On an April evening in 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine suffered a catastrophic failure. During a routine safety test, Reactor 4 exploded, lighting up the night sky and spewing radioactive material into the air. The poisonous fallout from the explosion was carried by the wind across a huge portion of Europe.
To this day, there are areas surrounding Chernobyl that remain unsafe for extended stays without protective gear. The ground has absorbed and retained dangerous levels of radioactivity through the years. In many places, it’s risky to walk anywhere other than paved roads or designated paths, for fear of kicking up toxic radioactive dust. The Chernobyl “exclusion zone,” spanning roughly 1,000 square miles, was established to protect as many people as possible. Even now, the zone remains a barren wasteland of ghost towns and empty buildings.
When it comes to coping with pain and suffering in life, we often build our own “exclusion zones.” Metaphorically speaking, creating distance often seems like our first instinct to recover. To heal. We use phrases like:
move on
turn the page
put it behind you
chart a new path
cross a bridge
turn a corner
Trauma is often spoken of as a location where we find ourselves. And as such, the road to healing takes us somewhere else we need to go. And that makes sense — we don’t want to remain in a place of suffering any longer than we have to. Deliverance is a gift. Self-care is a beautiful thing. But what if part of the way God brings beauty out of our pain is by leading us to revisit that hurt somehow? What if redemption means returning to the scarred grounds of Chernobyl in our own lives — the very ground where it happened — a place where we know the Lord sustained and delivered us?
What this looks like is a nine-year-old girl who lost her father to cancer. Growing up fatherless was hard enough, but later in life this same girl went back into the trenches alongside an older sister battling cancer. They fought together for nearly a decade before her sister also passed away.
That girl grew up to make her vocation in healthcare. She’s a Doctor of Pharmacy by training, but even beyond her nine-to-five job, she has a recurring calling to help people with cancer — researching treatments…offering wise counsel…cheering over phone calls…praying through tears. I’ve lost track of how many people she’s helped over the years — and I know this because that girl is my wife, Alicia.
When we say God doesn’t waste our suffering, I think this is sometimes what it looks like. Not every time. Not neat and tidy in every trauma — but so often, God uses people who step back onto the grounds of memories that once felt toxic. They navigate the ghosts of tragic moments while digging in the dirt for the good of another — speaking the same language of pain but laced with hope and comfort.
The alternative? We suffer alone. But that’s not the way of the church. Not the path of the Spirit-filled people of God. We bear one another’s burdens — which means sometimes picking up a weight we know all too well. Circling back over ground zero to love another.
And isn’t that the very blueprint of Jesus? Humanity rejects a holy God — so God becomes human and suffers at our hands. The first people rebel against Him at a tree — so He hangs cursed on a tree to reconcile and redeem them. The very ground He formed man from is the ground where He is buried in death.
But in the Kingdom of Heaven, dead ground bursts forth with life. The same power that resurrected Christ is at work in you and me, transforming pain into purpose. There are ghosts of sorrow all around us — but rest assured, there are flesh-and-blood miracles walking among us too. Vessels of comfort and healing walking once toxic ground turned holy.