makes everybody tough.  We end up endorsing the sentiment, "Anything that doesn't kill me makes me stronger," (which, by the way, isn't the Bible at all, but Nietzsche, of "God is dead, and we have killed him," fame).  And we end up making the category error of saying suffering itself has the power to made us tough, as though we should seek out pain in order to harden us, because trauma will somehow inevitably be good for us.  That conclusion imagines that everybody is a hard-boiled egg made solid by the boiling water, and nobody is a potato; it imagines that everybody is clay hardened by the sun, rather than ice that is melted by its heat.  And that ends up making us into callous jerks who glorify suffering as inherently "good for you."

Well, let's clear things up for a minute: that's not Paul's point.  The New Testament does not teach that suffering is inherently good for us, and that going through enough pain will harden us or give us "character."  The Gospel's good news is NOT that if you're soft like a raw egg, God has given us the blessing of adversity to toughen you up, and that by going through enough rotten situations you'll come out "stronger" for it.  And the promise is NOT that "true believers" will be able to "keep calm and carry on" without breaking, no matter what tragedies befall us.  No, like Hemingway said, "The world breaks everyone.  And afterwards, many are strong at the broken places." 

And yet... Paul does go through this whole progression from suffering to hope, convinced that the ashes of pain can become diamonds through pressure--but not just because of the suffering itself.  So what makes the difference?  As Paul tells it, it's the Spirit.  The difference is that the Spirit has "poured the love of God into our hearts," and it is because of the Spirit that we can have hope in the midst of suffering.  

Understanding that difference is crucial.  Without it, we end up thinking that God's plan is just to toughen us up through inflicting pain, and that we should just grin and bear it when we're hurting because it is somehow "God's will."  But when we actually follow the whole train of thought, we see that suffering isn't the driving force that leads inexorably to strength, but rather that the Spirit communicates God's love to us, so that we have hope even in out of the worst of circumstances.  This kind of hope "does not disappoint," not because all hopes are all always fulfilled (they ain't!), but because a hope that is grounded in God's love will not let us down.  Paul's point is to say that even in our darkest days and stormiest seas, God's love is strong enough to carry us through, so that we can endure and reflect a hopeful light.  The power isn't in suffering to "toughen us up," it is in the Spirit-poured strength of God's love to carry us through.

In the end, the Christian hope is not that God will harden our hearts so that we never break, but that God's love has been poured into our fragile hearts and will hold us even when they are already broken.  That hope will not let us down.

For whatever you are going through today--whether it's a walk in the park or a dark night of the soul, or a gray Wednesday in between--that's the hope that holds us.  And that's the gift the Spirit gives in our lives.

Lord God, ground us in the solid hope of your love and the presence of your Spirt, to face whatever else comes in this day.