Pain

The Pain on the Far Side of the World

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Today’s city newspaper featured a front page story about a school bus rear-ended by a dump truck. A teenager was killed. Someone’s 18-year-old son, all ready for graduation, all geared up for college in the fall (“Mom, Dad, I got accepted!”), wolfs down his breakfast, maybe says goodbye, maybe even offers a kiss on a good day, gets on that bus and winds up a few minutes later in eternity.

A couple days ago, I read an obituary in my town newspaper about a 27-year-old man who died in a freak accident while on vacation. The part that got me was that he was very active in the Big Brothers organization. They ran his picture in the obit, a smiling face bright with possibilities. Now some boys who don’t have fathers don’t have the surrogate dad who took time out of his schedule to help them.

Personally, I find it very hard to read these kinds of stories. I’m thinking that perhaps I shouldn’t.

David Kuo at Beliefnet recently wrote the following in his post Thoughts on Suffering after seeing for himself the misery in Uganda:

Is that [poor decision-making] God’s fault?

I think not. Because at every moment those decisions were made God was whispering for people to do the right thing, the just thing, the merciful thing. But we chose not to listen.

God has done his job. We haven’t done ours.

I used to think the suffering question was a serious head scratcher, a truly troubling thing—the best evidence against God. No more. I think it is largely an excuse to make ourselves comfortable in our complacency by blaming God for the suffering we aren’t spending our lives addressing.

We live in unusual times, times that didn’t exist until a handful of years ago. It is said that the average person today is inundated with more data in a few weeks than most people in the 18th century and previous got in their entire lives.

We can thank our instantaneous global news networks for this. All the world’s misery can be pumped into my home in a matter of seconds. Every day of the year. For as long as I live.

I’ve thought for many years that this constant stream of anguish and pain coming at us from every corner of the globe is an aberration of our age. God never intended Man to process so much misery at once. Misery, Want, PainIf we’re increasingly a nation of people on psychoactive medication, should we be surprised? Isn’t there enough pain within ten miles of our homes to last us a lifetime? What then do we do when we hear an orphanage was buried under a mudslide in Ecuador or a bus full of nuns holding babies in their arms went off a cliff in Singapore?

If you and I were serious about praying for others, we’d have enough prayer requests from hurting people in just our church alone to last most of us from week to week. Isn’t that the case with you? I know it is for me.

I could probably spend two or three hours a day just praying for the crushing needs of people I know. So how can I shoulder the rest of the world’s problems?

I believe that many of us are suffering from compassion fatigue. The flood of misery washes over us and we’re just numb to it anymore. That’s a problem, because God never intended that we live our lives as if anesthetized to pain.

Somewhere, though, we have to draw the line.

With all due respect to David Kuo, I can’t blame myself for the problems of Africa. If he wants to blame himself, that’s his prerogative. This is not to say that I don’t care about the pain in Africa, only that if I want to be sensitive to the needs of others, I can’t let myself grow numb in the waterfall of misery that is the entire world in 2008. And that means I have to find a means to turn off at least part of that waterfall. For my own effectiveness as a Christian.

That may seem callous, but I have to ask myself what my responsibility would have been a couple hundred years ago. Before the instant news update on the earthquake in Japan. Before the daily notification of genocide in Sudan. Before the suffering of the entire world landed on my doorstep and asked me in one united voice to solve the problems of 6.5 billion people.

It’s not that I don’t care, only that God never intended for me to be the savior of the world.

Lessons from Suffering

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I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.

—John 16:33

It’s hard to read the newspaper and think any other thoughts than this: people are suffering. I fear that much more suffering is to come.

Last week, I spent most of Wednesday in agony. And agony is a mild word for what it feels like to have a kidney stone. Worse: when you can’t keep the pain meds down because the waves of nausea are forcing up everything. After a prolonged fight, and a thankful passing of the stone, my day of suffering came to an end.

Just when I needed my parents most, they died. My son will never know my Mom and Dad. That’s a different kind of suffering.

Been through a lot of suffering through a series of career starts and restarts. Can’t really explain why. My wife and I have gone through more than our fair share of downsizings. We’re coming up on 12 years of marriage and in that time have endured seven layoffs between the two of us. We always got stellar performance reviews, too. Suffering hurts even worse when it makes no sense.

Last week, when I was hugging the toilet, my side felt ready to explode, I had a good chance to meditate on suffering. Here’s what I learned:

Suffering stinks.

I find it odd that some sectors of Christianity seem to have a love affair with suffering, as if suffering exemplifies the highest form of spiritual bliss. The photographer later killed himselfSome of those folks even go out of their way to suffer. I think that’s nuts.

This is not to say that one can’t learn from suffering. If you’re severely injured in an accident or happen to struggle with a painful, chronic disease, you understand the torment of the cross. How can any of us hurting that profoundly not think of what Jesus endured for us? People in pain can identify with the Savior and experience the fellowship of His sufferings.

In earthly suffering, each of us gets a taste of hell, even if that taste is a small one. Magnify it a millions times. Now who wants to go to that awful place? The Savior comes to save us from that suffering.

Thoughts of heaven permeate the lives of those trapped in earthly suffering. At least they should. People used to content themselves with heaven—note the past tense. Heaven seems remote to people today, even Christians.

