This is part two of an interview with Tony Guru from Colliding World-views

There are many ways to deal with suffering. Here are some effective ways to address them.

1. Weeping deeply. It is crucial to be brutally honest with yourself and God about your pain and sorrow. Do not deny or try too much to control your feelings in the name of being faithful. Read the Psalms of lament or Job. God is very patient with us when we are desperate. Pour out your soul to him.  
2. Trusting and Praying Despite the invitation to pour out our hearts to God with emotional reality, we are also summoned to trust God’s wisdom (since he is sovereign) and also to trust his love (since he has been through what you’ve been through). Despite your grief, you must eventually come to say, as Jesus did (after first honestly entreating, “Let this cup pass from me”), “Thy will be done.” Wrestle until you can say that. Though Job did a lot of complaining and cursed the day he was born—he did it all in prayer. It was to God he complained; it was before God that he struggled. In suffering, you must read the Bible and pray and attend worship even though it is dry or painful. Simone Weil said, if you can’t love God, you must want to love God, or at least ask him to help you love him.  IF YOU DON’T –then that is when you must be honest with your self and admit that–and do it anyway.
3. Thinking Scripturally. You must meditate on the truth and gain the perspective that comes from remembering all God has done for you and is going to do. You should also do “self-communion.” This is both listening to your heart and more directly reasoning with it. It means saying, “Why are you cast down, O my soul? Forget not his benefits, his salvation” (Ps 42; Ps 103). This is not forcing yourself to feel in a certain way, but rather directing your thoughts towards your heart until, sooner or later, it becomes engaged. Much of the thinking and self-communing that we must do has to do with Christian hope. Heaven and the resurrection and the future-perfect world are particularly important to meditate on if you are dealing with death—your own or someone else’s. But it is crucial in all suffering to know that He suffered too, he understands. Look at his hands and see the wounds, meditate on him, Watch the Passion of the Christ. Know he would suffer hell to save you.  This teaching comes from Rabbi Simcha Bunem of Pershyscha. It was said of Reb Simcha Bunem that he carried two slips of paper, one in each pocket. On one he wrote: Bishvili nivra ha-olam—“for my sake the world was created.” On the other, he wrote: V’anokhi afar v’efer”—“I am but dust and ashes.” He would take out each slip of paper as necessary, as a reminder to himself.
4. Letting God know what you really think! Elijah, Moses, Job, Jesus. In  Ian Punnett’s prayer-provoking book, How to Pray When You’re Pissed at God he tells the story of a boy with a debilitating disease who says he gave up on God… My God my God, why have you forsaken me! Eili la Shabitiniti 
5. Self-examining—Learning from your pain. The biblical image of suffering as a “gymnasium” suggests this. We must exercise care here. This does not mean we should always be looking within ourselves for the cause of our suffering. Job’s friends tried to do that, though Job’s suffering did not occur because God was trying to correct him for something. Nevertheless, Job grew in grace and maturity, and every period of adversity is an opportunity to look at ourselves and ask—how do I need to grow? What weakness is this time of trouble revealing?  What did I do wrong and how can I learn from it? The BEST way is to brainstorm with people who love you, or if you cannot, go to a Christian therapist – not in name alone either!
6. Connecting to a higher community. Simone Weil speaks on how isolating suffering can be. But the early Christian communities were famously good places to be a person in suffering. Christians “died well,” the early church authors claimed, not because they were rugged individuals, but because the church was a place of unparalleled sympathy and support. Gospel doctrine should make it impossible to grow many “miserable comforters”, like Job’s moralistic friends. And the Christian gospel accounts for and assigns meaning to the experience of suffering, in a way a secular society cannot. Find a Christian church where sufferers are loved and supported –go be with people who love God and sooner than later, naturally you will feel it.
7. Get up. –Begin healing — physically, mentally, socially, financially –by serving others–Whoever brings blessing will be enriched, and one who waters will himself be watered. Proverbs 11:25