How God Meets Us in Suffering

One of the few topics in life that is always relevant is suffering. The fact is, suffering will continue until the day Jesus returns to earth. Because suffering is always nearby, we constantly need to be talking about it. Why? Because it’s in suffering that one of two things can happen. We either let the enemy and our own flesh bring us down, or we recognize God in the midst of it and grow closer to Him. This week on indoubt we chat with author Vaneetha Rendall Risner. She helps us understand how God works in our lives when it comes to suffering. Her own story is full of pain and hurt that you might relate to, yet it’s the suffering in her life that draws her closer to God.

 

Who’s Our Guest?

Vaneetha Rendall Risner is a wife, mother, and author who lives on the east coast of the States. Her unique story of joy in the midst of suffering (quite intense suffering) is encouraging to hear. She blogs regularly at danceintherain.com, and was recently approached by desiringGod to make a short documentary on her life.

Episode Links

Vaneetha’s book is called The Scars that have Shaped Me: How God Meets Us in Suffering. Check it out!

Vaneetha also has a blog which can be accessed here.

DesiringGod made a little documentary about her life, check it out below!

Read It

*Below is an edited transcription of the audio conversation.

Introduction

With me today is Vaneetha Rendall Risner. She’s recently authored a book called The Scars that Have Shaped Me: How God Meets Us in Suffering. Thanks for talking with me on the show today Vaneetha.

It’s great to be here.

I really want to give some time for you to just share your story. So why don’t we just do that – get right into it, and then we’re going to dig into some more specific questions. Tell us your testimony.

Okay. Well, I guess I’ll start from the beginning with my testimony, because it’s relevant from the very beginning. I was born in India to Christian parents, and when I was three months old I got polio. Now, polio had been practically eradicated by the time I got it, so the doctors had no idea what I had. I had a 105-degree fever – my parents took me to the hospital, and the doctors thought I actually had typhoid. So they gave me cortisone which lowers the body’s immune system but it also lets polio kind of go rampant.

It took down my fever, but by the end of it I was completely paralyzed.

I had had polio in just one leg, really not a severe case, but within 24 hours I was a quadriplegic. And then the doctors said “Oh my gosh, she had polio, but we didn’t know that.” And they said, “There’s nothing we can do.” So they told my parents that I should probably leave India if I had any chance of any kind of life. My dad, who was a professor in a university in India took a manual job in London installing telephones just so I could get good medical care.

I had my first surgery in England, and then we moved to Canada which is where I lived for the next 8 years. And I had, probably, nineteen operations in Canada. I lived in Montreal and was at the Shriner’s Hospital for a lot of it, which is a free hospital – because my parents really didn’t have a lot of money. At the time, that hospital was – you had to stay there and your parents couldn’t come stay w...