This week, we’ve been exploring the uncomfortable topic of pain. On Monday, when I penned the first of these three devotionals, I chose to title it “The Problem of Pain,” only later remembering that one of my oldest and most trusted mentors wrote a book by the same name.
You may know who I’m talking about; his name is CS Lewis. No, I never met him in person. He’d died long before I was born, but he helped shape my spiritual worldview nonetheless, first as a child when I read The Chronicles of Narnia, and later as an adult through his non-fiction works like Mere Christianity and The Four Loves. Lewis has taught me so much about things like life and love, God and grace. He’s one of those names who needs no introduction and whose words seem to carry greater weight, simply because they came from him. Today, I want to allow CS Lewis to teach us about pain.
You may not know this, but Lewis is someone who was well acquainted with the multifaceted pain life can throw at us. One of his earliest memories was at the age of four, when his dog Jacksie was struck and killed by a car. That loss hit him so powerfully that he began calling himself Jacksie (later shortened to Jack), and the name stuck, becoming the nickname his family called him for the rest of his life. But that was only the first of many helpings of pain for Lewis.
He lost his mother when he was 10, and was then emotionally abandoned by his father and sent away to boarding school. As a teenager, he suffered through a chronic respiratory illness, and then postponed his education to fight in World War I. There, on the front lines of France as a 19-year-old, he was injured when an Allied shell fell short of its target and accidentally hit his trench, killing two of his friends and taking him out of the war. During his slow recovery, he suffered from bouts of depression and deep spiritual doubt. But the worst was still to come. Many years later, he had to watch his beloved wife Joy suffer from a malignant cancer that claimed her life when she was only 45.
Through all of this, Lewis grappled with his faith and the glaring presence of pain in a world God had labeled ‘good.’ Several of his non-fiction books were borne out of the soil of his suffering, most notably The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed.
The irony of suffering is that the dark valleys are hard, uncomfortable places to be, and we’re tempted to run away when we find ourselves in them; however, they can also be fruitful places where the deepest growth can occur. And this was true for Lewis. The pain he endured was awful and he grieved deeply, as evidenced by his writings, but those painful seasons also produced some beautiful insights on life that continue to resonate for people experiencing pain today.
For instance, in The Problem of Pain, Lewis explains why admitting we’re hurting emotionally is far harder than acknowledging physical pain:
“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say ‘My tooth is aching’ than to say ‘My heart is broken.’ ”
Ouch. I will admit that, as a guy, I’m ok admitting that my back hurts, but it’s far less comfortable confessing that my heart hurts or that I’m feeling discouraged. That’s just a little too vulnerable, just a bit too exposing. That said, one of unexpected silver-linings of this current season is that, since everyone is suffering, it’s more socially acceptable to admit it. But once this current crisis has passed, when the stores are all open and we’ve moved on (which will happen), what then? Will we go back to burying our heartache and sadness under a forced smile? I hope not.
In the same book, Lewis also describes the way God uses pain to get our attention:
“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
Often, suffering is the one of the first pieces of evidence atheists give for rejecting the idea of God. But for Lewis, a man who sought to ignore God through his 20’s and early 30’s, his suffering was where he became most aware of God’s presence. It was in his moments of grief, when his pain overwhelmed his determination to run from God and drove him to his knees, that he found God was right there with him, and had been the whole time. And it was in his moments of weakness that he discovered just how strong God truly was.
But as Lewis points out in the quote above, our pain isn’t simply a megaphone for us, but for the world around us. The way we work through pain often speaks far more loudly and convincingly than our lofty platitudes posted on social media from the comfort of our couch.
I will never forget the unexpected joy bubbling out of Tony Peca when I went to visit him in the hospital after he barely survived a heart attack. His calm, confident hope felt so utterly out of place, and yet it spoke volumes to me and everybody else who walked into that hospital room about the depth of his faith.
And I think of Johanna, my family friend, who passed away last year after a long battle against cancer. We miss her, but what stands out even stronger is the way her faith was revealed through her struggle. The cancer slowly consumed her body, but it couldn’t touch her trust in God. It stole her comfort, her breath, and finally her life, but it couldn’t steal her joy.
I will admit that it’s really easy to declare our trust in God when the sun is shining and we have plenty of food in the fridge and money in the bank. But it’s in times of crisis like this when our true feelings are revealed, both to ourselves and to everyone else around us.
So I suppose the question we need to ask ourselves is, How’s your faith doing right now?
What has this current crisis revealed to you about your relationship with God?
