Part 2 of 3: Making sense of suffering in a success-driven world.
This is dedicated to all of those persons who have experience tremendous heartbreak in life at any point in time; I am talking about the kind of heartbreak that almost shattered your sense of hope or direction. Be comforted in knowing that God's love is much greater than your pain.
As I watched the program, I could relate to some of the young man’s disillusionment. I have learned over the years that when dealing with people who have experienced tremendous heartbreak, saying stuff like “I understand your pain” can often sound disingenuous, because unless we are actually that person, we really don’t understand what they are going through even though we may have had a similar experience. We are all unique as individuals and our respective genetic makeups and life experiences mean that we don't all view life through the exact same prism. I have realized that it is not my job to try and discount a person as a heretic simply because they have serious questions or lost their faith due to senseless suffering. As I listened to this gentleman on TV speak of the ordeal of losing his family, I kept wondering to myself, “what would I say to this young man if he told me that story and I was trying to help restore his faith?” Would I give him the standard “all-things-work-for-the-good-of-those-who-love-Him”-speech' based on the popular verse in Romans 8:28? Would I try to explain how ultimately all things will work themselves out because of God's providence or give him a dissertation on fallen humanity based on free will? This may bring some level of comfort, but it can never really bring his family back or justify what the killer did to them. Or would I condemn this young man's abandonment of faith as sheer heresy in a time of testing when he should have simply held on to his faith? To be honest with you, I don’t know what I would say to him, there are no easy answers to questions like that, and I have learned that the best thing to do when you don’t have the answer to a question is to simply say “I don’t know.” I know this because I know how angry I have often gotten when people have tried to give me simplistic yet ineffective answers to complex issues of suffering that I have dealt with in life, with suggestions from a to-do list like: "pray more", "fast more", "be more dedicated to God", "confess your sins more often" etc.....all these things often done in an effort to pacify God, when in actuality doing this things only led to further anger and disillusionment, especially when the internal pain did not go away after checking off the to-do list. Too often, because we want life to fit into our neat little fundamentalist and theological formulas, we try and come up with a simple “Biblical” answer to almost everything, and sometimes our answers end up doing more harm than good. There is a lot that we will never understand as long as we are these mortal bodies of ours.
Some would suggest that what this young disillusioned man needed was a theological explanation about how God gave us all free will, and how it was not that his family did anything wrong to deserve such a fate, but that some raging lunatic or mentally ill person decided to abuse the gift of free will and use it to inflict unspeakable pain on others. Some may want to add that because we have abused that free will (starting with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden) we have perverted our society and world with sin and thus live in a fallen state where bad things sometimes happen to us. And while this is true, “free will” does not give a logical explanation to all types of suffering? Not even slightly; how would you explain the fact that even the Bible speaks of instances where people’s hearts were hardened for a purpose (example: Pharaoh of Egypt during the plagues. See Exodus 4:21) or the fact that natural disasters affect people good and bad alike? Earlier this year, tens of thousands of people in Myanmar and China were killed from a cyclone and earthquake that ravaged their respective countries. What logical explanation would you give for these deaths? Some would say it is because these countries are not 'Christian" nations, or it was bad Karma (as actress Sharon Stone tried to imply about the earthquakes in China, she would later apologize after the negative backlash to her comments). But these assumptions are not in line with the God of love and grace that says He does not desire that any person perish but that all come to know him and be saved (see 2 Peter 3:9). Besides, natural disasters affect Christian and non-Christian people alike.
