A Different Kind of Life

Divine Humility

(Today’s post comes from The Business of Heaven by C.S. Lewis—I found it particularly thought provoking…)

We are perplexed to see misfortune falling upon decent, inoffensive, worthy people—on capable, hardworking mothers of families or diligent, thrifty, little tradespeople, on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly, for their modest stock of happiness and now seem to be entering on the enjoyment of it with the fullest right.  How can I say with sufficient tenderness what here needs to be said?  It does not matter that I know I must become, in the eyes of every hostile reader, as it were personally responsible for all the sufferings I try to explain—just as, to this day, everyone talks as if St. Augustine wanted unbaptized infants to go to Hell.  But it matters enormously if I alienate anyone from the truth.  Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for the moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not leaned to know Him they will be wretched.  And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover.  The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them.  I call this a Divine humility because it is a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up ‘our own’ when it is no longer worth keeping.

A God Who Weeps

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. “Where have you laid him?” he asked. “Come and see, Lord,” they replied. Jesus wept. Then the Jews said, “See how much he loved him!” --John 11:33-36

All of us—regardless of social station, economic affluence, or religious belief—experience hardship at some point in our lives. We would all readily attest that we live in a broken world, and that misery happens to the best and worst among us. Obviously, this begs the question of “Why?” Why would an all-powerful, supposedly loving God allow suffering and misery to happen? Yet such questions obscure the more significant truth contained in the above passage.

You see, if we allow ourselves to become fixated on the explanation of “why” (which despite the hundreds of books written about it, will probably never be explained adequately in this life), we miss the greater truth about the character of God that Jesus reveals here. In the midst of the suffering of Mary and Martha (over the death of their brother Lazarus), Jesus comes and is present with and weeps with them. Do not miss the significance of this—that the one who created the whole world stood alongside Mary and Martha and shared their pain—he wept with them and wept for them.

While we may never in this life receive an answer for why we experience suffering, we may take comfort in the fact that there is a God who shares our pain—who weeps with us.