Why many Christians suffer
This is our weekly post here at deposition of our faith. Thank you for joining us.
Okay. Not so weekly, sorry!
This is Week 22.
(Although you can start from anywhere, we encourage you to read up on previous posts as well as some articles lead into the next one).
Scripture Reading: Hebrews 12:2
“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.”
— William Goldman
Not all pain is as gloomy and hopeless as it sounds. For instance, there’s the pain of discipline, there’s the pain of regret.
Theres the pain of endurance, and there’s the pain of suffering.
Many of us are just suffering. And that’s the bad kind of pain.
Many are working at jobs that they hate, and they just suffer through. This can lead them to falsely assume that everybody else who is working at that same job is enjoying it, and that only they are miserable. Sometimes, this leads people to self-resentment, because they feel like they are being selfish, ungrateful, lazy, spoiled, etc.
This is the wrong approach.
The truth of the matter is, many people who are working at that same job hate it as much as you do. They are also looking for a better job, wishing for a better pay, wanting a better scenario. Many probably thought they’d be doing better than this when they imagined their future five years ago.
However, they know that they need the job. They have mouths to feed at home. They are paying off their student loans, they are trying to put their younger ones through college. Many of them know that they wish they could be the CEO, or may even feel like they deserve to be CEO, but they know that the company’s culture and policy means they have to rise through the ranks to get there. And so, even though it hurts, and it sucks waiting, they are committed to the demands of waiting patiently because they know why they are waiting.
So, the difference is between you and the people at your job is not always that they are not in pain, the difference sometimes is that they are not suffering through that pain.
What makes us suffer through painful scenarios? There are many reasons.
I know of two.
One is, you’re taking it personal.
The first one is probably the most annoying to hear because it makes things distasteful.
How dare you say that I shouldn’t take things personal?!
The discomfort I feel is personal, the rejection I feel is personal, the tiredness I feel is personal. How dare you suggest that my situation is merely trivial and nothing personal?
In no way am I suggesting that your situation is trivial. But, look at this. Politicians are stealing millions everyday. They don’t particularly know or care from whom. Thieves come to homes, steal cars and steal jewellery, and they don’t particularly know or care that you’re still paying off that car, and that the jewellery belonged to a diamond-selling store that you simply just work for. The point is not to say that the crimes are any less heinous, it is to point out that they are not as personal as they feel.
The point of not personalising pain is that it helps us to 1. Not exaggerate pain, 2. Not villainize the world.
Sometimes, things that hurt us would hurt us just a little bit more and longer if we felt that it was an intentional effort to spoil our lives and ours alone. It makes you feel, “why me?”.
Also, sometimes, the things that hurt us often lead us to such dismay, that we end up taking out our displeasure on the nature of the world itself. Many wonder why God would let them go through such pain, and why the universe doesn’t seem to realize that they are due for a lucky break.
However, let us look at our perfect example, Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ personalises every situation where we falter and we fall, then there’s no way he’d keep rooting for us. Imagine your worst heartbreak. Hurts? I personally think that heartbreak is what it feels like for Jesus to have to tolerate our lazy, unintentional, inconsiderate attitudes sometimes 😂. Yet, if Jesus Christ personalised the pain of being betrayed by his right-hand man, Peter, then maybe he’d not have gone through with the crucifixion. If Jesus Christ had personalised our failures, he may have thought that the world was not worth saving.
Not personalising pain doesn’t mean that you won’t be right sometimes; sometimes, people do want to hurt you. Sometimes, people do want to steal from you, specifically because they know you haven’t finished paying off that car. Sometimes, they want to steal your jewellery because they know it belonged to the store you work for. In fact, look at the devil. Every bad thing that happens to you is from the devil. Every single negative thing. And they are intentional efforts to truncate your destiny. So its personal! But guess what? He’s doing the same thing to over seven billion other people!
Anyway, although many of the things against us just might as well be personal, many are not. Sometimes you were sacked because you weren’t performing well enough. Sometimes your credit score wasn’t good enough to get that loan, sometimes you were not doing well enough to keep that relationship, sometimes you were not eating healthy enough to avoid that illness.
Now, not personalising pain is not to say it can’t ever be personal. It is simply good to have the state of mind/emotional intelligence which takes you to a level of understanding that exists above the plane of “why me?”s and “how come?”s.
When you take things personal, you risk tunnel vision. There’s so much that happens in situations that cause you pain. Whether its getting fired from work, getting asked to leave your apartment, losing an opportunity you had been expecting for years, etc. Even though many of these things seem to happen to us with no influence of ours at all, many of them still could have been avoidable. Taking things personal could blindside you from seeing the ways you could have done better/been more careful/been more thoughtful. When you take things personal, you stand as a victim of life’s woes, and no victim can be blamed for their situation so they end up suffering through.