Still, the thing about suffering is that its lessons are learned quickly. It’s like the little kid who sticks his hand in the fire. That lesson is well learned once. The point of experiencing sufferings repeatedly or for years and decades gets lost in the end. We know the lesson. Can we please do without more suffering?

I know that when I was twisting in agony, all the spiritualizing about suffering went out the window. I knew the lessons already. More suffering didn’t help me know them better. It didn’t make me any more holy or more Christ-like. Suffering stinks.

What makes the obsession some Christians have with suffering even more odd to me is that suffering is an aberrant condition. God didn’t build suffering into Creation. There’s no suffering in heaven, either. Suffering is the result of sin. Christ became incarnate in part to end suffering. He came into a suffering world and alleviated suffering. Seems to me He’s no fan of suffering.

J. Hudson Taylor, the great missionary to Asia, went to the Far East to bring the Gospel to the lost people there. Today’s blazing Chinese Church, white-hot with revival as it is, owes much of its origin to Hudson Taylor.

But Hudson Taylor buried his family in China and came back to England a different man. Friends who knew him saw the change. A sadness permeated his life afterward.

In some ways, few of us Americans really know anything about suffering, at least suffering for the sake of the Gospel. To me, suffering for the Gospel is the only suffering that makes sense.

However, some better Christians than yours truly don’t see a distinction between suffering from a kidney stone and suffering for the Gospel. I wonder sometimes if they’re overspiritualizing things. If we’re being beaten with a tire iron, it seems to me a great difference if the person initiating the beating is doing so because we’re trying to share the Gospel with him as opposed to his reacting negatively to our complaint about the lousy job he did balancing our tires. A big difference exists between having our heart stop beating because some jungle native drove a spear through it because he didn’t like this Jesus we were talking about and us going into cardiac arrest due to a lifetime of scarfing down buckets of fried chicken.

But that’s just me. Perhaps I’m just not deep enough.

The Fellowship of His Sufferings

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PainMonday morning, I was considering Christ’s agony on the cross. The unrelenting pain intensified by His rejection by a world filled with the souls He created. The weight of sin. The blood-stained ground.

This side of heaven, the world is filled with pain. Some people suffer emotional pain. Others twist in torment from bodily pains.

My father experienced unremitting pain for years after falling down a flight of stairs in his early thirties. This led to several spinal surgeries, some of which did not turn out well, leaving him in constant pain. That experience changed him. The medicines he took to combat the pain were later implicated in a number of psychoses that users experienced. The pain changed my father in many ways and probably resulted in a shortened life.

Years later, I realize that I didn’t understand his pain. In fact, I brushed it off. Kids are like that. All I knew was that my father didn’t want to wrestle anymore. We always had to watch out whenever we did an activity together lest it somehow result in more pain.

People in pain dwell at the end of a long, dark tunnel. Everyone else stands in the light at the entrance, far, far away. The people in pain can see those others, but they don’t feel those others near. Pain separates.

People in pain turn inward. Their pain becomes who they are. I know that folks who suffer from little-understood sources of pain such as Epstein-Barr and fibromyalgia find their pain threatens to overwhelm their personae. People start identifying sufferers by their pain, not by their God-given identity. In time, people in pain can lose themselves amidst their suffering.

People in pain identify with each other. “You, too?” they ask. Then the heads start nodding. “Yeah.” Someone else sits at the end of that dark tunnel and for a time, the loneliness, separation, and even the pain lessens.

From this one truth shines forth hope for people in pain: they know the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings. For the Christian, to suffer pain is to lose oneself in the agony of the cross, to identify with the Savior, and to be more like Him.

Wisdom comes in pain for the believer who seeks it. It may seem a perverse wisdom, but few of us understand the ways of God enough to know how He molds us in the midst of pain.

For me, pain teaches about the human condition. It reminds me that we are all dust, that we dwell in a fallen world, and that people in pain need relationship desperately.

Some cultures handle pain better than ours does. We have much to learn from them.

A few things I’ve learned from pain:

1. Prayer makes a difference in pain, whether physical pain or mental. Our God is a healer and tapping into His healing comes through prayer. I don’t believe that God will it that pains goes on throughout a lifetime. He can heal. Sometimes He heals through our pain.

2. The caring love of others goes far in reducing pain. Because our culture deals poorly with pain, we tend to shove people in pain into an attic and hope they stay there. Their pain reminds us of our own frailty. And a culture based on youth and vitality has no place for the frail. We Christians need to be counterculture and begin to seek out those in pain because they need the word of Christ more than anyone else.

3. People will not understand pain until they experience it themselves. A woman will never adequately convince a man of the pain of childbirth. A person who’s never suffered through a kidney stone cannot transmit the depths of that pain to someone who has never experienced one. A couple with a quiver full of children will not understand the pain of a couple who loses their only child. But the very act of suffering transforms us into better people if we let God be the God of our pain and let others into it. We will all experience pain in this sin-stained world. Better that we take time to associate with it rather than flee from it every chance we get.

If you are in pain, whether from grief or physical torment, drop me an e-mail at the address in the top of the sidebar, and let me pray for you. Christ dwells with those who share in the fellowship of His sufferings. No reason exists to suffer alone.