Character Produces Hope

The ancient Greeks wrote about noble heroes brought into crisis by a single fatal flaw of character. God, on the other hand, wrote about ordinary people, full of flaws, brought through crisis to share in his glory. Modern Americans don’t want to be the victims of the fickle finger of fate like Prometheus or Medea, but neither do we want to gain character through the pathway of suffering. We pay top dollar to the pharmaceutical industry to keep us pain free. Our best defense attorneys brag that they could have gotten Jesus off. Our culture doesn’t want to bear the cross. We would even take it away from Jesus.

The apostle Paul offers a lesson in character building in which our moral fiber is neither the beginning nor the end of the exercise: “[S]uffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5 NRSV).

I just returned from the poorest country in Africa. After ten years of civil war, the people of Sierra Leone could write the book on suffering and Christian character. Rebels terrorized villages, amputating arms, legs, and more from men, women, and even babies. Many victims begged men who called themselves names like “CO Cuthands” and “Captain Evil Spirit” to kill them. “You’re going to live,” their torturers told them. “You are going to suffer.” Yet Sierra Leone’s Christians have a palpable sense of hope.

For 35 years, I worked with children with cancer. I could tell stories of parents who lost a child but found hope. Then I met mothers with no living children, although they had given birth to six or more.

In the West, we don’t know what suffering is, nor do we want to develop that brand of character. Unlike Jesus, our supreme role model, we don’t want to enter into the pain of others. CNN edited out a great deal of the atrocities in a documentary on Sierra Leone to suit the short American attention span for African suffering.

The good news of God is that Jesus had a perfect attention span when he entered into the suffering of the world. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” our Lord said when he started his ministry, “because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:19 NRSV).

If in the power of the same Holy Spirit, we enter into the suffering of others, we will experience Christ-like character that quietly brings hope to the whole world.

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