The Double Trauma of Suffering
The trauma of suffering is two-fold. In God’s Healing for Life’s Losses, I introduce the biblical concept of two levels or layers of traumatic-suffering:
Level One Suffering: What happens to us. What we experience. “The world is fallen and it falls on us.” Level Two Suffering: What happens in us. How we process what we experience. “The world is a mess and it messes with our minds.”
What happens to us in unjust suffering is bad enough. It is crushing.
What happens in us as we remember, respond to, and interpret our suffering determines whether the crushing weight of suffering leads to despair and doubt or to dependent hope.
Calculating the Cost of Traumatic-Suffering
The embodied-soul can calculate the cost of traumatic-suffering in two very different ways.
Despair and Doubt: “Life is unjust, God must be unjust, too.” (Think of Job’s doubts.) Dependent Hope: “Life is bad, but God is good.”
Despair and Doubt: “When trauma hits, I see life only under the sun—from a temporal perspective, from a Christless worldview.” (Think of Solomon’s repetitive focus on fallen life “under the sun.”) Dependent Hope: “When trauma hits, I see
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