The point is that when you get into the area of trying to rationalize suffering or come up with a one size fits all formula to explain it, you run into many questions without answers. People have been grappling with this issue for centuries, and in more recent history we have even had various authors write bestselling books trying to explain this issue. Books like Harold Kushner’s “Why bad things happen to Good people”, Dr. James Dobson’s “When God doesn’t make sense” and Philip Yancey’s “Disappointment with God” all come to mind. I recently read another such book, written by a brilliant and articulate professor of Religious studies at University of North Carolina. His name is Bart D. Ehram, and his book is titled “God’s problem: How the Bible fails to answer how most important question – why we suffer”. Bart Ehram takes a very thorough look at what the entire Bible has to say about the issue of suffering, both Old and New Testaments, and what you will find to your surprise, is that the familiar formula “we suffer when we’re bad, but we prosper and suffer less when we are good (or “righteous” as some would say)” is not a universal theme in the Bible. I was amazed at how thorough Bart Ehrman’s research was, and was really intrigued at his own personal story, how he went from an on-fire “born again” Evangelical Christian to someone who is now an agnostic and has lost his faith in God, or at least the one that we popularly adore in our make-me-feel-good contemporary Christianity. Philip Yancey, one of my favorite authors because of his rare authenticity and candor, also details in his work how he became disillusioned with God earlier in his life, but he kept coming back to God because he knew of no other place where he could find grace or unconditional love. His reasons for staying connected to God mirror mine, because of the message of Grace through Jesus, which I know makes me secure in God and also give me reassurance that God's love for me is not predicated on my actions or behavior, great news considering how much I struggle daily, especially with compulsive habits stemming from deep emotional turmoil. Philip Yancey's brother, on the other hand, abandoned Christianity at an early age, after suffering a traumatic experience at the hands of an authoritarian religious leader. I sincerely believe, that the God we serve, however, is big enough to take our doubts, our fears and our raw authenticity, instead of the blatant “you ought to not feel that way” conclusions that many religious circles promote and condone.
“…Modern churches tend to feature testimonies of spiritual successes, never failures, which only makes the strugglers on the pew feel worse. Books and videos likewise focus on the triumphs. Yet, delve a bit deeper into church history and you will find a different story, of those who strain upstream like spawning salmon.” ~ Philip Yancey, "Reaching for the Invisible God".
Fundamentally, I think that some people end up becoming disillusioned with God when they realize that life cannot be narrowed down to a formula, not even a “Christian” one. Sometimes bad things do happen to decent people, and it is not necessarily because of willful sin on their part. How would you feel if someone suggested that the people who died in those buildings and those hijacked planes during the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were the “worst of sinners” and that is why God in His divine providence allowed them to be in that horrific situation? We would call such a claim cruel, sadistic, and a gross misrepresentation of God’s character. But, ironically, this is exactly what we do sometimes when we take the verse “you reap what you sow” out of its original context and use it as a simple explanation for everything in life, failing to realize that if we were all to truly reap what we sow based on God’s definition of righteousness, we would all be dead and destined for an eternity apart from God's love (otherwise known as "hell"). I don’t say all of this to minimize the importance of personal responsibility or to imply that sinful or irresponsible actions don’t have consequences, but I do say all of this to say that when you look at life from a broad perspective, you realize that simple "theological formulas" cannot explain everything; there is mystery involved when you are talking about accepting God’s grace. Yes, irresponsible and sinful behavior often leads to misery and suffering, but not all suffering stems from personal irresponsibility. Even when you read the Bible, you realize that there is no one reason given for the issue of suffering; sometimes it is directly due to personal sin of the sufferer, sometimes it is not.
This brings me to the gist of part 2 of this 3 part essay on "success" entitled," making sense of suffering". Even though I have pondered on this issue of suffering for years, it suddenly dawned on me that most of the beliefs and illusions that I had held on to from a young age about success and suffering were actually doing me more harm than good. Hitherto, I had built my existence around the notion of primarily formula that says "if you are good, God will bless you and your life will be relatively stress free, but if you are bad, trouble and strife will define your life". Using this formula, which is a common interpretation of Christianity, I now set my lifelong goals of trying to obtain wealth, health, security and “financial freedom”, only to become disillusioned when the neat little “Christian” formulas that I had been applying for years did not free me from my own “demons” that were hindering me from achieving my dreams. It is not that these goals I set for myself are not great goals, it is just that I had gotten to the point where I was using God as a means to an end to obtain them, which made my goals idolatrous. So I recently asked myself, “what is a success anyway, and does suffering only come to those who are the worst of sinners?”
