In Pain

There is nothing more ordinary than suffering.

There is nothing more extraordinary than suffering.

Both of these statements are true.

The last few months have been characterized by a number of people that I know and love enduring significant pain. Sometimes the pain is physical, sometimes it is relational, sometimes it is existential. Sometimes it is all the above. Always, it is excruciating to watch people suffer.

I’ve spent a lot of time, and a lot of words on the problem of evil and suffering in my life. A lot of time analyzing, parsing, explaining, and justifying the ways of God in a world where pain is everywhere. And yet despite all this, I often feel utterly helpless when faced with an actual living, breathing, suffering human being sitting across from me, and even a relatively few encounters with deep pain can leave me a wreck for days.

Yes, it’s been a season of pain. Or at least it’s felt like it. On one level, none of this should be surprising. Pain does not store up its arrows for those with the psychological or theological equipment to handle it, for those who have had time to fortify their defences. It does not give advance warning. It just comes. People suffer. Horribly. All over the world. All. The. Time.

Ordinary.

And yet, each person in pain has a story, a past, a present, and a future (we pray), a community of friends (we hope), a family wondering how something like this could possibly happen, how the universe could possibly be so unjust, how God could possibly allow this. There is no such thing as generic pain because there is no such thing as a generic person.

Extraordinary.

If there were ever something in our world that ought not to catch us by surprise, it would be suffering. And yet it continually catches us by surprise. We cover our mouths; we gasp and reel and stagger when it comes close to home. You would think we would get better at dealing with something this ordinary, but we are well and truly useless at making this normal. Maybe our stubborn reactions are nothing more than the uncomfortable emotional residue of a biologically rooted survival instinct. Or maybe they are existential tokens from across the sea. Maybe we were never meant to be at peace with pain.

At the end of the day, each of us have adopted some form of a pain management strategy in a world where awful things happen to people. Some reject and resent God for allowing pain, stamping their feet and demanding a more competent God than the one who’s claimed to be running the show. Some cling to belief in God as the only means by which pain and suffering might ever be healed and overcome. And some do both in the same day.

I get a lot of texts, messages, phone calls, emails asking for prayer. Will you pray for this dear person in pain? Yes, of course I can pray. But it’s a funny business praying in a world of ordinary suffering. It’s a funny business praying to a God who I know has always allowed indescribable and seemingly random suffering in his world and will continue to allow it. It’s a funny business, banging on this mountain of a door, scaling this impenetrable wall with my meagre little bag full of words for others.  I know that none of us get to avoid this… I know that we all land on the wrong squares in the game of life from time to time… But, just this once… Do you think?… Maybe we could have a story less ordinary? Please?

Yes, of course I can pray. And I do. I pray not only for stories less ordinary, but I pray—sometimes through clenched teeth—that the God who suffered on our behalf, the God who extraordinarily entered this world of ordinary pain would accomplish his purposes in us through all of this suffering. I pray that somehow the pain could make us better, more compassionate people, that it would train and strengthen our hope, that it would bring us closer to God. I pray that the suffering we experience and walk through with others would somehow take its place in the sufferings of Christ, by which all things are mysteriously made new.