I had asked a young man why he had departed from the
Christian faith. He responded that if there is a God who is all-powerful and
all-good, He should have been able to create a pain-free world.
But perhaps we need to suffer and that it might even be a
necessary ingredient for growth and maturity.
Leprosy is a disease which prevents feeling pain. It points
to the fact that we need each nerve to tell us when we might be damaging our
body. Without this pain-feedback, we continue to injure our bodies, unaware
until we become an absolute crime-scene covered with soars and abrasions.
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Perhaps in the same way, we also need
psychological sensors to inform us when we are hurting ourselves and even
others.
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Perhaps we need to be instructed by our sorrows,
losses, fears, grieving, guilt, and shame.
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Perhaps without these consequences, we would
never learn essential lessons.
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Perhaps also we would gradually maim our psyches
so badly that we wouldn’t be able to be fit associates or friends, like the
psychopath who feels no shame in hurting others.
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Perhaps we have been physically and
psychologically designed to suffer and to learn necessary life-lessons.
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Perhaps we also need death to teach us
thoughtfulness about our lives and appreciation for what we now enjoy.
I had seen a video showing a woman who had been discovered
and freed from of rubble after four days following the Haitian earthquake. She
and her husband were tearfully and thankfully hugging, perhaps like never
before.
Without the prospect of death, how could we be thankful for
the deliverance from death and disease? Without consequences, there could be no
thankfulness for anything! Life would just go on monotonously. Nor would there
be anything to prompt us to think about the deeper things of life. Would we
appreciate our parents, friends, or anything else if we would be deprived of
the consequences?
I had read about a rock singer who concluded that happiness
required him to eliminate his conscience. He thought that he could achieve this
by living as wildly as he could, causing his conscience to fall apart like a
soggy piece of toilet paper. Instead, it ended in suicide.
Instead, our conscience is meant to teach and socialize us.
In order to exalt myself, I would put others down. However the painful
consequences taught me otherwise as I lost all my friends.
We never learn humility or compassion without such
consequences. We remain beasts. Nor do we learn to seek for any meaning beyond
ourselves and our own immediate gratification. Once again, we remain beasts no
better than the beasts we hunt and kill.
These considerations should lead us to question, “What is
life, and why am I here? Does it all just end with my last breath?”
The Bible teaches that the suffering of this life is the
necessary preparation for the next:
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So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self
is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light
momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all
comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that
are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are
unseen are eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:16-18)
Suffering teaches us that our lives have meaning and purpose
and are not the result of a series of mindless accidents of an uncaring world.
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