First lets look again at the issue of "success in life". What is "success"? What does it mean to "make it", or be "successful in life"? If you ask the business-person, he or she would probably tell you “customer satisfaction and more profits for the company”, if you ask the doctor, you’d probably hear “more healed patients and an effective and profitable private practice”, if you ask the athlete, you may hear, “consistency in my sport and a championship ring or trophy”. if you ask parents, they would probably tell you something like, "raising healthy, happy and productive kids." These are appropriate definitions when talking about career goals and ambitions, but how does this apply to our lives as a whole? What if we are never able to achieve any of these lofty ideals, does that make us complete losers? I have been to enough spiritual support groups and anonymous life-recovery groups to know that for most of us, there is more to our lives than meets the eye. Beneath the carefully varnished masks that we often wear are real people with real problems. I have met the “successful” business executive whose marriage has collapsed after years of emotional and physical absence in pursuit of the “American Dream” of financial freedom; I’ve met the proficient pastor and teacher struggling with severe clinical depression; people unable to get over traumatic abuse from years ago; people struggling with sexual identity issues; people feeling lost and hopeless after an ugly divorce; people grieving the loss of a loved one or child; drug addicts; sex addicts; shopaholics; perfectionists; compulsive gamblers; anorexics; bulimics etc etc. It seems that once you scratch beneath the surface of our image conscious world, there is a lot of pain and heartache that is being concealed in the hustle and bustle of our lives. You name it, there is a support group for practically every emotional hang-up, disorder and addiction under the sun. And yet, on the surface, many of these persons, some who are on the higher plane of the socio-economic ladder, are considered successful by society’s standard simply because they are part of the middle class and have attained some level of financial freedom. It is the paradox of this beautiful thing we call capitalism: on one hand it promotes entrepreneurship, hard work and innovation, and keeps our economy running, and on the other hand it feeds on our insecurities and addictive tendencies.
It was Warren Buffett, the billionaire investment tycoon, who once famously said that if you want to be successful in business "You make a product for a penny, you sell it for a dollar and you sell it to addicts." He could not have said it more plainly, if you can find a product or service and successfully market it and sell it for significantly more than it costs to make to potential addicts, you won’t have to worry about trying hard to maintain your clientele because an addict is a repeat customer. So in a weird way, addicts help fulfill the corporate bottom line and the geniuses who market from Madison Avenue know this, this is why you can’t view any form of media without being bombarded with a myriad of commercials promoting the latest item that is going to give the next "happiness-high" (A term used by Dr. Neil Clark Warren used to describe our nation’s constant desire for the next emotional fix). While being addicted may not eventually be good for our well-being (unless it is an acceptable addiction like "work" and even work can be stressful without balance), it feeds the corporate bottom line. This is why the barriers between consumers and producers have been made virtually non-existent. From unlimited access to credit cards, pay-day loans, Internet access to goods and services, and “no payments till…” plans with high interests rates, all of this helps keep our addictive tentacles in full operation mode, and many of us are enslaved but don’t even know it. Some economists claim that we are mortgaging our kids future away in huge debt. The vicious cycle of earning to get more while simultaneously drowning in debt continues and the line between our true needs and our carnal desires has been virtually blurred. Author and activist Randall Robinson asks, “For what is the value of democracy if our opinions are formed, our appetites manipulated, our values shaped, our decisions made, our most fundamental human needs camouflaged by the puppet-masters of politics and profits?” Most of us think of freedom and success based upon our ability to “do as we please” and “buy what we want”, but when the economic god –The Market – heavily influences these decisions and we constantly dance to its tune, how free and successful can we really say we are?
Since success is determined in our culture primarily by your financial worth it is no wonder that we can have a scandal involving the tobacco industry, where their executives intentionally lied under oath about the addictive nature of cigarettes even though the now famous 60 minute interview showed that not only did they know that cigarettes were addictive, but that boosters were added to them to intensify this addiction. The scandal was then chronicled by the movie “The Insider” starring Russell Crowe as the whistle blower who exposed the scandal. Today, smoking is virtually banned from all major public places. Our definition of success is the reason that we have major corporations outsourcing jobs to other nations (some of these nations are Communist) to save labor costs at the expense of safety and quality regulations, as we have seen recently with the lead infested toys from China and the contaminated pet food products. Our definition of success explains why we can have a delicate balance of love and hatred with political administrations like those in Venezuela, which we criticize in public, while simultaneously doing huge business deals with them behind closed doors because we are addicted to their crude oil. Yes, our definition of success explains why we have some major corporations that proclaim to be arbiters of “family and moral values” but yet own and profit from cable companies that sell every form of pornography that you can imagine right into the comfort of your home or hotel room. Yes, in a society that puts money at the center of the “success” wheel, you find these kinds of paradoxes. We enjoy tremendous financial freedom, but at what cost to out emotional and spiritual health and true freedom?Can we still be deemed successful when sometimes the reality of our personal lives make us wonder if the sacrifices we made to become wealthy were really worth it?
