Pain, Suffering, Problems, Troubles, Aggravations, and Tribulations

I forgot my brother’s birthday.

Yesterday when I abruptly realized that I’d forgotten, I called David to apologize, and I asked, “How did you spend your birthday”?

“Doing nothing but sitting by the phone waiting for my brother to call,” he said.

He also spent an inordinate amount of time in a surgeon’s office getting 20+ shots, having a cancer cut off, and enduring a skin graph to patch where the cancer had been removed.

Sounds painful.

No fun at all.

Yesterday also, our friend Barbara White treated Ginny and me to lunch at a restaurant in downtown Yukon, Florida. Yes, there is such a place and ….er, make that the restaurant in Yukon, there isn’t any other.

We’ve been meeting with Barbara for lunches or breakfasts regularly for more years than I can remember.

This time we met in Yukon because the tiny town lies about half way between Barbara’s house and ours. Barbara felt up to driving halfway; she goes in for another round of chemotherapy Monday so this was the last day of her “good” week between treatments.

The three of us talked about pain.

Barbara’s been reading the book of Job for her devotions. And she reads articles and thinks a lot about finding meaning in her pain.

She said that pain does not make us good. Nor does it make us worse. “I am what I’ve always been,” she said, “The difference now is that I’m what I’ve always been—with cancer”.

Of course, like any of us who has ever suffered any pain or problem—even having a flat tire—she asks, “Why me”. She says that she’s asked that same question about her many blessings as well as about her pain. She concludes that it’s not a case of her deserving either pain or blessing. The just shall live by faith—not by racked up merit or demerit points.

Pain, trouble, problems—it’s all just part of living in a fallen world. As sure as smoke drifts upward, so man born of woman is few of days and full of trouble.

She observed that God does not remove life’s curses, He redeems them; it’s His trademark to lower Himself to lift us up. She mentioned a Stephen King tale about a prisoner who escaped to freedom by crawling through a sewer.

Barbara said that one of the most difficult things about suffering is the feeling that you’ve been forgotten (like when your brother forgets your birthday), or that while you get adequate physical care, you still feel neglected, put aside on the shelf, forgotten.

She finds comfort knowing that our God never forgets; He remembers even the most obscure and forgettable among His children. Every hair on your head is numbered—which in Barbara’s case is not as hard to do as it once was.

The trouble with going to lunch with Barbara and Ginny is that the two women gang up and shut me out. Why, when I tried to tell them the joke about the cat and the soccer team, they shouted me down and wouldn’t even let me get to the punch line.

That hurt.

Ginny told about an e-mail she’d received from our daughter Jennifer:

It seems a pastor visited a terminal patient to talk over her funeral arrangements, which hymns she’d like at her service, which Scriptures to read. And the woman requested that she be buried with a table fork in her hand and she explained her reason for the request.

During the viewing at the funeral parlor everyone noticed the fork in the hand of the body and wondered about it.

In his message the pastor told how the woman had grown up in her grandmother’s house and at the end of family dinners Grandmother would clear plates from the table saying, “Keep your fork. Something good’s coming”. Then she’d bring out fabulous deserts—pecan pie, chocolate cake, Peach cobbler.

To keep your fork meant you anticipated something wonderful ahead.

“Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him”.

Resurrection—the historical resurrection of Christ, the eventual resurrection of us—that’s what it’s all about. We are all temps down here.

As Job said:

I know that my Redeemer liveth,
and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:
And though after my skin, worms destroy this body,
yet in my flesh shall I see God:
Whom I shall see for myself,
and mine eyes shall behold,
and not another;
though my reins be consumed within me.

Yes, Jesus rose.

We too shall rise from our graves eventually.

But God cares when we hurt right here, right now..

And the Scripture says, “He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds”.

Personally, I don’t know much about pain. In fact, last week helping Donald spread tar on the roof, I scraped my knee. When Ginny brought out the first aid kit to apply ointment on my wound, the tube bore the use-by date of 1994! Obviously, I have not suffered a great deal in the way of wounds.

Seems odd to me that God has this double standard about pain:

On one hand, when we encounter pain in others, we are to do all we can to alleviate it; remember the Good Samaritan binding the victim’s wounds?

Reminds me of the cartoon where this guy is praying, “God, why do You allow so much pain and suffering and misery to go on in the world”?

And God answers, “Funny, I was about to ask you that same question”.

Then, on the other hand when we suffer ourselves, the Scripture says, “Endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ”.

Help others; endure yourself.

In other words, at some points in my life I am to help folks who are objects of charity; at other points in my life, I am to be an object of charity for others to help.

I’d rather do than be!

But God may have other ideas. maybe I ought to keep my fork.

I have no satisfactory answer to why God allows pain—especially the pain of the innocent, or of sinless animals, or of babies, or why good people suffer.

I just don’t know.

My own ointment hasn’t been needed since 1994.

I thank God that I don’t hurt anywhere at the moment.

But there is that man born of woman thing…

As my friend Wes said, “When tribulation comes, sometimes all you can do is stand there and tribulate”.