There is a peculiar pride that lurks behind our suffering. To expose it, one only needs to cite an example of personal suffering. It is often lures the lurker out from behind its dark corners. It comes out in the form of a repartee detailing a similar, but more intense, version of your suffering: i.e. if you were sick, they were sicker; if you have pain, they have more; if you're experiencing loss, try experiencing what they've lost; and so on...
Or perhaps you've noticed this compulsion in your own person. You read or hear about another's struggle and immediately from the corners of your mind many examples of greater hardship that you have had to endure pounce on the opportunity.
Pain and suffering may appear to be peculiar places in which to discover pride hiding, but they are preferred hiding places for exactly that reason. You don't hide in places people think to look if your game is to remain hidden.
No one wants to be outdone when it comes to having endured difficulty. Said the other way, everyone wants everyone else to know precisely how painful, devastating, and difficult the trials they've experienced have been.
This is, of course, due in part to the fact that only the individual knows their peculiar sufferings. We are all most acquainted with and intimately aware of the details surrounding our suffering, our pain, our despair, etc... We can not know others as we have known our own, but it is peculiar that almost without exception we assume that our barometer is accurate and that the temperature of our pain reads hotter than the heat of others. Just because we know our pains best does not mean that knowledge must necessarily lead us to believe our pain to be the worst. In other words, it does not follow that just because you are most acquainted with your thermostat, that yours is set to a higher temperature than those you don't know. The fact that you live in your house doesn't make it more or less comfortable to live in. It just means you are most familiar with the temperature of where you happen to live. Knowing the unique pain of our loss should, in some cases one would think, lead us to imagine our losses are not as severe as some of those we hear about from others. In other words, knowing that our thermostat has a setting for 90 degrees and yet we have ours set at 72 should help us imagine that some people's homes are actually warmer than ours.
But pain is often our pride. We survived it and we don't want anyone to take that from us. But, logically speaking, they can't, of course. We know that. They can't diminish our survival by regaling us with theirs. But because we are competitive with respect to this, we feel like anything that rivals our pain must be attempting to steal the dignity of our pain away. As though it were a game of keep away being played between two friends over coffee, mildly attempting to filch each other's respective thunder in the form of deeper wounds, more intense despairs, etc...
There is, of course, another option.
2 Corinthians 1:3-7
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.
We can repent of our pride, receive comfort from our God and give comfort to our neighbors knowing how badly hurt we have been and how badly we now hurt for them knowing that they are hurting. We don't have to clamor and play keep away. We can be comforted and feel no pressure to try and squeeze comfort from another by getting them to confess that our pain sounds worse, our loss more severe or our hardships more difficult than theirs.
We are comforted not so that we can compete in the marketplace of pain pride, but so that we can comfort others still caught up in the mayhem or currently enduring the pains of whatever it is God may be using to help them comfort others someday.
No comments:
Post a Comment