Is suffering ever optional?

Gee, in some moments where the light-bulb has flickered to life, and I’ve been given a great thought to write about, occasionally I’ve been dead wrong. Cringe.

I’m thankful for those who have graciously corrected my thinking — not that I haven’t experienced significant remorse for the well-intentioned, albeit misguided aphorism I expounded. And I must treat others who make the same errors as I do with the grace I’ve often been accorded.

An idea was posited as this: pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. It was meant in a specific context which was later clarified. All good.

But it does raise the idea, going off into a pleasant and opportunistic tangent, that there are people who would propagate the idea that suffering is optional.

To these, I write this:

I, and many I know who may read this,
know of a suffering that can never be thought of as optional.

In so many ways, we need to have been there — in an inescapable grief, an irresolvable depression, or in a tsunami-like panic attack, or the like — to know how incomprehensible the moment is. To have lived such a moment or a season punctuated by such moments, or heaven forbid, a life full with such moments teaches us something.

Now, what I’m about to say needs to be prefaced in the prayer of an open mind.

Do we ever contemplate that within our suffering is a gift? — but calling suffering a gift is never to be confused for it being a good thing. Of course, it is not. Not all gifts are good things in the way we as humans would see them. But gifts are given to us.

Is there any good thing that can come from such a heinous gift as suffering? Any blessing? We’re not blessed to suffer, but occasionally others are blessed because we have suffered or do suffer.

Now, why is this? What’s the rationale?

Empathy. Compassion. Understanding. Kindness. Gentleness. Patience. These attributes (and more) of having suffered as a human being cannot generally be learned any other way than through a suffering we cannot control; that which brings us metaphorically to our knees is good for others.

It’s like the boy who was frustrated by the truancy of a dear class friend, but because he himself had suffered, he understood there was more to the other boy’s truancy than he could fully understand. He just resolved to accept his friend, warts ‘n’ all. Why? Because he, too, had warts. His suffering had taught him he couldn’t control everything. He had learned the precious art of surrender — itself a gift.

In suffering in such a way as to know there is no way out of it, we’re coached in the ways of life and of God — that much of life that we previously had no idea about, utterly no concept for, is indeterminate. This is the reality for very many people over the face of our globe. Think of those who have been tortured, persecuted, orphaned, widowed, traumatised, abandoned, etc.

Suffering opens our eyes to a suffering world,
which itself is a gift of godly insight.

Is this some kind of acceptance or defeatist thinking, you might be asking? Surely God can provide the miracle to alleviate our suffering. The trouble with this thinking is it distracts us from what God might teach us in the suffering we cannot control — and that is hope!

When we suffer and we have no way of controlling it, what we need is for the suffering to mean something. But when we’re focused only on getting through it or past it, we miss what we might otherwise learn.

God is teaching us something not for ourselves; it’s something for others that our Lord wishes to give us, as we learn to pay our lives forward. Remember the motion picture, Pay It Forward (made in 2000)? How else are we to know just how to ‘love our neighbour as ourselves’?

We must empathise with their struggle
if we are to love them as we need to be loved.

Saying or thinking or believing that someone who’s suffering has control over what they’re suffering is not first standing in their shoes in order to first understand why it is they’re suffering so badly. We must see it through their eyes. That’s first base!

Sure, there are many times and situations where suffering may be alleviated. We must believe this otherwise our hope is blindsided and our purpose to live evaporates.

But we must first understand that suffering is an overwhelming truth embodied in an individual who would leave their suffering in a heartbeat. But they cannot. At some stage they might or will. But not right now. They’re not choosing to suffer.

In suffering, we lament the loss of a past that is no longer ours and cannot yet grasp a future we hope for.