How Romans 5 Brought Me to Christ When Suffering Had Killed My Faith

Midway through my surgical training, a single night’s work in the emergency department shattered my belief in God.

I grew up as a nominal Christian, with a faith grounded in sentimentality rather than biblical truth. One night, too many hearts thudded to a stop beneath my hands. Without the truths of Scripture to gird it, my meager faith crumbled to dust.

Harrowing Night

The horror began with a young man in his 20s, whom someone bludgeoned with a baseball bat in his sleep. His wife died during the assault, and his 4-year-old son witnessed everything. The man arrived with a skull fracture and with blood crowding out his brain. As I rushed to stabilize him, I struggled to focus. I envisioned his little boy staggering down the hallway in footed pajamas, rubbing his eyes with a fist, then opening them to watch his world disintegrate with the crack of a bat. What kind of life was this child going to have, with such memories haunting him?

While I still wrestled with this thought, paramedics careened into the ER with a teenager dying from a gunshot wound. His heart had stopped, and EMTs were performing chest compressions to force blood to his brain. In a blur, I grasped a scalpel and surgically explored the young boy’s chest. I cupped his still heart, and searched its borders with trembling fingers. When my hand plunged into a gaping hole, I caught my breath. The bullet had torn open his aorta, and emptied his blood volume into his chest. We couldn’t save him.

Midway through my surgical training, a single night’s work in the emergency department shattered my belief in God.

My trauma pager blared yet again. Another teenage kid. Another gunshot wound. This time the bullet had struck the boy’s head. When the resident shined a light into his eyes, the boy’s pupils remained fixed and empty, staring into the unseen. Brain death had claimed him, and we had no help to offer. Mustering my dwindling reserves, I began to suture his head wound closed. The least I could do, I thought, was to mend his wound and to clean him, to give his family a final, familiar glimpse of the boy they loved.

Midway through my work, the door opened. I raised my eyes, then froze in dread as his mother walked into the room. Blood still haloed her son’s head. As her face contorted, I knew she took it all in, every detail, every gash and fleck of this horrible scene etched into her memory forever. She howled and fell to the floor. I tugged the bloodied gloves from my hands, rushed from the room, and hid my face as I sobbed. 

Searching the Silence

After work the next morning I felt hollowed out, as if a vital part of me had been torn out from its roots. I wondered how people could look at one another and see no value. How could God allow such evil? How could he permit suffering to ravage people who love their families and dream of happiness and hope for something better, as we all do?

Although my body ached for rest, I drove two hours into the Berkshire Mountains in search of something good and true. I stopped at a bridge overlooking the Connecticut River, breathed in the crisp autumn air, and then shut my eyes to pray . . . but no words came. Through closed lids I saw only the blood staining my gloves, a boy’s eyes fixed in his final gaze. I heard his mother scream as she crumpled to the floor in grief.

In the vast silence, without God’s Word to guide me, I decided I couldn’t discern an answer because God didn’t exist.

Seeing Suffering Through the Gospel

For a year afterward, I ruminated daily about returning to that bridge spanning the Connecticut River, and hurling myself over the railing. Without God, I had no claim to hope. I discerned no meaning, no glint of mercy lining the dark moments that I witnessed in the hospital. I saw only the horror of it all, the pervasive suffering, the despair.

And yet, while I had dismissed God, he had not abandoned me.

. . . while I had dismissed God, he had not abandoned me.

When one of my patients recovered from a devastating brain injury in response to prayer, a flicker of hope stirred within me. When I finally cracked the spine of a Bible, God’s Word fanned that spark into a flame. I read through the four Gospels, and God’s love for us in Christ left me awestruck. Then I dove into Romans. Upon reading chapter five, I burst into tears:

Not only that, but 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. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Rom. 5:3–8)

For a year, the problem of suffering had driven me from faith. Yet as I read verses 3–5, I saw suffering through the lens of the gospel, and God’s mercy overwhelmed me.

Seeing God’s Love in Suffering

Paul begins with the staggering claim that we can rejoice even in our sufferings (v. 3). We can rejoice because we have peace with God and hope of glory through Jesus Christ (vv. 1–2). We can rejoice because God refines us through our trials, strengthening our hope in him (vv. 3–5). And we can rejoice because when we suffer, we remember our Savior who suffered for us, so that we might have eternal life (Heb. 4:15).

God worked through suffering—the suffering of his beloved Son—to accomplish the greatest feat in the history of mankind.

God worked through suffering—the suffering of his beloved Son—to accomplish the greatest feat in the history of mankind. When our eyes fail to discern God’s love, we can cling to the truth that Jesus knows our suffering, because he endured it, too (Isa. 53:3; Heb. 4:15). And, stunningly, he bore it for us. He took on the full weight of our sin and absorbed the punishment we earned, purely out of loving obedience to the Father, who in turn so loved us (John 3:16).

When we reflect upon Christ’s sacrifice, we see the most exquisite example of God’s love for the sin-stricken, broken, undeserving world. This is how God shows his love for us (v. 8).

Unshakable Hope

Romans 5:3–8 teaches us that those who know Christ have a hope which no calamity or disaster can wrench from us. It points our eyes away from this sin-sick world, toward Christ, who makes all things new (Rev. 21:5). And with our eyes set on him, our suffering refines us, as iron in the forge. The cross infuses even our most harrowing tribulations with purpose. Even as we groan (Rom. 8:22), hope in Christ chases away despair.

Illness, pain, and death are the detestable fruits of the fall, and they daily break us in two. But in Christ, we have hope. While tragedies devastate us now, our tears will not flow forever. He has conquered the evil that spawns our pain, and when he returns, the fruits of sin—the gunshot wounds, the brain injury, the mourning, the despondency atop bridges—will vanish from the face of the new earth forever.