Bearing the Unbearable

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Across Canada, Europe, and a growing number of U.S. states, governments present death as relief from suffering. The Netherlands employs “unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement” as a legal standard for euthanasia.

Before lawmakers and physicians define suffering as unbearable, they would be well served to listen to someone who has borne it.

In a recent interview with my friend Joni Eareckson Tada, she addressed California’s End of Life Option Act.

“It’s almost like people who feel they live with unbearable suffering can just move to California and end it all,” she said.

“Unbearable” does a great deal of heavy lifting in that sentence.

A diving accident at 17 left Joni a quadriplegic. Now turning 77, she has endured two rounds of breast cancer and lives with severe chronic pain in addition to paralysis.

Yet she is still here. Still serving. Still living a life of substance and consequence.

Asked whether she would ever retire, Joni said no, citing Paul’s willingness to remain because the work was unfinished.

She does not minimize the pain. She rejects death as its most compassionate answer.

I have spent forty years beside my wife Gracie, who has endured 98 operations, bilateral amputations, and relentless pain.

Joni sees unbearable suffering from the wheelchair. I see it from beside the wheelchair.

She hears the suffering person wonder, “Has my life become a burden?”

I hear the caregiver wonder, “Who will care for the person I love when I no longer can?”

As assisted death spreads, vulnerable people hear another question: Would everyone else be relieved if I were gone?

Death increasingly becomes the prescription for suffering we fear, consequences we refuse to bear, or lives that ask more of us than we wish to give.

The prevailing creed is autonomy: I alone will decide what suffering I will endure and what another person’s life may require of me.

The same creed underlies abortion. One person decides that another life may not demand more than that person is willing to give. In both cases, autonomy becomes the authority to determine whether another human life may continue.

But once death becomes an accepted answer to suffering or dependency, the judgment never remains entirely private. Families, physicians, insurers, and institutions inevitably begin weighing which lives are too burdensome to sustain.

They call it compassion.

It is not.

Compassion enters suffering. It does not eliminate the sufferer.

If suffering is merely random, ending the sufferer’s life can masquerade as mercy. But if a sovereign God rules over this world, suffering is never meaningless or beyond His reach.

Christianity rejects that counterfeit compassion. We entrust ourselves to Christ and enter the burdens of others.

Human worth is not conferred by health, independence, or usefulness. God made us in His image. Paul calls those members of Christ’s body who appear weaker “indispensable” (1 Corinthians 12:22).

But what sustains when the pain does not end?

Joni’s answer is not willpower. Gracie’s answer is not optimism. The answer is Christ.

But what does that look like?

No one can bear a lifetime of suffering at once. But the Shepherd gives grace for the next 24 hours. Psalm 23 does not promise a short valley. It promises we will not be abandoned within it.

Following what was then Gracie’s 92nd operation, she returned to her hospital room tangled in tubes and IV lines. A nursing assistant came in to check on her.

Still emerging from anesthesia, Gracie sensed something was wrong.

“How are you?” she whispered.

Tears filled the woman’s eyes as she confided that her marriage was in trouble.

Gracie threaded her hand through the lines and took the woman’s hand. Then she quoted her friend Joni:

“God permits what He hates to accomplish what He loves.”

Neither woman could see what God was doing. Neither believed He was doing nothing.

The woman’s shoulders straightened, and she breathed a little easier.

Gracie was one beggar showing another where she had found bread.

We do not become someone else’s savior. Even from within our own anguish, we can help people catch their breath, then point them to the Savior who understands their suffering and whose purposes extend beyond what we can explain.

“Bear one another’s burdens,” Paul writes, “and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).

That command applies to everyone who belongs to Christ. It cannot be outsourced.

If we say Christ is sufficient, visible obedience should follow.

Do we take Him at His word?

If we do, how would anyone know?

They would see us entering the burdens of others.

Sometimes to sit.

Sometimes to carry.

At all times, to point to the Savior.

Even from a wheelchair.

Even from a hospital bed.

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