A WORLD OF PAINFUL CONSEQUENCES, MEANING, AND DESIGN

 

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.

 

·       Perhaps in the same way, we also need psychological sensors to inform us when we are hurting ourselves and even others.

·       Perhaps we need to be instructed by our sorrows, losses, fears, grieving, guilt, and shame.

·       Perhaps without these consequences, we would never learn essential lessons.

·       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.

·       Perhaps we have been physically and psychologically designed to suffer and to learn necessary life-lessons.

·       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:

 

·       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.