Life is Pain

About seven years ago a friend of mine was going through a particularly difficult time. Upon entering puberty both of his children had developed serious psychological problems, problems that were quite disabling and difficult to manage. One day I asked him how it was going and looking at me in anguish he replied, "Bill, life is pain".

I did not like his answer. Like me, he was a Christian and by all outward signs, a much better one than me. How could he, being redeemed by Christ, say such a thing? Particularly to me because at the time I was going through great, if largely self inflicted tribulations and yet he was telling me that life was nothing but. It made everything seem so cruel, so pointless.

I never bothered to ask him what he meant but from time to time I would take out what he had said and examine it anew. Yet I never could quite grasp his point....I'd get close but it always eluded me. Until today. As I was driving home from church it finally hit me. My friend wasn't telling me that everything was hopeless, he was pointing me to the source of all hope.

You see without faith, without Christ's redeeming Grace, life is indeed nothing but pain. It's simply a constant string of tribulations that we try to flee and obscure with transitory pleasure. Unless we have the faith that only Christ can supply.  Let me give you an analogy:  Without faith we are like fish on  a dry lake bed, gasping for breath. When tragedy strikes it lands on us full force, crushing us beneath its weight. The other fish can't help because they're stuck in the mud too. But God's Grace is like that lake full of water. All of a sudden we can breathe and when the same tragedy strikes we feel its arrival but its crushing weight is absorbed by the deep, life giving density of the water - directly by Him and via His people. Yet this Grace is so ubiquitous, so powerful that we can hardly even tell it's there.

So I think my friend's point was that whatever sorrow or tragedy I face, I should look to the only one that can heal my deepest wounds, to the source of all hope, to the Love of our Lord Jesus Christ. And it is my prayer that you're quicker on the uptake than I was. That it won't take you seven long, harrowing years and the collapse of everything you've built to learn what Paul taught us in Romans:

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  

Romans 8:38-39 (ESV)