Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See promises a story that “illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.” This intricate work of historical fiction delivers on that promise and provides a compelling journey for any reader; but for the Christian, I believe it offers enduring lessons about kindness.

Kindness transforms us.
In January of 1941 in Saint-Malo, a young French girl named Marie-Laure is unable to get herself out of bed. Her circumstances weigh so heavy even simple tasks prove impossible:
She becomes unreachable, sullen. She does not bathe, does not warm herself by the kitchen fire, ceases to ask if she can go outdoors. She hardly eats.
Like others throughout the book, the cruelty of the world threatens to crush her.
The cook and maid of the Saint-Malo home, Madame Manec, sees this and refuses to watch her suffer alone any longer. Though it is not her responsibility, she takes Marie-Laure out of the house and down to the Breton coastline. As her lungs fill with crisp sea air and her curious fingers trace the frames of surrounding barnacles, Marie-Laure slowly comes back to life.
Madame Manec risks going out of her home during wartime to stand on a cold beach for three hours so a child not her own can feel again. This is kindness: to love another selflessly and without expectation of return.
Reading simple and profound acts of benevolence from All the Light We Cannot See during my own season of depression comforted me. Those who have tasted the bitterness of life know the sweetness of a hand reaching out through the fog of suffering. In many ways, these fictional glimmers of goodness lifted my weary chin to gaze at the transformational kindness of Jesus.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is for the despondent. It is right for our hearts to break when relationships are severed; for sobs to wrack our bodies when death steals the life of one we loved; for us to acknowledge the sheer wrongness of pain’s existence.
We could have been left in the despondent darkness of sin, but God in his lovingkindness sent Jesus to be the light of the world that those who believe in him may be saved.[1] Tasting communion upon our lips regularly reminds us of this love: the body of Christ broken for us, and the blood of Christ shed for us.
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Elihu re-emphasizes the gratuitous nature of what God has provided and indeed accomplished for sinners in the great transaction of redeeming his soul from hell and granting him heaven (verses 29,30). Paul affirms his operation of redemptive intervention in writing, “He has translated us out of the kingdom of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of his love, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:13, 14). This lifts us beyond the contemplation of what is needed that Elihu sets forth to Job and puts us in the realm of proclamation of what God has done:  “You may proclaim the excellencies of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9).

Complaints about pain as undeserved reveals a heart unresponsive to merciful rebuke. (33:19-22). God speaks through man’s pain that rebuke is necessary and if unheeded will bring one finally to perdition.  Physical pain is designed to show spiritual danger. When muscles ache and even bones radiate pain, when food nauseates, and physical symmetry gives way to gauntness, one should well consider that present pain is not even dimensionally related in either quality or quantity to the wrath of eternal divine anger. Man’s sin brings him near to the pit, as it were dangling over the flames of hell, in a weakened and morally susceptible condition, nothing to hinder the execution of a sentence of perdition. Pain is a merciful warning against self-righteousness, susceptibility to just infliction of punishment for sin against the infinitely righteous and just God. How shall we escape?
In 33:23-30, Elihu introduces an idea that Job himself had suggested (16:19-21) that another must arise to plead a sinner’s cause and restore him to righteousness. This ransom/mediator will be unique. He may be represented through a messenger, a faithful minister of the gospel, but he alone can accomplish the thing itself that is needed. This ransom/mediator must know the case of man and be able to declare fully and clearly what is right—“To remind a man what is right for him” (23). The ransom must be able to represent the case of God also and find before God that which will satisfy the prevailing necessity of justice in the case of a sinner. That which is found is not the worthiness of the sinner but solely the intervention of mercy to interrupt the certainty of death by the payment of a required sum in order to effect the release of the condemned. This ransom/mediator must be able to satisfy God in saying, “Deliver him from going down into the pit; I have found a ransom” (24).
The requirements of God’s goodness both in justice and mercy are served by this ransom/mediator. “But when the goodness and lovingkindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy” (Titus 3:4, 5). This transaction of mercy and justice through the ransom restores the almost-destroyed sinner to youthful vigor – “by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly” (Titus 3:5). Through the meritorious work of this ransom/mediator this once distraught person’s sin is forgiven and he is made an heir of eternal life according to the righteousness that God requires. (Job 33:26, 27). That which Elihu envisioned in this revelatory moment is described by the apostle Paul in its fulfillment, “through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace” (Titus 3:6, 7). The sinner so justified finds that eternal destruction is no longer his destiny [“He has redeemed my soul from going down to the pit” (Job 33:28)] and has given the hope of eternal life [“and my life shall look upon the light”]. Paul gives Elihu’s vision of the necessary the certainty of the historically accomplished: “we might be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life” (Titus 3:7).
Elihu re-emphasizes the gratuitous nature of what God has provided and indeed accomplished for sinners in the great transaction of redeeming his soul from hell and granting him heaven (verses 29,30). Paul affirms his operation of redemptive intervention in writing, “He has translated us out of the kingdom of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of his love, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:13, 14). This lifts us beyond the contemplation of what is needed that Elihu sets forth to Job and puts us in the realm of proclamation of what God has done.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Friday, October 20, 2023
Churches should speak and teach as though this is true. It’s utterly bewildering to so many young Christians I meet that their lives are marked by difficulty. The prolonged feeling of the absence of God in the midst of it is also bamboozling, but so utterly ordinary that almost every older Christian could tell these stories.

If you want to mature, you’re going to have to suffer.
Actually, that’s not quite right. You are going to suffer, that’s the nature of life under the sun. Some of that will be petty, some of it will be serious, and (heaven-forfend) some of it will be so psychologically scarring that you’ll be getting over it for a long time.
In of itself that won’t make you mature, but it will be the venue of your testing (1 Peter 4). It will give you the opportunity to endure and in so doing develop character (Romans 5). This is what we call maturity, a growing Christlikeness (2 Corinthians 3) and a growing wisdom (Luke 2) that happens through being broken like bread.
We have to learn to find God in his hiddenness, to encounter him in the pit of pain, to allow his rod and staff to guide us through the valley (Psalm 23), in order to grow up.
This is, I contend, what Jesus meant by Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted, but that’s not what I want to address directly today.
Suffering is normal
This is not how the world was originally designed to be—though maturity through testing is how the world was meant to be, but Adam failed the kingly test that Jesus passed—and it is not how the world will one day be.
However, our cultures think suffering is to be avoided rather than learned from, and often act as though it’s a terrible and unexpected imposition on us. It would be good if someone warned us.
The Church doesn’t always do much better. Some treat suffering as a lack of faith (more common than we’d like to admit), others as a deeply confusing reality because we expected God to bless us transactionally, and others speak as though Christians in the West don’t suffer (I hear this a lot, and then people wonder what’s wrong with them when they do).
It is of course true that Western suffering is different, we are unlikely to die in famines, less likely to die in plagues, and face fewer natural disasters. The suffering of the average Christian is much more likely to be psychological, but if following Jesus isn’t costing you anything that we could group under the catch all category of ‘suffering’ then are you actually following him?
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