Atheism 14 - If God loves us, why do we suffer so much?

 No one has asked this question in this blog yet, but it's a really big barrier to believing in the existence of God, so I thought I would address it as best I can.  And by "best I can," I mean "not too well."

I lay no claim to being an expert on this subject.  It is a question that people have asked as long as we have had any sort of belief in God, and it has been addressed through the millennia by far greater minds than mine.  I have read any number of great works on the subject, and among the best in recent years is When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold S. Kushner and The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis.  If my few paragraphs inspire a further interest in the subject, these would be a great place to start your research.  But on to my small contribution:

I have said for decades now that almost all the really important things I know about God, I learned from my children, and this is one of those things.  For years, I carried a photograph of my son in my wallet taken when he was about 3 or 4 years of age (I no longer have room for photos in my wallet, and I have never gotten around to transferring all those old pictures to my phone).

It was a standard "school" picture taken at the preschool he was attending at the time.  It shows the visage of your typical adorable kid complete with a mischievous grin, eyelashes out to here and the blue eyes he inherited from his father.  But that's not the reason I kept it in my wallet so long.

If you look at the picture really closely, you'll see a rather nasty gash above his right eyebrow and another on his right cheekbone.  These gashes are the reason I kept the picture.  You see, that photo was taken on the morning after the night that he finally learned not to pull the dog's ears.

For several weeks prior, he had taken great sport in chasing the dog (a toy poodle, if that matters) around the room, cornering her, and tugging on her ears.  His mother, his grandmother, his great-grandmother, his big sister and I had all tried to tell him that he shouldn't do that, that it hurt the doggie, that she didn't like it, that she might bite him, etc.  The dog, bless her heart, had said nothing; she was amazingly long-suffering. 

On this particular evening, however, the dog decided that enough was enough.  After my son had chased her under the dining room table and tugged both of her ears (I was watching this whole thing unfold), the dog let out a short, low growl and bit him right on the face.  I reached under the table, extracted the kid and took him to the bathroom, where I carefully washed and dressed the wounds (which I was able to determine were not too deep, barely more than scratches).  I then sent him to his room so that he wouldn't hear me laughing.

That child was mad at me for days afterward!  And he was skittish of the dog for weeks!  How could I let something like that happen?  How could I sit back and watch as his tiny little world completely crashed around him?  Remember, he was only 3 or 4 years old.  Not a lot of devastation in his life up to that point.  He didn't seem to remember that (1) I had been warning him of the likely consequences of his actions for weeks prior to the dog biting him, and (2) when it did happen, my first action was to be sure he wasn't actually hurt too badly; not nearly as badly as he thought he was, and certainly not as badly as he was going to be in 10 years when his first schoolboy crush ended.

To my son, this was the most devastating thing to have ever happened in his life.  To me, it wasn't really all that big a deal, especially since he had learned an important lesson, albeit the hard way and despite his own stubbornness in refusing to learn it the easy way.  In the words of Will Rogers, "good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment."

I learned an important lesson that day, too.  If I put the shoe on the other foot, if I imagined God as the father and myself as the child, I saw my own suffering in a completely different light.  I realized that the most devastating things I suffered in this life were but trifles from a cosmic perspective and, besides, they were all things that Scripture had repeatedly warned me against if I had simply put aside my own stubbornness and listened. 

But I learned another lesson in the coming weeks.  You see, afterward, my son and that dog became the best of friends, enjoying many hours of harmless play together.  I often wonder if sometimes we suffer because that's the only way we learn joy.

This makes more sense when I consider the births of both of my children.  Neither pregnancy was easy for my wife, nor either delivery.  Both involved long, arduous labors and many other common but implacable complications.  I held my wife's hand and watched helplessly as she suffered through the process.

But, in both cases, I also watched floods of joyous tears stream down my wife's face when a nurse handed her that new life and she held her child for the first time.  Within seconds, the pain and suffering were forgotten, replaced by an inexplicable euphoria and a love deeper than any other in heaven or earth.

And there I was, standing aside, momentarily just so much extra baggage, wondering if she would feel the same way had she simply been able to select a baby from a shelf at Target and take it home.  Somehow, I rather doubted it.

Please don't misunderstand my point.  I'm not saying that adopted children or foster children can't be loved by their parents, or that the love of adopted/foster parents isn't as strong or as real as that of naturally born parents.  It is, and there's no argument against that.  I simply use this as one of many possible examples to make my point that sometimes it seems that joy is the result of overcoming suffering.  Like my son did.

As I say, all the really important things I know about God, I've learned from my children. 

Pax