Dealing with suffering: remember our aim in life
What are you aiming for in life? What would you class as a good life, a successful life? It is important that you know what you are trying to do with your life. Then you can work out what you should be doing now in order to achieve that goal.
Think of it like this. We often have aims or goals for particular aspects of our lives. You might want to have a career in a certain field; that will require enrolment in an appropriate course or starting a particular training programme. There will be times during that studying and training that you find it hard or boring or expensive or tedious. When that happens, you can remind yourself of the bigger goal: you need to get through these things in order to achieve what you want. You are prepared to put up with short-term pain for the long-term gain.
When you apply that reasoning to life in general, we can see that many people don’t really think that hard about what they are trying to achieve in life. They just measure a good life compared to other people around them. A good life in many cultures is one where you have enough money, when you are comfortable, and when you have a family situation you are happy with. It is a life with health and prosperity in it. Without really thinking too hard about it, many think that this kind of life will make them happy.
If that’s your vision of the good life, pain and suffering and grief can only ever be seen as a bad thing. After all, they are stopping my comfort and prosperity! We can think that our current trials or diagnosis are completely unfair; we think we deserve the comfortable life others seem to have. The difficult parts of life just seem to be stopping us getting to the good bits. If comfort is the goal, then suffering makes no sense; it can only be a bad thing.
Yet Christians have a different aim in life. There are a few ways we could express this. We could say that we live to serve King Jesus. We want to glorify God and enjoy him forever. We want to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and love our neighbours as ourselves. However you phrase it, our goal is not ultimately a selfish one, to achieve maximum comfort, but a goal to honour and serve our good God. If we have that aim in mind, suffering and difficulties make more sense. These hard times are proving our faith, refining us, reminding us of our frailty and dependence on God, and making us long for eternity. There are all kinds of possible positive outcomes from the supposedly negative parts of life for the Christian.
We see this in so many parts of the Bible. Job underwent great suffering to prove his faith, and in the end he learnt a great deal about God that he would never have otherwise understood. Paul was prepared to undergo beatings and persecution and all kinds of trials because seeing people saved mattered so much more than his comfort. The writer to the Hebrews compares suffering to being disciplined as a son; God is helping us become mature by bringing us not only comfort and ease but difficulty and pain.
Don’t see the hard times in life as unfair or meaningless or getting in the way of the comfort we really want. We should learn from our suffering, growing in faith and prayer, and being reminded that there is more to the good life than our selfish comfort. We learn more in the hard times than the good times. Remember what your aim in life is; serving Jesus requires we not focus on ourselves but work hard towards the bigger goal of honouring and loving our good God.