Don’t get me wrong, this is not some kind of essay knocking the rich or wealthy, I realize that wealth brings a degree of financial-independence that enables you to do things that make life much easier. And I don't feel that money is a source of evil, it is the love of money that is dangerous. We all need money to survive in this world, that is the reality, but the premise of this essay is that we err when we assume that the accumulation of wealth is the primary essence of our being. When you really get to know the people sitting next to you in a church pew or fellowship, you will quickly come to the realization that our lives are often more complex than the eyes can see. What appears to be glitz and glamour on the outside is often a complex combination of triumphs, defeats, fears, loves, redemption and resilience on the inside. In fact, there are a growing number of people who have become so disillusioned with religion (yes, even the "Christian" kind) because they realized long time ago that religion does not encourage authenticity about the real nature of their spiritual struggles – to do so is almost akin to being labeled a heretic or someone who is simply not dedicated enough in their Christian faith. This is why you find a gropwing number of people calling themselves irreligious or "spiritual but not religious".
This brings us to the issue of suffering: Earlier I gave the simplistic explanation for why we suffer. The bottom line is that we live in a fallen world tainted by sin, so things are not as they were originally intended. But how then does this explain the spiritual conundrum that drive thinkers crazy? Bad things happening to "good people". Some, like myself, would argue that because we are all sinners and no one is really good by God's standard, this then implies that we are all candidates for suffering. But it is no secret that some people by no direct fault of their own, still suffer immensely more than others: babies dying by no fault of their own from sickness and various diseases; people born with severe mental or physical handicaps; about 1 in 6 people on the planet suffer consequences (usually death) from not having adequate drinking water, something that we take for granted in this country, were we enjoy the luxury of excess bottled water. There are people, many in so-called third world countries, right now suffering in ways that we can only imagine, just because they were born into abject poverty. You could quote example after example of situations where someone who did not deserve it experienced some horrific act or circumstance. If a car crashes and one person dies, and another survives and the surviving person says "God saved me", what about the other person? Does it mean that God loved one over the other? I ask these question not to challenge anyone's beliefs, but to simply point out that the simplistic answers that we often hear about the problem of suffering do not make sense in the grand picture. The bottom line is that in our mortality, there is a lot that we don't understand. You can read the Bible and cherry pick those verses that support a formulaic way of thinking about suffering, but there are also many verses that fly in the face of the popular notion of "good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people". Here a justa few:
"In this meaningless life of mine I have seen both of these: a righteous man perishing in his righteousness, and a wicked man living long in his wickedness" Ecc 7:15
"But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous." Matthew 5:44-45
"As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?""Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life."
John 9:1-3
The last passage is a quote taken from Jesus telling his disciples that the blind person that they saw was not born blind because of his sin, contrary to what they thought, but so that God's glory could be revealed in his life. Too often, however, we assume that suffering in a person's life is always a direct result of personal sin. Yes, sin does have bad consequences, the ultimate being death, but all suffering is not always a direct result of personal sin, as we see in the book of Job. Job and his friends did not know that Job's suffering was basically a result of a wager that Satan challenged God with, and throughout the book you see Job's friends challenging Job to simply confess his sin so that he can stop suffering. But the beginning of the book describes Job as an upright man who loved God, and eventually God scolds Job's friends for their irresonsible assumptions about Job's suffering.
Conclusion:
I say all of this simply to conclude that when it comes to others and their suffering, we should simply be conduits of God's comfort, love and mercy. It is not enough to simply analyze suffering, we should help those who are goiong through it. the Bible teaches that without God's grace, we all deserve eternal punishment, and this is one thing that keeps me grounded when I am in the process of making premature conclusions and assumptions about other people and their circumstances. We can therefore comfort others knowing how much God has comforted us!
This is dedicated to all of those persons who have experience tremendous heartbreak in life at any point in time; I am talking about the kind of heartbreak that almost shattered your sense of hope or direction. Be comforted in knowing that God's love is much greater than your pain.
