The Icy Tower of Babel

This post will be completely different than any post I’ve written previously. Because it isn’t about grief; it’s about something far worse.

This post is about suffering.

“What’s the difference?” you ask. “How is suffering worse than grief?”

It’s a subjective answer, of course, but I find suffering to be far more complicated than grief. Though I’ve promulgated, using dozens of iterations, that grief cannot and should not be rationalized, it is in fact an inherently rational concept.

We love something; we lose it; the resultant void is named Grief.

Our hearts and minds find refuge in that understanding, often to a fault (see The Invisible Colors of Grief). It’s comforting to feel like we can grasp the invisible forces bringing about our destruction, no matter how tenuous that grasp may be.

But more importantly, grief leaves us feeling justified. Not in the sense that our pain is fair or just – far from it – but rather, that our grief is productive. It is a direct result of love and loss, what some call “the price of love.” In other words, our grief is evidence that we once had love in our life, that good things once graced the earth. And each day we spend grieving, we subconsciously believe we are one step closer to healing.

That’s the secret: We unknowingly believe our grief to be fruitful. And in that belief, that subtle hope of progress and growth, we’re able to rise with the dawn and take the next step.

But therein lies the empiric difference between grief and suffering.

While grief is inherently rational and inculcates a sense of productivity, suffering is deeply nihilistic and defies all earthly logic.

Grief is the price of love, but suffering comes from everywhere and nowhere, an unjust cosmic punishment.

Grief is fruitful and brings us closer to healing; suffering is brutal and meaningless.

Or so we think.

Furthermore, the topic of suffering begets another relevant concept – helplessness.

While my wife battled Stage IV breast cancer, we had no shortage of suffering. We experienced it in numerous forms over the course of many years. All of it just as brutal and meaningless as that which had come before.

Or so we thought.

But it was in those trenches that I became intimately acquainted with suffering’s most virulent side effect, that voracious emptiness we call helplessness. Of all the trials we faced, helplessness was the most crippling. And I was never more helpless than in the winter of 2015.

This passage from Even if you don’t illustrates that helplessness. It occurred during a time when Kailen was particularly sick, and enduring physical pain so great it made her teeth chatter. In our odyssey of agony, this was near the pinnacle.

“It was a long, agonizing weekend and my sense of helplessness had never been higher. I organized her medication schedule and monitored her doses, but there was nothing I could do to make anything better. I tried, but like most people in horrific pain, she wanted to be left alone.

Jeff (Kailen’s dad), Jarrod (Kailen’s brother), and I eventually got restless and decided to build a snowman. It gave us reason to get out of the house and momentarily took our minds off the nightmare we were living.

Looking back on it, I realize it wasn’t nearly that simple. For what started off as “let’s build a snowman” became “let’s build the biggest snowman in the neighborhood” which then became “let’s build the biggest snowman in the state” which then became “let’s build the biggest snowman ever built in the history of mankind.”

Over the next three days, and more than sixty man hours, we constructed an ice mountain that quite literally dwarfed the house. Kids from all over the neighborhood came by to take pictures with us, but we couldn’t let them climb on our masterpiece seeing as they might fall to their actual and literal death.

It was fun and it was funny, but in retrospect it’s easy to see we didn’t build a snowman or an ice mountain – we built an icy Tower of Babel.

Our backbreaking effort wasn’t just a testosterone-fueled display of brawny innovation; it had deeper psychological and theological roots. Just like the actual Tower of Babel, we were toiling in vain, trying desperately to reach the heavens in an attempt to petition God with our plight.

Even more than that, we were protesting our own helplessness.

While Kailen suffered inside, we worked tirelessly in subzero temperatures, building a mighty frozen fortress that would melt away to nothing in a week. But the point wasn’t how long it lasted, but that we built it and it existed and we existed and God cared.”

You see, our icy version of Babel was our protest. As I said in the book, we were protesting our own helplessness. But it was more than that.

We were protesting the nihilism of suffering.

We wanted God to care. Because if God cares, then suffering isn’t nihilistic. Like grief, it starts to feel productive. It’s still brutal, but it’s no longer meaningless.

What’s your version of Babel?

No matter the depths of suffering you may be enduring, take heart! You don’t have to build a massive ice mountain to convince God to care. He already cares! Which means your suffering isn’t meaningless, and it never was.

“We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” Romans 5:3-4

Turns out suffering’s pretty productive, after all.

It produces hope.