Foreword to Finding God in Suffering
Monday, 22 July 2024
| Gordon Preece
What a privilege to be invited by my good friend Siu Fung to write a foreword to his genuinely uplifting book Finding God in Suffering: Journeying with Jesus and Scriptures. Enthralled, captivated, challenged also capture my response to this well-mixed blend of Bible, autobiography and wise guide. This invitation to spiritual and scriptural accompaniment does not disappoint. Enlightenment emerges out of or perhaps paradoxically in the shadows of suffering, during an adventurous journey.
As I expected from my humble friend, his personal depictions of suffering are made without blame or exaggeration. The matter-of-fact language, from a biblical scholar, is true both in form and content to Scripture. It is plain, simple, clear and often authentically heart-wrenching.
Siu Fung’s poor, toiling parents in Hong Kong’s garment district are so fixated on survival they don’t have the luxury of much emotional expression. His hard-working life is made much harder through his mother’s stroke at 30, major heart surgery and long-term disability and immobility on her right side. Her hard-working husband faces a five-hour return trip daily to see their mother and provide her special traditional food. Upon return to her many-staired home, she faces traditional Chinese stigma towards disability and being knocked over by the mobile mob on the streets. Teenager Siu Fung makes herculean efforts to carry her across the dangerous roads. But he is simply, without ornament, showing what the life of the suffering and disabled poor is like.
Young Siu Fung was resourceful – he had to be. He did his father’s business accounts, which barely broke even, on top of his manual work (till 9pm) and school studies (till 2am!). Like most Chinese parents, his put a high priority on children’s education as the way to a future. He would turn in for sleep after listening to his parents’ fights. His father’s verbal and physical violence was terrifying.
Yet in the presence of a mountain of misfortune, Siu Fung found the joy and company of Jesus on his hard journey, at seventeen in a Christian school. This was no merely intellectual conversion but a deep experience of shared suffering with Jesus. And in the midst of a dysfunctional family, he discovered families like his in Scripture and liberation from existential slavery into the intimacy of finding Christ in suffering and becoming a child of God. Despite his relatively unresponsive parents and arduous, unhappy family life, he discovered a new dimension of family in his adoption into God’s family (Rom 8:17).
But it was still no easy ride. The quest to get into an English University involved numerous obstacles being overcome, not primarily academic, but financial. It was a whole extended family challenge right up till the moment of airport take-off when his bag was lost, culminating in his mother finding it. I wanted to cry with joy, but also had a tear for a form of motherly love that will let go, even to her own economic and physical and emotional detriment. On top of that were language, climactic and cultural challenges not only in a global sense but also in the form of racism and classism within the UK. With the wider family’s educational and economic expectations resting on his shoulders, Siu Fung faced doubt and disappointment.
He also had a solid sense of Christ’s peaceful presence and the sustaining support of the means of grace. This brought some stability in the midst of constant challenge. Some of this came through forms of guidance and confirmation, ranging from the more charismatic/Pentecostal to the sacramental. Siu Fung wasn’t fussy about how Christ showed his presence in times of suffering or stepping out in faith. He longed for people both East and West, whether through more physical or mental suffering respectively, to find such consolation and immense support in Christ’s sufferings and cross-bearing and in God’s faithfulness. And a horizon of hope was promised in the cosmic renewal of Romans 8.
For young and mature Christians alike, Siu Fung provides in Christ’s and Paul’s and his own experience a rich blend of suffering and sustainable spirituality for the long haul. But he also draws on the global experience of suffering Christians in poverty and persecution as a great encouragement to western readers. Among other examples of suffering in this catalogue of pain is the global shame of domestic violence at similar rates between Christians and non-Christians, according to recent Australian research. He also laments power-based, un-servant like leadership he has experienced in various settings. Sui Fung doesn’t shrink from naming the hard things and makes us look at the shameful statistics. He doesn’t claim so but to me he has something of the mantle of the prophets’ and apostles’ experience of vocation or calling. Siu Fung feels some personal reticence about raising these things, as they do not come naturally to him personally or culturally.
But God seems to have allowed him to go through such wide experiences so he can draw the Australian and global church’s attention to them, so we stop covering them up.
Siu Fung’s view of poverty, suffering and the Christian life is unromantic, but heart-felt and hard-won. In the end, his biblical conviction about a love-centred community and God’s ultimate triumph in the midst of suffering sustains him and potentially others, if taken seriously. I commend this user-friendly and fleshed-out adaptation of Siu Fung’s published doctorate on Suffering in Romans. It has the biblical and personal authenticity to bring renewal to individuals and churches from a range of cultures.
Gordon Preece is Director of Ethos.
This is an edited version of the Foreword in Siu Fung Wu, Finding God in Suffering: Journeying with Jesus and Scriptures (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2023). First edited and republished with permission in Zadok Perspectives and Papers: ‘Multicultural Odysseys and Storms’, Issue 162 (Autumn 2024), p.4.