One Saturday afternoon, I watched one of those true-crime stories on cable television about a serial killer who had just been apprehended. Over several years, this man terrorized and killed a number of families. He was infamously known as the B.T.K. killer, because he would bind, torture and then kill his victims. After his killing spree was over, he then went on to live a relatively normal life in another town. He even got married and was even active in his local church. No one even suspected that he was a murderer on the loose. Eventually, however, some key evidence was discovered in the case, he was arrested and to the surprise of everyone who knew him, he eventually confessed to the killings. One young man, who was related to one of the families that had been murdered, recalled the unforgettable story of how he discovered that his parents and sisters had been killed years ago when he was a young boy; on that fateful evening, he had gone out with a friend, and when he got home, he was shocked to see that his parents and sisters had been brutally killed. He realized that he had escaped death only because he was not home when the killer had struck. I will never forget what the young man said next: he talked about how he could not understand how a “good God” could let this happen to their family. His deceased family members were good Christians; they attended church faithfully, were believers, and served their church and community. He went on to say that the moment he saw the brutality that had been inflicted on his family, he lost all faith in God; he came to the conclusion that if this is the kind of stuff that God would allow to a faithful family, then Christianity must be a hoax and he wanted nothing to do with it.
As I watched the program, I could relate to some of the young man’s disillusionment. I have learned over the years that when dealing with people who have experienced tremendous heartbreak, saying stuff like “I understand your pain” can often sound disingenuous, because unless we are actually that person, we really don’t understand what they are going through even though we may have had a similar experience. We are all unique as individuals and our respective genetic makeups and life experiences mean that we don't all view life through the exact same prism. I have realized that it is not my job to try and discount a person as a heretic simply because they have serious questions or lost their faith due to senseless suffering. As I listened to this gentleman on TV speak of the ordeal of losing his family, I kept wondering to myself, “what would I say to this young man if he told me that story and I was trying to help restore his faith?” Would I give him the standard “all-things-work-for-the-good-of-those-who-love-Him”-speech' based on the popular verse in Romans 8:28? Would I try to explain how ultimately all things will work themselves out because of God's providence or give him a dissertation on fallen humanity based on free will? This may bring some level of comfort, but it can never really bring his family back or justify what the killer did to them. Or would I condemn this young man's abandonment of faith as sheer heresy in a time of testing when he should have simply held on to his faith? To be honest with you, I don’t know what I would say to him, there are no easy answers to questions like that, and I have learned that the best thing to do when you don’t have the answer to a question is to simply say “I don’t know.” I know this because I know how angry I have often gotten when people have tried to give me simplistic yet ineffective answers to complex issues of suffering that I have dealt with in life, with suggestions from a to-do list like: "pray more", "fast more", "be more dedicated to God", "confess your sins more often" etc.....all these things often done in an effort to pacify God, when in actuality doing this things only led to further anger and disillusionment, especially when the internal pain did not go away after checking off the to-do list. Too often, because we want life to fit into our neat little fundamentalist and theological formulas, we try and come up with a simple “Biblical” answer to almost everything, and sometimes our answers end up doing more harm than good. There is a lot that we will never understand as long as we are these mortal bodies of ours.
Some would suggest that what this young disillusioned man needed was a theological explanation about how God gave us all free will, and how it was not that his family did anything wrong to deserve such a fate, but that some raging lunatic or mentally ill person decided to abuse the gift of free will and use it to inflict unspeakable pain on others. Some may want to add that because we have abused that free will (starting with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden) we have perverted our society and world with sin and thus live in a fallen state where bad things sometimes happen to us. And while this is true, “free will” does not give a logical explanation to all types of suffering? Not even slightly; how would you explain the fact that even the Bible speaks of instances where people’s hearts were hardened for a purpose (example: Pharaoh of Egypt during the plagues. See Exodus 4:21) or the fact that natural disasters affect people good and bad alike? Earlier this year, tens of thousands of people in Myanmar and China were killed from a cyclone and earthquake that ravaged their respective countries. What logical explanation would you give for these deaths? Some would say it is because these countries are not 'Christian" nations, or it was bad Karma (as actress Sharon Stone tried to imply about the earthquakes in China, she would later apologize after the negative backlash to her comments). But these assumptions are not in line with the God of love and grace that says He does not desire that any person perish but that all come to know him and be saved (see 2 Peter 3:9). Besides, natural disasters affect Christian and non-Christian people alike.
