How to deal with life when it sucker punches you
Webster defines “sucker punch” as taking a personal blow “suddenly without warning and often without apparent provocation”. What about you … has life caught you in the gut lately?
Maybe this sounds familiar: you’re minding your own business, trying to make your way through each day without bothering anyone, maybe even trying to do good and what you believe is God’s work in some way, and then — WHAM — out of nowhere, you get a body blow from the universe that isn’t deserved. Pain, coupled with disbelief, quickly leads to anger and bitterness over what’s befallen you.
If you can relate, well, I’ve been there plenty of times myself so you’re not alone.
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Occasionally the awful things that come our way are blowback from bad decisions we’ve made, although a recent Pew Research poll showed that only 6% of us think that’s the case. The vast majority in the study believed “life happens” and that there is no rhyme or reason for sudden misfortunes that strike us.
Sometimes these adversities take on multiple personas such as the “boomerang” or “yo-yo” hardship where you thought you had gotten free of adversity and breathed a sigh of relief, but now it’s come back to haunt you again. Or how about the “triphammer” trial where one bad thing happens after another and you end up like Jack Nicholson in the movie “Something’s Gotta Give” where, after a series of issues have pounded him, snow starts slowly falling on his head causing him to look heavenward and dejectedly ask, “anything else?”
Ever done that? Don’t feel sheepish if you have, because I think all of us have felt that way at one time or another. As Christians, from an emotional standpoint, we often internally feel that life’s sucker punches should be reserved for other people, and so we’re surprised when we feel it ourselves even though we intellectually know Scripture says trials are visited upon everyone.
So, how can we rewire ourselves to correctly deal with those experiences when they come? Let’s look at how a couple of pretty famous guys did just that.
You gotta be kidding me
First up is the apostle Paul who, putting it as simply as I know how, had it rough. When God said about Paul, “I will show him how much he must suffer for My name’s sake” (Acts 9:16), He wasn’t kidding.
This seems strange for a man that God would use to write most of the New Testament and evangelize the non-Jewish world at that time. You’d think someone tasked with those responsibilities would be divinely protected from unprovoked, out-of-the-blue assaults.
But read through the book of 2nd Corinthians and you’ll find exactly the opposite as Paul details all the trials he endured during his Christian life. Paul’s sucker punches came in the form of both physical and psychological afflictions where he admits, “We were burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life; indeed, we had the sentence of death within ourselves so that we would not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead” (2 Cor. 1:8-9).
This tells us that Paul had to, from time to time, think “you gotta be kidding me” when all Hell broke loose on him, likely wondering how one divinely tasked by God could see so much trouble when a sovereign and omnipotent Creator was overseeing everything in his life.
We see evidence of this when he writes, “we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor. 4:8–9). What stands out refreshingly to me in these verses is that Paul admits he was “perplexed” about the hardships that came his way just like we are today.
The word “perplexed” in Greek is aporeo and it means to not know which way to turn; to be in total dire straits without any resources to help. So, tell the truth: have you ever felt that way in your tribulations even though you’re a Christian and, in your head, know God loves you? If so, you and the greatest disciple of Christ who ever lived have something in common.
But through it all, Paul says even though he had bottomed out he was “not despairing,” and so, in the end, his attitude was “we do not lose heart … for momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:16–17). In the end, Paul continued to trust God through his storms believing, “He will yet deliver us” (2 Cor. 1:8).
Fast forward nearly 2,000 years from Paul to someone even non-Christians consider one of the most powerful intellectuals to ever grace American soil, the great theologian Jonathan Edwards. His writings and sermons continue to educate and direct the thoughts of believers today toward the deep things of God.
Yet, read any of Edward’s biographies and see the undeserved attacks that came upon him, intensifying to the point where he was evicted from his own church and banished to the wilderness to teach native Americans the Gospel. But what was Edwards’ attitude toward all his undeserved assaults?
We get a good idea from his sermon Christian Happiness where he says:
“The good [man] is exalted out of the reach of all worldly evils; they cannot send forth their baneful influences so high as to touch him, and all the hurt they can do him is but as a sharp medicine … A good man may look down upon all the whole army of worldly afflictions under his feet with a slight and disregard and consider with himself and joy therein that, however great they are and however numerous, let them all join their forces together against him and put on their most rueful and dreadful habits, forms and appearances, and spend all their strength, vigor and violence with endeavors to do him any real hurt or mischief, and it is all in vain.”
While it’s important to drink deeply from what Edwards is saying, it’s also critical to understand that he and Paul are not trivializing the awful things that can come our way. Instead, they are acknowledging them and showing us a way (actually the only way) forward.
The writer Dostoevsky painted this picture in his novel The Brothers Karamazov through his atheist character Ivan Karamazov, which he has admit, near the end of the book, that Christianity is the only worldview that takes human brokenness seriously and provides a solution.
So, while life’s sucker punches are going to keep coming until God brings about the new heavens and earth (Rev. 21:1), remember what that great philosopher Rocky Balboa said: “You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t how hard you hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done.”
True. And it helps to know that God knows our struggles and has already written a good ending for each of us, which is why Jesus said: “These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation but take courage; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
Robin Schumacher is an accomplished software executive and Christian apologist who has written many articles, authored and contributed to several Christian books, appeared on nationally syndicated radio programs, and presented at apologetic events. He holds a BS in Business, Master's in Christian apologetics and a Ph.D. in New Testament. His latest book is, A Confident Faith: Winning people to Christ with the apologetics of the Apostle Paul.
