There is all kinds of pain.Physical, emotional, phantom, acute, mental. Pangs of the hearts, ailments of the body, anguish of the mind, imagined pain, aggravated pain, pains in the butt. Pain is a fact of life. It can involve physical suffering, psychological hurt, social rejection or material deprivation. Loneliness, criticism, unemployment, breakdown, failure, divorce, persecution and bereavement, physical illness all tend to bring pain in their wake.
People say there can be false pain, but I am still not sure about that. For sure, there are hypochondriacs who imagine or create pain where it does not really exist, but it really is just wounding coming out in a different direction. Still pain to me.
Whether we describe what we are feeling as an irritant, discomfort, distress, anguish, anxiety, travail, loss, suffering, bother, vexation, weariness...it all really boils down to pain and it is common to man. We ALL feel pain of various sorts. We ALL have things in our lives we wish would change, we could be relieved of or wish we could have a "do-over" on.
Physically, pain can be a gift when it triggers us to know that something in our body needs attention. (The absence of pain is one of the problems associated with leprosy). At the same time, sometimes a good gift can turn bad with illness and disease.
Pain, for many, is the main obstacle in believing in God as so many grapple with the place and cause of suffering around them. As sin abounds much, suffering grows and one real look at local and world news can be enough to deflate the hope of even the greatest optimist if that hope is not grounded in the Lord. A part of the reason for the narcissism of this "me" generation is an attempt to escape pain and sin.
C.S Lewis had some things to say about pain and Robert Banks in a 2006 talk at a Moore College theological conference summed some of Lewis' words as follows:
According to Lewis, the problem of pain in its simplest form is as follows: “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 the goodness, or power, or both”. To answer this, he says, we need to look more closely at erroneous assumptions built into the words “all-powerful” and “good” when ascribed to God.
The “all-powerfulness” of God is often taken to mean that God can do anything. But, says Lewis, he cannot do what is against his nature or choice. For example, even God cannot make 2+2 anything other than 4. Having made the world to work in certain consistent ways, like the force of gravity, he does not arbitrarily change these whenever potential harm rears its head. Though this does not rule out what we call miracles, if God kept changing the way things normally operate in the world, it would be impossible for us to rise to genuine challenges or act with real responsibly within it.
Unfortunately, fashioning such a reliable world opens up the possibility of people hurting each other in various ways. We might be able to conceive of a world in which God would correct every overstepping of a risk or abuse of the free will through constantly intervening in our affairs. However, such short-circuiting of all harmful actions and evil intentions would involve the destruction of human responsibility and freedom. http://www.cslewistoday.com/blog/the-problem-of-pain
Here are my less eloquent thoughts:
1. When we choose love in the midst of pain, we choose God. Love at every level (affection, friendship, erotic love, and the love of God.) will cause pain if we really invest ourselves in it. As Christians there is a redemption we get in being covered by the blood of a man / lamb who paid for our sins, but that redemption is something we wear on earth as humans who have free will. And in this broken place; we hurt and we hurt people.
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable." C.S. Lewis
"Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself. --The Problem of Pain
2. Love realizes that for every sin done against self, self has sinned against another. Love does not excuse sin, but covers over it. Will I love when the feeling of love has been wounded? Will I choose the "greatest of these" emotions? Love carries a multitude of sins, covers a multitude. Love forgives wide and Love forgives deep.
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained” --Answers to Questions on Christianity
“We are all fallen creatures and all very hard to live with”-- C.s. Lewis
3. Saying yes to God's kind of love meant we no longer get to choose when we give it out.
“I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.” --C. S. Lewis.
"God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain" --C. S. Lewis.
4. Perfect love casts out fear and love is the only antidote to grief and fear.
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” C.S. Lewis
5. Love and faith and belief are a choice. It is a part of daily picking up our cross. I once read that Biblical verse as likened to a boat pushing off of the dock and going out to sea. In order to move out and on, we have to untie from what kept us. It is called casting off and a part of choosing is casting off.
"Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done..." --from a letter "To Mrs. L."
6. It is in the "not so great moments" that the best or worst of who we are arises...
"Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment."--The Problem of Pain
7. Love as we experience it, is but a mere shadow of the real thing. Most of the time we are hard-pressed to put our best moments of love and our worst moments of pain into words because it limits the experience and mere words do not do justice to the feelings. The only one who can truly experience the fullness of what we feel is Jesus. He was a man ACQUAINTED WITH, thus - he is the only one wholly able to carry me, intercede for me and identify with me.
"Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot fromm their faces like barbed lightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression could easily be mistaken for ferocity." --Perelandra
8. IN the END.....The word “pain” or some form of it appears over 70 times in Scripture. Jesus felt pain for our sake (Isaiah 53: 3-5) and somehow - when we stand with Jesus - we can rejoice in pain and consider our trials with joy because of what it will work in us. (James 1:2-3, Romans 5). And for all my words their is THE word and it declares that in the end:
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Love this one today Marcie, seriously, I can't tell you how much I appreciate this! Personal responsibility is what makes freedom so powerful for surely without responsibility freedom becomes mere chaos. Excellent, thank you so much!
ReplyDeleteWhoa! I love you even more, my friend, after reading this. Very cathartic, I am sure, and powerful for those of us blessed to read it. This will take some mulling and chewing to digest completely! Thank you!
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