The point is that when you get into the area of trying to rationalize suffering or come up with a one size fits all formula to explain it, you run into many questions without answers. People have been grappling with this issue for centuries, and in more recent history we have even had various authors write bestselling books trying to explain this issue. Books like Harold Kushner’s “Why bad things happen to Good people”, Dr. James Dobson’s “When God doesn’t make sense” and Philip Yancey’s “Disappointment with God” all come to mind. I recently read another such book, written by a brilliant and articulate professor of Religious studies at University of North Carolina. His name is Bart D. Ehram, and his book is titled “God’s problem: How the Bible fails to answer how most important question – why we suffer”. Bart Ehram takes a very thorough look at what the entire Bible has to say about the issue of suffering, both Old and New Testaments, and what you will find to your surprise, is that the familiar formula “we suffer when we’re bad, but we prosper and suffer less when we are good (or “righteous” as some would say)” is not a universal theme in the Bible. I was amazed at how thorough Bart Ehrman’s research was, and was really intrigued at his own personal story, how he went from an on-fire “born again” Evangelical Christian to someone who is now an agnostic and has lost his faith in God, or at least the one that we popularly adore in our make-me-feel-good contemporary Christianity. Philip Yancey, one of my favorite authors because of his rare authenticity and candor, also details in his work how he became disillusioned with God earlier in his life, but he kept coming back to God because he knew of no other place where he could find grace or unconditional love. His reasons for staying connected to God mirror mine, because of the message of Grace through Jesus, which I know makes me secure in God and also give me reassurance that God's love for me is not predicated on my actions or behavior, great news considering how much I struggle daily, especially with compulsive habits stemming from deep emotional turmoil. Philip Yancey's brother, on the other hand, abandoned Christianity at an early age, after suffering a traumatic experience at the hands of an authoritarian religious leader. I sincerely believe, that the God we serve, however, is big enough to take our doubts, our fears and our raw authenticity, instead of the blatant “you ought to not feel that way” conclusions that many religious circles promote and condone.
“…Modern churches tend to feature testimonies of spiritual successes, never failures, which only makes the strugglers on the pew feel worse. Books and videos likewise focus on the triumphs. Yet, delve a bit deeper into church history and you will find a different story, of those who strain upstream like spawning salmon.” ~ Philip Yancey, "Reaching for the Invisible God".
Fundamentally, I think that some people end up becoming disillusioned with God when they realize that life cannot be narrowed down to a formula, not even a “Christian” one. Sometimes bad things do happen to decent people, and it is not necessarily because of willful sin on their part. How would you feel if someone suggested that the people who died in those buildings and those hijacked planes during the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were the “worst of sinners” and that is why God in His divine providence allowed them to be in that horrific situation? We would call such a claim cruel, sadistic, and a gross misrepresentation of God’s character. But, ironically, this is exactly what we do sometimes when we take the verse “you reap what you sow” out of its original context and use it as a simple explanation for everything in life, failing to realize that if we were all to truly reap what we sow based on God’s definition of righteousness, we would all be dead and destined for an eternity apart from God's love (otherwise known as "hell"). I don’t say all of this to minimize the importance of personal responsibility or to imply that sinful or irresponsible actions don’t have consequences, but I do say all of this to say that when you look at life from a broad perspective, you realize that simple "theological formulas" cannot explain everything; there is mystery involved when you are talking about accepting God’s grace. Yes, irresponsible and sinful behavior often leads to misery and suffering, but not all suffering stems from personal irresponsibility. Even when you read the Bible, you realize that there is no one reason given for the issue of suffering; sometimes it is directly due to personal sin of the sufferer, sometimes it is not.
This brings me to the gist of part 2 of this 3 part essay on "success" entitled," making sense of suffering". Even though I have pondered on this issue of suffering for years, it suddenly dawned on me that most of the beliefs and illusions that I had held on to from a young age about success and suffering were actually doing me more harm than good. Hitherto, I had built my existence around the notion of primarily formula that says "if you are good, God will bless you and your life will be relatively stress free, but if you are bad, trouble and strife will define your life". Using this formula, which is a common interpretation of Christianity, I now set my lifelong goals of trying to obtain wealth, health, security and “financial freedom”, only to become disillusioned when the neat little “Christian” formulas that I had been applying for years did not free me from my own “demons” that were hindering me from achieving my dreams. It is not that these goals I set for myself are not great goals, it is just that I had gotten to the point where I was using God as a means to an end to obtain them, which made my goals idolatrous. So I recently asked myself, “what is a success anyway, and does suffering only come to those who are the worst of sinners?”
