The Creative Work of Suffering

Mama works it.

She’s spread newspapers out over the table, flyers of last week’s specials on canned corn, bags of potatoes.

A can of polish, lid twisted off, sits within arm reach. Mama pours the milky liquid clean onto frayed cotton rag, then rubs silver’s curves again.

Her hands fly, deliberate, overlapping hope circles. She presses into it and her fingernails whiten.

“We’re getting it, Levi. You just see. You just see what we pull up here.” She’s arched tight over silver, her words eddying too.

“Why’d you buy it, Gram?” Levi leans in closer, watching fingers buff. “It’s all black and ugly. I wouldn’t drink tea out of that.”

“You just wait, Levi.” Her words are soft, her hands taking all her energy. “Wait and see what a little work will make of it.”

A tarnished platter lies on the table, too a find from a neglected back corner of our local imploding thrift store.

I watch her hands, listen to her determined, bent breathing. Her glasses are sliding down her nose. She does this, it’s the warp of who she is: values the discarded. Works and creates something good out of nothing good.

Isn’t that too who we are, ones who bear His name?

“And here Christianity has its enormous advantage over every other religion in the world,” writes Dorothy Sayers. “It is the only religion that gives value to evil and suffering. It affirms… that perfection is attained through the active and positive effort to wrench a real good out of a real evil.”

Mama’s rag kneads steel and I think how Jesus already did it: attained perfection through the horrific effort of the Cross, wrenching real good out of our very real evil.

Hideous sin ravages this world. Evil stalks and devours and vomits. But our creative, redeeming God claims the ugly and, cloth in hand, works it all for good. It’s His tireless, unending creative process: "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good…” (Gen. 50:20).

And now we, part of His body, may participate with Him every day in that creative, demanding work, wrenching real good out of real evil. We who are dead in the body but alive in Christ, are now invited to do continually what He did: suffer and create.

Out of our suffering, we too may create beauty. Out of our pain, we too may create poetry. Out of our hurt, we too may create praise.

We suffer grime but, like David, we may create good, working grief into glory psalms.

Kids scream, bones ache, dreams stain and discolor and we have the choice of creatively working it all into praise, into thanksgiving, into God-glory. This is the creative work of living: polishing the sin grime off each moment and seeing the good in it.

The God in it.





Levi pushes closer. Mama deeply massages the last of the silver.

“I can see my face in it, Gram!” Levi’s beams toothily into the gleam. Mama knowingly raises an arched eyebrow, smiling too.

She's worked the ugly into beauty.

Now can I?

:::
Lord, it takes real work to wrench good out of evil. Your scars prove it. You welcome me too into the hard, creative work of suffering.
With You today, cause me to enter into the real creative work of living: redeeming all ugly into the beauty of all You.

:::
Related: Get Closer to the Ugly
Photos: Mama polishing silver