Suffering

One month ago: "Darla, Jen wants to do a talk on "suffering" for the next Women's Breakfast. Can you decorate for that??" "Pshaw", I says! "No prob"...SO! How do you decorate for a women's breakfast where the theme is "suffering"?

The color gray immediately came to mind.
Gray everything.
Yeah...that pretty much looks like suffering feels.

So there was the beginning. My decorating plan so far went something like this: Gray table clothes, plates, cups, napkins, clear plastic ware wrapped in the gray napkins, clear vases with gray flowers...HUH?

Hold on. Where am I going to find gray flowers? Solution: dollar store white roses spray painted with gray primer. Perfect! This was a great illustration, because sometimes in our suffering, even the things of beauty, things that god has given us to bless us and bring us joy, seem gray and lose their shine. It was coming together, but it needed something...

So for a month I've been thinking about the grayness of suffering. Loss, hurt, emotional pain, stress, aloneness, - they can all be found during a time of suffering. But for what good? What benefit? If God is a God of grace and love, power and mercy, how can these gray times bring him glory? How do the valley times in our lives give him honor?? Why must we endure them???

Clay. CLAY! Oh, yeah, we're SO like clay! He is the potter, we are the clay.
So there was the "something". Clay became Playdough and the plan was complete. Each lady found a little pot of dough at their place (8 in a pack at the dollar store! What a deal!) A few play dough toys, little rolling pins, popsicle stick, cookie cutters, and the like were placed in the center of each table. Simple, but meaningful.

As the women found their spots, they were all wondering how gray flowers and play dough have anything to do with suffering. But as we listened to Jen and discussed afterward, we learned that God uses suffering to mold us, shape us, press us, form us into what he wants. And then, sometimes it feels like he squishes us up and starts all over again! I looked up from making my purple flower princess and watched the ladies playing with their dough, some making cookies, some building a gingerbread house, some just squishing it, some making stick puppets w. the popsicle sticks...no two creations were exactly the same. The teenagers had mixed theirs together and created tie-dyed looking dough. I couldn't help but see a family or even a church or community suffering together. It struck me that all the things being made were making their creators smile. We were enjoying forming and molding our clay into what we thought would be beautiful. The clay doesn't know what it will become, or why it has to go through the thing that pushes it out in the shape of a star, or why it has to have a toothpick stuck in it, or why it has to be mixed up with red (maybe it doesn't like red), or (OUCH) why it has to be rolled so thin. But the creator does. And in the end, the clay is his, and he knows what He's doing, and it makes him smile to see what we are becoming.

More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Rom 5:3-5

Thanks Jen, great topic!!

P.S. I'll post pics as soon as I figure out how!