First lets look again at the issue of "success in life". What is "success"? What does it mean to "make it", or be "successful in life"? If you ask the business-person, he or she would probably tell you “customer satisfaction and more profits for the company”, if you ask the doctor, you’d probably hear “more healed patients and an effective and profitable private practice”, if you ask the athlete, you may hear, “consistency in my sport and a championship ring or trophy”. if you ask parents, they would probably tell you something like, "raising healthy, happy and productive kids." These are appropriate definitions when talking about career goals and ambitions, but how does this apply to our lives as a whole? What if we are never able to achieve any of these lofty ideals, does that make us complete losers? I have been to enough spiritual support groups and anonymous life-recovery groups to know that for most of us, there is more to our lives than meets the eye. Beneath the carefully varnished masks that we often wear are real people with real problems. I have met the “successful” business executive whose marriage has collapsed after years of emotional and physical absence in pursuit of the “American Dream” of financial freedom; I’ve met the proficient pastor and teacher struggling with severe clinical depression; people unable to get over traumatic abuse from years ago; people struggling with sexual identity issues; people feeling lost and hopeless after an ugly divorce; people grieving the loss of a loved one or child; drug addicts; sex addicts; shopaholics; perfectionists; compulsive gamblers; anorexics; bulimics etc etc. It seems that once you scratch beneath the surface of our image conscious world, there is a lot of pain and heartache that is being concealed in the hustle and bustle of our lives. You name it, there is a support group for practically every emotional hang-up, disorder and addiction under the sun. And yet, on the surface, many of these persons, some who are on the higher plane of the socio-economic ladder, are considered successful by society’s standard simply because they are part of the middle class and have attained some level of financial freedom. It is the paradox of this beautiful thing we call capitalism: on one hand it promotes entrepreneurship, hard work and innovation, and keeps our economy running, and on the other hand it feeds on our insecurities and addictive tendencies.
It was Warren Buffett, the billionaire investment tycoon, who once famously said that if you want to be successful in business "You make a product for a penny, you sell it for a dollar and you sell it to addicts." He could not have said it more plainly, if you can find a product or service and successfully market it and sell it for significantly more than it costs to make to potential addicts, you won’t have to worry about trying hard to maintain your clientele because an addict is a repeat customer. So in a weird way, addicts help fulfill the corporate bottom line and the geniuses who market from Madison Avenue know this, this is why you can’t view any form of media without being bombarded with a myriad of commercials promoting the latest item that is going to give the next "happiness-high" (A term used by Dr. Neil Clark Warren used to describe our nation’s constant desire for the next emotional fix). While being addicted may not eventually be good for our well-being (unless it is an acceptable addiction like "work" and even work can be stressful without balance), it feeds the corporate bottom line. This is why the barriers between consumers and producers have been made virtually non-existent. From unlimited access to credit cards, pay-day loans, Internet access to goods and services, and “no payments till…” plans with high interests rates, all of this helps keep our addictive tentacles in full operation mode, and many of us are enslaved but don’t even know it. Some economists claim that we are mortgaging our kids future away in huge debt. The vicious cycle of earning to get more while simultaneously drowning in debt continues and the line between our true needs and our carnal desires has been virtually blurred. Author and activist Randall Robinson asks, “For what is the value of democracy if our opinions are formed, our appetites manipulated, our values shaped, our decisions made, our most fundamental human needs camouflaged by the puppet-masters of politics and profits?” Most of us think of freedom and success based upon our ability to “do as we please” and “buy what we want”, but when the economic god –The Market – heavily influences these decisions and we constantly dance to its tune, how free and successful can we really say we are?
Since success is determined in our culture primarily by your financial worth it is no wonder that we can have a scandal involving the tobacco industry, where their executives intentionally lied under oath about the addictive nature of cigarettes even though the now famous 60 minute interview showed that not only did they know that cigarettes were addictive, but that boosters were added to them to intensify this addiction. The scandal was then chronicled by the movie “The Insider” starring Russell Crowe as the whistle blower who exposed the scandal. Today, smoking is virtually banned from all major public places. Our definition of success is the reason that we have major corporations outsourcing jobs to other nations (some of these nations are Communist) to save labor costs at the expense of safety and quality regulations, as we have seen recently with the lead infested toys from China and the contaminated pet food products. Our definition of success explains why we can have a delicate balance of love and hatred with political administrations like those in Venezuela, which we criticize in public, while simultaneously doing huge business deals with them behind closed doors because we are addicted to their crude oil. Yes, our definition of success explains why we have some major corporations that proclaim to be arbiters of “family and moral values” but yet own and profit from cable companies that sell every form of pornography that you can imagine right into the comfort of your home or hotel room. Yes, in a society that puts money at the center of the “success” wheel, you find these kinds of paradoxes. We enjoy tremendous financial freedom, but at what cost to out emotional and spiritual health and true freedom?Can we still be deemed successful when sometimes the reality of our personal lives make us wonder if the sacrifices we made to become wealthy were really worth it?
