“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps you can understand what He is doing.
He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you know that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make much sense.
What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards.
You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage; but He is building a palace.”
Someone once said that there are three kinds of suffering we experience in mortality:
1. Suffering that is woven into the fabric of life. It comes with being mortal. We get sick. We age. We die. Those we love get sick. They age. They die. It's an indiscriminate part of life.
2. Suffering that is the result of our poor use of the gift of free agency or the consequences of the poor use of it by others. We create painful circumstances of disease, prison, and a hard, difficult life because of the choices we make. Lying leads to distrust. Cheating on a spouse leads to divorce. Taking others' property leads to a prison sentence. This is suffering at our own hands, as the result of sin we commit.
But we also suffer because others choose badly. We are hit by a drunk driver. We are mugged in a back alley. A loved one is a victim of a drive by shooting. These are not naturally existing experiences of the human condition, nor are they God-created. They are the result of freedom misused.
3. Suffering as a result of the difficulty of the trials comprised of those God-gifted opportunities to learn and grow. They stretch us, challenge us, are meant to help us get from where we are to where He wants us. Thy create the fire that has the potential of burning off the moral dross, allowing the purity of soul to shine a little brighter. We learn patience and tolerance and endurance. We learn how to endure pain and suffering with grace. We become humble, teachable, open to God's guiding hand in our lives.
Pride is purged, selfishness diminished, thoughtlessness replaced with a greater capacity to feel for others, to empathise with those who likewise have suffered. Trials and tragedies can also place the rest of life in proper perspective. The little things are finally recognized as merely little things.
Or, of course, we fail to learn. We fail to even recognize the difference between the types of suffering and we blame God for His arbitrary extension of love and grace or anger and revenge. We curse God or stop believing in Him. We become bitter and angry and our souls become twisted and ugly.
But just as we can't reasonably condemn a teacher for giving a test we did not appropriately prepare for, so we've missed the point if we blame God for the life's trials. After all, the purpose of life is hardly to skate freely through it without opposition, without trial or injury. Rather, the task of life is to rise to the occasion, to be inspired and inspiring, to follow in the steps of higher footsteps, climbing to a higher path less taken, as we strive for higher goals.
The trick, of course, is to identify the type of pain we are experiencing to keep from attributing to God all human misery (as though the God of love would work through a Hitler or a Stalin or a Saddam Hussein or the 9-11 terrorists for His end). Then once identified, to recognize the lesson the trial can teach us.
All trials and tribulations, whether God-given or just part of living or the result of ours or other people's bad choices, can teach us great things about ourselves and life and moral virtues worth our vigilant effort in acquiring. But we have a particular responsibility to seek the meaning behind the trials God lays in our path to round off the rough corners of our character.
He is, after all, building a palace of us all.
Back to Heart & Soul
No comments:
Post a Comment