« I Am Moody Today | Home | I Like Psychology »
I Am Bewildered
By Peace | June 21, 2006
I read this from one of the site when I want to know why strange things happen to me, especially the loss of my dog.
Suffering is an inevitable part of Christian living. It is inescapable. The Scriptures underline this fact repeatedly. Yet, despite the counsel Scripture gives about the inevitability of suffering, we still tend to think of it as something strange that happens to us. It is not. The strange thing is peace and prosperity; the normal thing is suffering.
We all have a vision in our mind of a place where there is uninterrupted peace and prosperity, where everything goes according to schedule. It may be a cabin up in the Sierra, or a condominium on Lake Tahoe. Somewhere there must be a place where we can let down our hair and relax, where no one will hassle us, and the phone brings only good news, and there are no problems. But unfortunately, life is not like that. It is filled with pressures and problems.
Murphy’s Law states that whatever possibly can go wrong certainly will and at the most inopportune time! We have all experienced the truth of that law. Why is it that on the busiest day of the week, your little boy spills India ink all over the rug? And why is it that, when a wife has had a particularly difficult day at home, and the children have been unusually unruly, that is the day her husband comes home from work, grumpy and out of sorts and difficult to communicate with? Or why is it that when a husband has had an extremely hard day at the office that is the day that his son runs his motorcycle over the sprinkler head and breaks it off, and he comes home to find water spouting ten feet in the air? And on and on it goes.
No matter how hard you try to rectify things. Something always goes wrong. And yet we all have the hopeful outlook that someday we will turn a corner and things will be all right. We have a strange duality in our thinking: our experience tells us that everything will go wrong, but we are always hopeful. We will suffer because we are part of a fallen humanity, and simply because we are identified with the name of Christ. Why should a man like Jesus suffer? – the best man whoever lived. As a matter of fact, he was the only truly good man whoever lived – the man who went about doing good, and doing it well. He was not self-righteous or self-conscious or priggish about his righteousness. He was good in every way, and yet he was killed for it. Why? Well, merely because he was, and is, good, and the world hates goodness. This is because the world lies in the lap of the evil one, as Scripture tells us. We sing, “This is my Father’s world” — and it is, in an ultimate sense. He is the Creator and Sustainer of it, and the One who ultimately will reclaim it. But this is not my Father’s world now; this is Satan’s world. It is a world that is in opposition to good. Satan hates good, and he will persecute it wherever he finds it. And men persecuted Jesus merely because he was good. It is suffering that does that for us, because suffering drives us to depend upon God. It really does not make us stronger; it makes us feel our weakness more keenly. Then we draw upon God’s power and his strength, and he begins to change us, from attribute to attribute, to be like Jesus Christ. It is always opposition that causes us to grow. We sometimes think that suffering is what impedes us, works against us. But suffering does not work against us; it works for us. It accomplishes the very thing we want in our lives – the character of Christ.
And then I search for why bad things happen to good people, and I got this:
First, they say that some of what happens is our own fault. “What goes around comes around.” This means that what we do comes back to us. If we do bad things, bad things come back to us. If we do good things, good things come back to us. If you lie, people won’t believe you. If you cheat, people won’t trust you. If you are cruel, people won’t love you. What goes around comes around. Many religions teach that some of the ways people die are just plain and simple their own fault. People smoke and die of lung cancer. People use drugs and die of overdoses. People eat food full of fat and sugar, then don’t exercise, and die of heart attacks. People drive too fast and die in car crashes. Now this does not mean that all the bad stuff that happens to us is our fault. Let’s look at another idea: The bad stuff is nobody’s fault. For Buddhists, the bad stuff in the world happens because of the way the world is. another way that some religions teach that bad stuff is not our fault is to say that the bad stuff comes from the devil or bad spirits. It was certainly the sense of Jesus that he was tempted by the devil. We may not be comfortable using that language, but I think we need to be careful not to prematurely discount spiritual forces of evil just because we don’t understand them. Whether we call it mental illness, addiction, or something else, there are people who feel that their lives are controlled by powerful evil forces. This, by whatever name, is a cause of suffering. Another possible cause for suffering is that we reap the consequences of actions in previous lives. Suffering certainly has the capacity to cause us to question both the reality of God and God’s care for us. Many of our frustrations, setbacks, and problems are the results, and indicators of moving in the wrong direction or of having wrong values or wrong commitments. Sometimes the best thing that can happen to us is to get laid off from a job, or have our business fail, or spend a night in jail. There is suffering that tells us we’re gong in the wrong direction and that we need to change what we’re doing.
Let’s recount all the possible causes for suffering:
-Some suffering is our own fault. It’s simply cause and effect.
-Other suffering comes about simply because this is the way the world is.
-Some people believe that Satan causes suffering.
-Others credit karma from past lives.
-All of us have the option of suffering for the sake of conscience.
-Certainly suffering has the capacity to test our spiritual motivations and
commitment.
-Many see suffering as a punishment from God for past sins.
-Suffering can also be interpreted as evidence that either there is no God
or that God does not care about us.
-Some also see suffering as a warning that there is something wrong in our
life and that we need to change our ways or direction.
Topics: Personal, View All | 1 Comment »
February 20th, 2010 at 6:15 pm
Bad things happen in life as the whole cosmic system is governed by inscrutable laws of Karma… as we sow so shall we reap… nothing less or more! If they were only happiness in life… all would become monotonous… meaningless! Only when we suffer… we understood true value of happiness… never otherwise!