Enduring Loss and the Hope of Glory
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Buffy had been losing weight for a few weeks, but the procedure was supposed to be routine. Still, there we sat in the vet’s office listening to the doctor explain that our kitty just wasn’t recovering from her biopsy.
Her blood pressure and temperature were dangerously low, and our normally energetic, friendly cat could barely lift her head and seemed hardly even to recognize us. Her eyes were glazed over, her breathing labored.
My husband and I sat in the room numb, struggling to grasp how it could be that our ten-year-old, always healthy pet was now lying listless in an incubator as the vet did all she could to stimulate the healing process.
A few of the doctor’s words penetrated our mental fog, but they only added to our confusion: “We’re not ready to give up on Buffy yet,” “Let’s keep her in the emergency clinic overnight,” “Do you want to add a DNR?” We had no framework into which we could fit these statements, no sense of how this happened, let alone how to respond.
Buffy’s death followed soon after, and it was a devastating punch to the gut—no less because it came a week before our cross-country move. We had picked the house in Texas with Buffy in mind and had imagined her there, sitting next to David in his office while he worked as she so faithfully did in Lynchburg, hanging out with us while we watched TV, running around playing with the laser light. But now she wouldn’t be coming with us. It was a hard realization to take. Grief mingled with anger came quick, but the demands of the moment left little space for mourning.
Inside the house I was packing boxes while outside our son was digging Buffy a grave, a grave we would have to leave behind. The rapid approach of our moving day meant no time for a memorial, no time to be still and simply reflect on this precious cat’s life. I felt an impulse to rage against the meaninglessness of it all, but had no energy or mental space to generate the emotions.
Buffy’s death—so unexpected, so wrong, and yet so inescapable—somehow symbolized all I felt about this summer’s transition. There would be promising possibilities waiting for us in our new location and new positions, I knew, but what loomed larger for me at that moment was all I stood to lose with the move, and Buffy’s death underscored that loss, crystalizing and compounding it.
The comfort of home, the familiarity of Lynchburg, the intimate acquaintance with my late institution’s practices and policies: these would soon be no more. Harder still was moving 1,200 miles from my family and son and leaving behind friends and beloved colleagues. And all of this during a pandemic. This transition has been one of the most difficult experiences I’ve had to endure—with its logistical challenges, financial burdens, and emotional tolls.
Although I know on one level that the conditions at our past school would have made staying there more challenging in the long run, my longing for comfort and my visceral resistance to the loss entailed by our fresh start persisted and sometimes manifested in anger. I was angry that my many prayers for spiritual renewal at Liberty returned unanswered and seemingly unheard, that conditions worsened even.
I was angry that God’s answer to my pleas for deliverance involved so much loss and pain. And I was angry that those responsible for the unbearable conditions were either unaware of or unmoved by the pain they caused. Like Buffy’s death, it all just felt so wrong. It was hard to square with my vision of God, the one who cares and comforts, who sets things right. Why had he refused to set things right? Or, rather, why was the remedy he offered, this escape, so painful?
Over the summer, I wrestled with the paradox of trusting the redemption of my pain and loss—of Buffy, of our home in Lynchburg—to the same God who allowed that loss in the first place.
I know the biblical promises of the resurrection. I know that they apply not merely to the physical body but also to the cosmos. “Behold, I make all things new,” Jesus says in Revelation. It’s a beautiful promise—life-giving in every sense of the phrase. But as much as I’ve professed my embrace of those truths, even earlier this summer in writing about the pandemic, Buffy’s loss conjoined with our move tested that faith. I am only now starting to believe that that testing strengthened it.
The pain I endured through Buffy’s loss and this transition has pushed me further in my recognition of how little I know of God’s redemption of the world or even of what in the world God has redeemed. Day by day I had to lean on God to provide the strength I lacked, the comfort for my hurts, and the hope to overcome my fears. It was a sobering time, too, as it forced me to confront my own self-entitlement, pride, and complacency.
I longed for God to prevent Buffy’s death and to accommodate my desire to remain in place. Truth is, Christianity teaches that real victory comes beyond death, not in bypassing it. I have said it before, I know it cognitively, but this summer I experienced that truth and now know it even deeper—even as I’m still learning of the restoration God will provide on this side of my loss.
That really is the story of scripture, that God delivers us through suffering and loss not from it. Humanity’s ultimate deliverance, of course, comes from the ultimate suffering—the innocent suffering of Christ on the cross. The resurrection is, in fact, linear—death, and only then eternal life.
It’s a hard word in many ways. Who willingly embraces suffering? No one of their own strength and not for suffering’s sake alone. Instead, redemptive suffering requires our hearts to be set right—and it can serve to set our hearts right if we allow God to do a new work in us through it.
Thomas Merton in No Man Is an Island puts it this way:
If we love God and love others in him, we will be glad to let suffering destroy anything in us that God is pleased to let it destroy, because we know that all it destroys is unimportant. We will prefer to let the accidental trash of life be consumed by suffering in order that his glory may come out clean in everything we do.
If we love God, suffering does not matter. Christ in us, his love, his Passion in us: that is what we care about. Pain does not cease to be pain, but we can be glad of it because it enables Christ to suffer in us and give glory to his Father by being greater, in our hearts, than suffering would ever be.
So this summer was excruciating. I’m coming out of it—stronger, more experienced, better prepared for what God has ahead. But most of all, I’m even more confident that the eternal glory to come, of which I’ve seen only glimpses so far, truly will far outweigh these light and momentary afflictions (2 Corinthians 4:17).
Marybeth Baggett is professor of English at Houston Baptist University and serves as associate editor for MoralApologetics.com. She earned her PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and — along with her husband— recently has published The Morals of the Story: Good News about a Good God (IVP Academic, 2018).