Don’t get me wrong, this is not some kind of essay knocking the rich or wealthy, I realize that wealth brings a degree of financial-independence that enables you to do things that make life much easier. And I don't feel that money is a source of evil, it is the love of money that is dangerous. We all need money to survive in this world, that is the reality, but the premise of this essay is that we err when we assume that the accumulation of wealth is the primary essence of our being. When you really get to know the people sitting next to you in a church pew or fellowship, you will quickly come to the realization that our lives are often more complex than the eyes can see. What appears to be glitz and glamour on the outside is often a complex combination of triumphs, defeats, fears, loves, redemption and resilience on the inside. In fact, there are a growing number of people who have become so disillusioned with religion (yes, even the "Christian" kind) because they realized long time ago that religion does not encourage authenticity about the real nature of their spiritual struggles – to do so is almost akin to being labeled a heretic or someone who is simply not dedicated enough in their Christian faith. This is why you find a gropwing number of people calling themselves irreligious or "spiritual but not religious".
This brings us to the issue of suffering: Earlier I gave the simplistic explanation for why we suffer. The bottom line is that we live in a fallen world tainted by sin, so things are not as they were originally intended. But how then does this explain the spiritual conundrum that drive thinkers crazy? Bad things happening to "good people". Some, like myself, would argue that because we are all sinners and no one is really good by God's standard, this then implies that we are all candidates for suffering. But it is no secret that some people by no direct fault of their own, still suffer immensely more than others: babies dying by no fault of their own from sickness and various diseases; people born with severe mental or physical handicaps; about 1 in 6 people on the planet suffer consequences (usually death) from not having adequate drinking water, something that we take for granted in this country, were we enjoy the luxury of excess bottled water. There are people, many in so-called third world countries, right now suffering in ways that we can only imagine, just because they were born into abject poverty. You could quote example after example of situations where someone who did not deserve it experienced some horrific act or circumstance. If a car crashes and one person dies, and another survives and the surviving person says "God saved me", what about the other person? Does it mean that God loved one over the other? I ask these question not to challenge anyone's beliefs, but to simply point out that the simplistic answers that we often hear about the problem of suffering do not make sense in the grand picture. The bottom line is that in our mortality, there is a lot that we don't understand. You can read the Bible and cherry pick those verses that support a formulaic way of thinking about suffering, but there are also many verses that fly in the face of the popular notion of "good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people". Here a justa few:
"In this meaningless life of mine I have seen both of these: a righteous man perishing in his righteousness, and a wicked man living long in his wickedness" Ecc 7:15
"But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous." Matthew 5:44-45
"As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?""Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life."
John 9:1-3
The last passage is a quote taken from Jesus telling his disciples that the blind person that they saw was not born blind because of his sin, contrary to what they thought, but so that God's glory could be revealed in his life. Too often, however, we assume that suffering in a person's life is always a direct result of personal sin. Yes, sin does have bad consequences, the ultimate being death, but all suffering is not always a direct result of personal sin, as we see in the book of Job. Job and his friends did not know that Job's suffering was basically a result of a wager that Satan challenged God with, and throughout the book you see Job's friends challenging Job to simply confess his sin so that he can stop suffering. But the beginning of the book describes Job as an upright man who loved God, and eventually God scolds Job's friends for their irresonsible assumptions about Job's suffering.
Conclusion:
I say all of this simply to conclude that when it comes to others and their suffering, we should simply be conduits of God's comfort, love and mercy. It is not enough to simply analyze suffering, we should help those who are goiong through it. the Bible teaches that without God's grace, we all deserve eternal punishment, and this is one thing that keeps me grounded when I am in the process of making premature conclusions and assumptions about other people and their circumstances. We can therefore comfort others knowing how much God has comforted us!
"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows."
2 Corinthians 1:3-5
coming in part 3 of 3: "Church Inc. & contentment."
Stephen O. Akinduro
posted by Stephen O. | 11:53 AM
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