Life is full of pain, leaving us wanting to blame something or someone for our suffering. Can there be purpose behind our struggles and sacrifices?
If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both. This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form.
C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Eleven years ago last fall, my body began to feel like a traitorous enemy. What at first felt like aches and pains from a virus became nightly leg and feet pain that was nearly unbearable and robbed me of sleep. I was a hospital chaplain, on my feet most of the day, so I assumed that I simply needed to wear more supportive shoes instead of my usual stylish choices. However, nothing seemed to alleviate the pain that gradually began to spread throughout my body. Blinding migraines hit the following spring. By June, I had missed so many days of work that, weeping, I tendered my resignation.
Despite having classic symptoms, it still took eight months and numerous doctor visits to receive a diagnosis other than it being ‘all in my head’ or ‘depression.’ I had fibromyalgia. At the time, there weren’t many options other than pain meds, which I didn’t want because addiction runs strong in my family of origin.
There were many dark days to follow, months searching for treatments or cures, (there aren’t any), and numerous seasons questioning why, why, why. An understanding doctor, a fibromyalgia clinic in Atlanta, a husband who would stop at nothing to see me receive whatever I needed, and a patient, loving Father saw me through the next two years. Although I don’t know a day without pain somewhere in my body, by the grace of God, it isn’t the focus of my life.
A verse from a song by NEEDTOBREATHE always arrests me when I hear it because I now see pain in a different light, too:
Don’t let the night become the day
Don’t take the darkness to the grave
I know pain is just a place
The will has been broken
Don’t let the fear become the hate
Don’t take the sadness to the grave
I know the fight is on the way
When the sides have been chosen
Pain
Pain, the gift nobody wants, as Paul Brand wrote with Philip Yancey in their classic 1993 book (cleverly titled, Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants). In it, Brand described the staggering lessons he had gleaned from his work with leprosy patients, many of whom had lost the ability to feel any pain at all. One might think that was a good thing, yet Brand reported that the lepers would come to the clinic with festering, infected burns or injuries. Why had they waited so long? They could not feel the pain. Limbs had to be removed due to untreated, un-felt injuries. “The mind responded to these effects of painlessness with a feeling that could only be called suffering,” Brand wrote.
It seems pain and suffering often arrive at the same time. Many of us have suffered helplessly as we watched a loved one die slowly, painfully from a terminal disease such as cancer. Or perhaps like me, you deal with pain on a daily basis. Sometimes we question why. When I was a hospital chaplain, I can’t count the number of times I was asked why God allowed “this to happen” or allowed their loved one to suffer so much. There is an important choice to be made here – we can continue to seek God’s face in the pain or we can let the anger and sadness take us to places of bitter darkness.
Blame
God is an easy target on which to focus blame. After all, He’s in charge of everything. It shouldn’t matter if I’m an unbeliever, or I’ve been blatantly unfaithful. God is LOVE, isn’t He? Even more so if I’m a super-Christian, (aka – overcommitted and uber busy with church activities). Isn’t God supposed to step up when I am in pain and deliver me immediately?
I can’t say that has ever been my experience…has it ever been yours? Have you seen that born out in Scripture? Why, then, do we continue to question the existence of pain and suffering in our lives or in the world?
Suffering
As written in Christianity Today: Stanley Hauerwas, [American theologian and ethicist], famously said, “The great enemy of the church today is not atheism but sentimentality.” In his view, there’s no deeper sentimentality than the presumption that we (or our children) can hold convictions without suffering for them. To have true convictions is to love something bigger than the self, and we cannot love God or others without suffering…holding to our convictions might mean suffering unto death.
The entire Bible is very clear about the inevitability of pain in life. There is even a man in I Chronicles 4:9 whose name means pain! (All childbirth is painful, but wow! That’s harsh!) Interesting side note, being named Pain (or Jabez) didn’t scar him for life. In fact, “Jabez was more honorable than his brothers…” Is it possible pain has a positive purpose?
If you have ever read Hebrews 11 in its entirety, you know that it contains many who died in the faith, not having received the promises…(v13, NKJV). Verses 35-40 describe types of suffering and trials which men and women of faith endured because they knew that God had provided something better for us (v40, NKJV). These were people of whom the world was not worthy, (v 38, NKJV), yet we shudder to contemplate modeling our lives after them. Their suffering seems too monumental.
Sacrifice
And of course, there is the example of Jesus, telling us boldly in John 15 that love, not emotional, flighty, what’s-in-it-for-me “love,” but genuine love, sacrificial love, love that forgets about my wants and needs in order to meet my husband’s or my child’s or neighbor’s needs when necessary, the kind that dies to self over and over and over in order to display the love of Jesus…that kind of love is His commandment. It’s not a suggestion and He isn’t telling us to do something He hasn’t done or isn’t doing.
Love lays down its life.
Jesus simply commanded His disciples to love others in the same way He had been loving them, even as He was moving inexorably toward the cross. Nothing was going to stop Him, no torture, pain, suffering or betrayal of friends; He knew what was required for our redemption.
Nothing was going to stop Him, no torture, pain, suffering or betrayal of friends; He knew what was required for our redemption. Click To Tweet
Love laid down His life.
It’s usually painful – loving, that is…and life, too. Look no farther than the evening news for proof of the latter and at the last argument, you had with your spouse or close friend for the former. But imagine this world – or your life – without a trace of His love. It’s unimaginable, isn’t it?
The older I get the more I realize that I have only touched the hem of His garment where His love is concerned.
He freely gave it. He freely died.
And He commanded us to do likewise.
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