Peace functions like a paperclip to hold separate pieces together in a new shape and function.

Peace in suffering can be difficult, elusive and temporary, especially when we insist on our own terms. It is in accepting God’s threshing floor as a place of transformation or growth that we see the pieces come together into something new. We continue to grieve the loss of the shape of former things. But in His wise hands our pieces hold a new form bringing peace in suffering that will be used for His glory.

I’m sitting at my desk paying bills when I need a paper clip. The small plastic bin in my top drawer is empty, so I scratch a note to buy more. Then I remember a hidden stash, a Ziploc full, moved from Maggie’s desk to mine in a clean-up frenzy shortly after her death. I find the bag in a bottom drawer and remove it slowly. I laugh because I obviously imparted one thing to both daughters – a love of office supplies and the desire to collect and hoard them. The Ziploc bulges with brightly colored clips in a variety of shapes, some quirky, and sizes – binder, standard, hangars, t-shirts, pants among others. Some I’ll keep and cherish as a visible reminder – a relic of sorts – of her good intentions – so like mine – to keep things together and in order. Many of them I’ll put to their intended use, holding pieces together in a unity of purpose. But all of them lead me to consider my search for peace in suffering.

Just two days earlier was the fifth anniversary of Maggie’s diagnosis. It’s the first one without Maggie with us to defy the death sentence we heard on Monday, April 7, 2014. We had spent the weekend between a colonoscopy and hearing the results of a rushed pathology report in anxious prayer, hoping for a benign explanation for an unexpected “mass”. We entered an exam room much too small for four adults and their outsized fears. And as we heard the words, the worst, Stage IV colon cancer, the picture of a normal, quiet, some might say blessed, life fell apart. Shattered.

In the world you will have tribulation

Christ tells his followers (John 16:33). So why do we equate the rewards of a faithful life with a present-day smooth ride? And the presence of affliction as unexpected and unfair? Our word tribulation comes from the Latin tribulum, a sled-like device with iron or stone teeth used to separate chaff from wheat by crushing. Shattering. The original Greek word is thlipsis, translated to mean affliction, anguish, distress. W.E. Vine defines tribulation as “the suffering which results from what presses hard on the soul.” Sounds like a trip to the threshing floor. I had no idea in April 2014 we were facing over four years there. I tried several times, prematurely, to collect the pieces and bind them together. Thinking our anguish was nearly over, our time of testing finished, I longed to snap a clip on the pages of our story, file them under “faith building,” and move on. I failed to see how Jesus would continue collecting the fragments and joining them together for His purpose and in the process impart peace in suffering.

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. (John 14:27)

Yes, Jesus promised affliction. But He promised peace in suffering unlike any the world offers. We try to fashion our own – devoid of conflict, soothing to the mind, a buffer to round the jagged edges, and totally powerless to reassemble anything from chaos. Or we trust another earth-bound soul to complete what seems missing in our efforts to find wholeness. But when I surrender to the purpose of the threshing floor, I find peace, which literally means to join together that which was previously separated. I don’t find it late because its appearance is overdue, but because I’ve not recognized its atmosphere present from the beginning. When I breathe in, though the hammering still fills the air with the dust of chaff, I receive His peace. It takes my broken heart, my crushed spirit, and shattered dreams and joins them in a reworked unity, true to His kind intention.

Present an offering from the threshing floor (Numbers 15:20)

As I slip the Ziploc back into my drawer, the threshing floor is long still. The quiet has yet to become an old friend for the pause seems to ask something of me, prodding me to move on reshaped and untested limbs. Alexander Maclaren’s words echo in my mind, “While do, do, do is very important, be, be, be is the primary commandment.” I close the drawer and search to find a hint of what I’ve become, to learn from it a new direction. I look for one embodiment of my clarified, repurposed fragments. And as my hand finds this gift, I lift it as an offering in worship. Bread.

For more on peace in suffering for a repurposed life, read here. For more perspective on John 16:33, read this helpful piece.