Exploring Boston: Meet Catherine

Gospel-centered before "gospel-centered" was cool...

“You’re going through this trial because you’ll come out the other side stronger!”

“God won’t give you more than you can handle. Clearly, you’re strong enough for this!”

“You can’t see it now, but God has something better in store for you! After all, when He closes a door, He opens a window.”

Have you been given one of these platitudes while suffering?

These well-meaning statements attempt to comfort, but they only offer a certain kind of comfort; one that is, in the long run, not very comforting. They provide a temporary comfort. Some of these things may be true for the believer in this life. Some may not. We’ve gotten into the habit of generously giving those suffering promises that the Bible itself doesn’t provide.

Think about it: God won’t give more than we can handle?

Can a married couple handle the death of their son?

Can a father handle the despair of bankruptcy, discovering he cannot provide for his family as he thought?

Can a wife handle the unfaithfulness of her husband? Vice versa?

Can a husband handle his wife’s seven-year-long sickness after much pleading with the Lord to take it away?

This is the circumstance Thomas Boston found himself in.

Meet Thomas’ wife, Catherine Brown. She had been sick and pretty much bedridden for seven years, and each day had looked bleak. But what is striking is how she found comfort through her constant inflammation-causing fevers and bodily pain.

Boston indicated that a “sweet calm went through her soul,” and it left him amazed. She would write to the Lord and pour out her heart through a pen, recording the things she found lovely about the Lord Jesus.

You may picture her lying in bed in a quiet house: husband out fulfilling his pastoral duties, a dimly lit room, stone-sized raindrops pelting the roof (which characterized most days in rural Scotland), and there she was, taking refuge in the Word of God. Boston recorded some of her words for us:

I have often aimed at embracing the everlasting covenant held forth in the gospel, and saw my welcome thereto; was willing also to betake myself to it, with my whole heart and often essayed it. My defect still lay in the want of that confidence of faith that the covenant should be made forthcoming to me, according to my needs, for time and eternity; fear still prevailing, and keeping me as it were standing on loose ground. But on March 21, betwixt two and four o'clock in the morning, on my bed of afliction, it pleased the Lord to stir me up, and belp me to essay it again, and to get that gap in some measure filled up. Being deeply convinced of the sin of my nature, and judging it to be the source of my unfixedness, I did, in the first place, make confession of the sin of my nature, life, and practice, being as particular therein as I could reach… That if there was any lust or idol that i knew not of, I might be made sensible of the same; and I judged myself… as deserving nothing but the utmost of God’s indignation.

Then I looked to the way of salvation held forth in the Word of the gospel; beheld Jesus Christ, a Savior every way suited to my needs, my lost and undone condition…And I was in a good measure brought to a constant persuasion, that this foundation of the everlasting covenant, on which I had bottomed my soul for time and eternity, had all things in it needful for me.”

Astounding words. Did you skim them? Go back and carefully read (you won’t regret it; I’ll see you back here when you’re done). Here are a few reflections.

First, she saw the greatest suffering and battle as not her sickness or trial, but her own indwelling sin. Sin will cause more harm and more suffering than any trial. Cancer, criticism, disease, or death—your sin will cause you more grief. She sought to run to Jesus with her sin so that she would be in a place of full dependence upon Christ and have nothing hindering the work Christ would be seeking to do in her.

Second, her greatest source of comfort was the gospel of Christ. She was gospel-centered before “gospel-centered” was cool. Before this so-called “movement” came about over the last few decades, there was a woman, lying in bed in the 1700s, who sought to center her life around the gospel because this was the anchor for her soul as she trevailed stormy waters.

Her comfort was not, “I’m just glad God is not giving me more than I can handle.” Or “This just means God has a big thing in store for me on the other side of this.” It was (to paraphrase) “I have looked away from myself to the Lord Jesus as He is offered to me in the gospel, and I have found all that I need through my union with Him.” She found comfort in the covenant of grace, which was ratified by the blood of the Son of God. This was what she needed. It’s what we all need, for it is not a temporary comfort, but an eternal one.

When was the last time you were suffering and simply rehearsed the gospel to yourself?

This should remind us of where Peter’s mind went when trying to comfort believers who were smack dab in the middle of their suffering:

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion…Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

1 Peter 1:1, 3-5

In suffering, may the gospel, like Peter, like Catherine, not be peripheral, but central. Catherine’s trial was more than she could handle. She was not enough. But thankfully, this reality drove her to a Savior Who is.