Pain

Pain has been around since the Fall of mankind, but is there any good that can come from that pain? C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain explains how pain reminds us that God is who we need to rely on. “God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me.” It is by our pains that we come to know God more closely. It is through this pain that we experience that we more fully appreciate what God has done for us and what He continues to do. In the times of happiness it is much easier to forget that God is there, but in the times of trouble, we do not hesitate to call out for help. “God whispers to us in our pleasures; speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain. It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

There is no doubt that pain is not what God had planned for us in the beginning of time. “Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.” And when a man is being hurt all he wants is for the pain to stop and the best way to do that is to stop the person hurting you. Pain leads to poor choices when we think on who has caused the pain. Some find a thirst for revenge that consumes them and takes over their life. However Lewis points out that “ revenge loses sight of the end in the means, but its end is not wholly bad-it wants the evil of the bad man to be to him what it is to everyone else.” There must be some kind of checks and balance to those who cause pain or there would be absolutely nothing stopping anyone from causing pain all the time. But there is a limit to the revenge we seek, it should not consume us but only be a way to remind the other that he has done wrong. Although it is hard thing to do we will always have the greatest model to follow in Jesus. “The sacrifice of Christ is repeated, or re-echoed, among His followers in very varying degrees, from the cruellest martyrdom down to a self-submission of intention whose outward signs have nothing to distinguish them from the ordinary fruits of temperance and 'sweet reasonableness” His suffering was far greater than anything that we experience, and our pain can only give us small glimpses at what his pain was like, what he suffered for us.