Now, are there situations in which you are truly a victim with no hand of fault at all? Yes. Most definitely. However, acknowledging your “victimhood” can never help you overcome. Accepting that you can respond your own way regardless of the events of life gives you more control over your affairs.
Number two, you don’t have a “why”.
Now, Christians are often in the habit of making one of two mistakes. One is that we think that being believers means we are somehow excluded from any struggle or pain, and the other is that we think that being believers means that every bad thing that happens to us is preplanned/predestined to teach us something. I mean, both are not quite true, but I would address that in another article.
What I mean by suffering because you don’t have a “why”, is that many people don’t know “why” they should overcome difficulty. Notice the key distinction. I’m not saying they don’t know why things are difficult (because I don’t think every difficult/damning situation in life is some scheduled lesson by God), but I’m saying, many don’t even know why they should overcome roadblocks and adversity.
Jesus Christ, who for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross…
This is an example of someone who endured pain, instead of suffering through.
Look, we’ve said this so many times on this blog. There’s barely anything of value on this planet that you could stumble on without making effort to find it. I mean, except maybe penicillin. I don’t really know of anything else. Effort isn’t always convenient. Sometimes, it’s flat out painful.
Here is an example that is closer to home. Exercising, hitting the gym, and for most, adjusting your are all very essential for getting fit. These things are hard, and also quite painful. They take discipline, diligence, and sacrifice. However, if you know why you are going through this pain, it could help you endure it instead of suffering through. Many people who suffer through weight loss programs don’t end up making it to the end. They just end up with aches and weirdly disproportionate bodies after a few days/weeks of semi-dedication 😂.
So here, we see the two things I spoke about earlier tying in perfectly. Many are in a place in their lives where they wish they weren’t overweight or spoiled or lazy. Many haven’t even accepted the fact that it’s their responsibility to care for themselves. They are still blaming biology, genetics and rough childhoods for their current situations. That’s not unnatural or untrue, but it won’t help you get fit. You can’t sue healthy diets, exercise, regimens and calories to a court of law. No matter how sympathetic anyone is for you, there is a route from point A to point B. Complaining about the “why me”s and “how come”s won’t get you there.
The things that we have discussed above are not new, and, as many would have noticed, not easy. Let me give you a heads up: you will fail. You will try, and you will fail. Many times, you will forget, and you will complain, you will curse, you will sulk, you will gnash and gnaw, but if you received it, you will overcome eventually.
These things are so hard to practice, and nobody is going to always get it right. I mean, we saw Jesus Christ cry “My God, why have you forsaken me?!”. I don’t know if God “forsook” him when he was on the cross, but something about the pain he was feeling was so great, and the atmosphere was so cold, uncomfortable, hostile, exhausting, that something inside of him personalised all that he was feeling as abandonment by God. And what’s funny is, say God did abandon Him on the cross: they both planned that moment since the dawn of time! Yet, it felt so personal. It felt like God made an intentional effort to leave him hanging (literally).
Many have been in that place. The fact that Jesus, our perfect example, was in that place shows us that it is common to man.
Many times, you will cry. Jesus, knowing what he was going to raise Lazarus (and probably even knowing that Lazarus was going to die too), mourned his death before his journey, and wept again after he arrived at the home of the deceased. Human emotions. Completely logical.
I don’t particularly remember the days when men were told not to cry, but if I was among the people who were told that, then I have never obeyed it anyway. I cry. When I am in pain, I cry and I cry proper tears. But the thing about tears is, they can make you start to feel sorry for yourself. Sometimes, they go from being an outlet for pain, to being an outright source for more pain. Funny that. Just like complaints can expose problems, but over-complaining can lead to even more problems that weren’t even there at the beginning.
This shows that we cannot solve all our heartbreaks, disappointments, aches and inadequacies with purely physical routines. We need the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit keeps us patient, keeps us loving, keeps us good and peaceful. The Holy Spirit helps us remain gentle. Being believers and bearing the spiritual fruits help us to heal in ‘Christian’ ways. Many lash out, many take revenge, many avoid their shortcomings, many smear names, many abuse substances, all just to get over (or through) pain. We don’t need to be victims of the weaknesses of our flesh. We are overcomers. This doesn’t mean that you may not fail sometimes, or fall, or falter, but you’ll always come back up and you will overcome pain.
The reason I feel the need to bring this to our Christian experience in particular is that many of us are failing miserably at life — many even more so than unbelievers — because of our lack of understanding on how to deal with these truths. Remember what I said at the beginning: Life is full of pain. Any one who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something. All your favourite Bible characters went through pain like all your favourite unbelievers did. The key distinction is that God helped them to overcome.
This will be a very good week for us on this blog, and I can already tell. I have been inactive for about a month, so more articles will be coming this week to make up for lost time 😃.
See you sooner than before🙏🏽.
