For the past year, I have travailed through a “dark night of the soul” of sorts. Everything came to a head for me during the first week of a two-week sabbatical I recently took. I found myself struggling with anger and frustration, ultimately leading me into a deep sense of despair.

Going into the second week of the sabbatical I recalled a book that had been on my shelf for some time. I reached for it in a last-ditch effort to receive some sort of clarity and hope. The book being Seasons of the Soul: Stages of Spiritual Development, by Bruce Demarest. I have been taking my time with this book, especially the chapters on dark nights of the soul. I came across a simple, yet profound, quote by Eugene Peterson in a chapter titled “Joyful Reorientation” (p. 130):

We live the Christian life out of a rich tradition of formation-by-resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection provides the energy and conditions by which we “walk before the Lord in the land of the living” (Ps 116:9). The resurrection of Jesus makes available the reality in which we are formed as new creatures by the Holy Spirit. (excerpt from Peterson’s book Christ Plays in Ten-Thousand Places, 232)

As I read these words, several times over, a new sense reality washed over me: that hardship and suffering are the primary means God uses to transform us – that metaphorical death produces life in us. Scripture reveals that hardship and suffering are consequences that resulted from Adam and Eve’s original sin in Eden.

It is possible that God could have allowed humanity to continue living unencumbered by such evils. After all, the only consequence God told Adam he would suffer would be “death,” in that when he ate from the fruit of the tree of “knowledge of good and evil”… “death” would ensue. Though this “death” has traditionally been cashed out as a relational separation from God (transferred from Adam to his progeny). So then, why was it necessary for a good and loving God to allow hardship, suffering, and death to permeate the created order?

The answer to this question is surely multifaceted. Though it appears that this judgment is paradoxically a means of grace. God created human beings for relationship with himself. This relationship was grounded in humanity’s utter trust and dependence upon God. If creation were to remain in a state of perfection after the Fall, then what would drive humanity to God? Humanity had tasted that false sense of autonomous ‘freedom’ and would never be the same. Even now, in a world filled with tragedy and despair, we are prone to insulate and numb ourselves to the brokenness that surrounds us, rather than turn to God. How much more then, if God did not bar us from the tree of life and the blessings of a perfected natural order?

Death then, both figurative and literal, is an extension of God’s grace in that it presents us with our frailty. It incites and provokes us. It induces grief and gives rise to a desire for something more. For something beyond our physical senses. For a better world. Death helps us to realize that the world is not how it ought to be – that we are not as we ought to be.

The Christian life is grounded in the death and resurrection of Jesus, through which we receive new birth. We are made truly alive through Christ as we are restored to an intimate and interactive relationship with God. But ‘new birth’ isn’t all that matters. The Christian life is understood as a journey of becoming fully alive as every aspect of our soul is increasingly transformed into the likeness of Christ.

Scripture reveals that death-and-resurrection is the pattern for such transformation. The principle is simple: to live, you must first die. Every aspect of our souls – our will, mind, desires, emotions, and so forth must experience death in becoming fully transformed, fully alive.

In his first epistle, the apostle Peter speaks of our salvation in terms of this ongoing process of death-and-resurrection. God uses “trials” – hardship and suffering (even temptation!) – to bring about death in us so that we may fully experience his life in us (1 Peter 1:3-9). Likewise, the apostle Paul embraces suffering knowing it leads him to greater dependence on and intimacy with God (2 Corinthians 12:7b-10).

Christ identified with us by entering into our suffering, similarly, we become more like Christ as we identify with his suffering (Philippians 2:5-8; 2 Corinthians. 5:21). The Christian life follows a cyclical pattern of death and resurrection, purification through adversity and suffering; at least, as much as we allow it. To be transformed is to die, to die is to truly live. There is no other way.