When you look around you, there are many beautiful things that God created. The earth was created to provide us with the comfort that we need to live a fulfilling life: abundance of food for us to eat, the sun to illuminate our days and the stars and the moon to equally dazzle our nights. In such an ideal world that God created for us, one might ask why there’s a lot of suffering in it. Perhaps the hardest lesson we learn from suffering comes from the book of Job. This was a remarkably righteous man. Job carefully avoided acts of transgression and sin against the laws of God. His behavior was beyond reproach. God decided to test his character to find out his true commitment to Him and how he was going to withstand severe adversity. In Job 1:8, God boasted of Job’s righteous behavior to Satan. Satan responded, “. . . Stretch out Your hand and touch all that he has, and he will surely curse you to Your face!” Later events proved Satan wrong. Job’s character was not that weak. According to Pastor James Kalinda of Christian Redeemed Church, Kicukiro, the biblical account of Job’s suffering is to help Christian and righteous people, when they are faced with monumental, discouraging and traumatic experiences, to learn to trust in God patiently while at the same time wait for the solution to problems that afflict them. “The experience of Job may explain why sometimes righteous people can go through traumatic and discouraging times and be tempted to hate God for not quickly and obviously coming to their rescue. Like Job, we normally fail to come to terms that God sees more than us,” he says. Pastor Kalinda adds that no matter the severity of our trials and travails, we ought not to assume that God doesn’t care or listen to our voices of anguish and pain. “God sees the lessons that we require to learn which are beyond our current understanding.” He says that we need to remember some advice from King David when he says, “Wait on the LORD; be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart; wait, I say, on the LORD!” in Psalm 27:14. “We should learn from Job’s experience to maintain patient respect and trust in God even in the midst of our sufferings.” The book of 1 Peter specifically deals with suffering Christians endure. Peter understood the meaning of the suffering of people living righteously in the light of Jesus and the suffering He had to endure to redeem mankind. Peter notes that there are two categories of suffering: the first one is for righteous sake which brings us closer to the Kingdom of God. The other one is largely unnecessary since it’s normally as a result of the problems that we bring to ourselves. “We earnestly need God’s help, however, during both types of suffering. It’s only God who is going to save us from suffering and troubles we might be currently going through,” pastor Kalinda advises. According to Abubakar Issa, a Muslim leader in Nyamirambo, there are various reasons why God lets adversity and hardship befall human beings. “Even those genuine believers experience adversity and hardship at some stage in their lives in accordance to God’s plan and wisdom. He adds: “It is God’s design to put the human through hardship and adversity so as to test their faith and their resolve and trust in Him.” The Imam advises people not to despair in the moment of suffering but to believe that God is going to ease their pain at some moment.
