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"Religion is lived by people who are scared of Hell. Spirituality is lived by people who have been through hell."

I don’t know if the statement above is true or not but I know there’s a depth to faith (and life for that matter) that seems to emerge through the way of suffering. Books like The Wounded Healer (Nouwen) and Disappointment with God (Yancey) wouldn’t have made any sense to me with the black and white theology I had as a young adult. These days though, it’s a different story.

Growing up I was encouraged to ‘have faith’ – to pray to God for what I needed and believe that He would come through. It didn’t take much real life experience though to bring me to a point of questioning this. Looking after sick and dying people will do that to you. I couldn’t deny that bad things were happening to good people all around me and I wondered (as many others do) where God was in it all. Then it got personal – despite desperately wanting to have children, my husband and I discovered that we couldn’t and so began the rollercoaster ride that is IVF treatment. At one point (after we had lost our seventh little one) I found myself contemplating whether the hairdryer in the bath would really work, whether I could indeed end this intolerable pain. I felt like I was adrift in a vast ocean, barely holding on, yet holding on to something. I remember people asking me how I could still have faith in God after all this and thinking along the lines of Peter (John 6:68) when he said, “Lord, to whom shall we go. You have the words of eternal life”.

Somehow I surfaced and came to appreciate the change that suffering was bringing about in my life. I found that there was a clarity that comes through pain which enabled me to identify and keep focused on things that are actually important in life. The idea that life is short and time is precious is in clear focus when you are faced with suffering and it changes how you see and interact with the world. The joys in life seem greater on the backdrop of pain – we now have two beautiful children and I really do treasure their presence in my life. My experience has also enabled me to demonstrate greater compassion to others and to empathise more honestly with those in difficult situations. These aspects of my character and attitude to life are ones I would not want to change and I find that I am strangely grateful for the experiences I’ve had which brought them about. I feel less inclined to want to define my beliefs or faith and more focused on how my life is lived.