the privilege of suffering

Susan and Todd, with sons on their wedding day in August 2010.

My friend Susan recently got married.

I never knew her first husband Brian -- the man she adored, the man with whom she had two sons, and the man she lost to cancer in 2005. Since Brian's death, Susan has been raising her children, working as a teacher, and -- among other things -- learning about suffering.

Below are some of her words, excerpted, from her blog. The title of her post was "Sweet Redemption."


Last week I got married. Graciously—for a second time. 


As I’ve reflected on that moment of pure grace, I keep dancing around the great biblical notion of privileged suffering. Maybe it’s all those years in Los Angeles when I first learned of the “very important people’ concept—being on the list for On the Rox, getting in the side door with Vince Vaughn or hanging with Prince in the VIP room. Name-dropping. Walking on the red carpet. The Deserved. The Entitled. 


But what if the deserved didn’t get to be first? Instead, they were last? VIP suffering, maybe? 


As I’ve traversed life as a widow—one without a partner but never alone or abandoned—God has gently and persistently pushed on my heart the value of sacrifice and suffering—in this world and culture. 


Missing out on family gatherings because I didn’t have a male counterpart was painful at times. Knowing my kids may never have a dad to coach soccer or baseball or go camping with the Cub Scouts often felt a little like lemon on a paper cut—stinging with a cry of pain but then subsiding. 


Or evening after evening, in the quietness of my house, knowing that I could never fill the shoes of a father and trusting that God would be there for my boys—all the time, every moment.


But I learned something invaluable...the privilege of suffering. Suffering, I think, is where we understand redemption. 

For the past few years, I've thought of Susan every week, always with admiration for her strength, her authentic and abiding faith, and her beauty.

As her Facebook update in August, when she and her new husband Todd (see photo, above) were marrying, she wrote:

Goodbye, sweet widowhood, you've taught me to live by faith, to never fear, and to take each moment intentionally. Amazing grace, a redemptive hand--I get to do it again. Laguna Beach--a lovely place to get married.

She's called herself a "second-chance bride." Other friends of mine who have entered into marriage for a second time have started to use that moniker as well.

When I showed my kids the photos of her wedding in Laguna Beach, California, one of my sons pointed to a picture of Susan's son reaching to take her new husband Todd's hand.

"Look," he said, tapping on the computer screen. "Look at that." As a boy who worships his own father, my son Theo noticed when a boy who had adored his father (and who had lost him) had found a man in his life who would be his father, not the one he knew before, but a real and present one all the same. A second chance father, maybe?

So...Susan's blog isn't technically about adoption, but when I see pictures of her with her new husband and sons, they are no longer "hers" but "theirs." Boys who lost a father now have one. Second chance bride. Second chance sons.

As I work on "Love You More" and dive deep into times of suffering in my life and in the lives of others (miscarriage, dry stretches in my marriage, the choice to hand a baby over to a foster mother, self-doubt, and the many times I feel I've failed my children), I'm all for second chances.