on suffering…
One of the things that’s funny to me about the whole glass half-empty/half-full thing is that I’m really actually a hopeful person. I was nicknamed Eeyore by my former boss, and I do tend to be a realist, but especially with problems outside of our control they are just great reminders that we can’t do everything, sometimes we just need to trust God will take care of things in the end. I would never say the cliche, ‘Everything happens for a reason,’ to someone who is suffering, that robs them of their right feel pain and seek compassion. But I don’t think God randomly allows hardship in our lives. I look at former gang members who are now community activists. Certainly it would be wonderful if they had never been gang members in the first place, but they can speak truth into a broken social system because they’ve been there, they’ve walked the streets. I have been fortunate enough to have a pretty easy life, but I think in some ways that has been what’s most convicting to me. I did nothing to deserve the wonderful parents I have, the car I own, my camera equipment, etc. I can’t just sit around and say to myself, wow, look how blessed I am and do nothing about the suffering in the world! Yet while it would be easy to look at all the suffering and be hopeless–using that as an excuse to not take action–I just wrote a paper for school saying that we as Christians can take hope because we know how the story ends. We know the story of Revelations! We know someday God will come and restore His Kingdom and all pain and suffering will be no more. So even when I start getting depressed about things in the world, I always end up knowing that God hasn’t called me to fix the world, just help one person at a time. The late historian Howard Zinn, who I’m certain wanted nothing to do with Christianity, once wrote, ‘if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. …to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.’ Can you imagine a world where everyone stopped running around with their heads down trying to carve out their little piece of the pie and instead looked around see how they could care for the poor, the suffering, the lonely, and the lost around them?!
