Scanning the Internet this morning, I came upon this post over at Christianforums.com.

Hello fellow believers. I am a true believer in Christ and the Bible. I am not looking for a debate. I just want some help with dealing with this issue. I am struggling with my faith because I just have a hard time accepting God’s way of using suffering to bring us towards him. I honestly believe that God’s way of saying that he uses suffering for good and to bring glory to him is a cop-out and selfish. I’m not trying to offend anyone or God, I am really trying not to, but since God gave me reasoning and logical thinking, then I am using it to make sense of the world and so far, logically speaking this is the only way I see it. Thankfully, I haven’t personally went through terrible tragedies like having cancer, an accident, got shot, starved, got abused, etc. I am not being ungrateful at all. I actually feel blessed and I thank God for all of that. I see good things in the world, I see people making it thru trials with Jesus. I am aware of good things. 

I know in the Bible, that Jesus says he will provide peace and comfort to those who seek him, to not worry about tomorrow because he loves us so much. If we seek the kingdom of God first, everything else will be provided. (Matthew 6:33). However, I feel overwhelmed by all the negativity, and tragedies of the world. it affects my heart. What about the people born in North Korea, or in Syria? they never asked to be born, they suffer through immense pain, and most of them just die in suffering. They never make it “thru” their trials. What lesson have they learned through that? How does that bring glory to God? and I thought God says he will help anyone through their trials? Or even people in living 1st world countries like America, they still get abused by police, gang members, get raped, have an abusive relationship, the government imprisons someone to prison for life when they are actually innocent. Everyone is not trying enough to fix this. Everyone who are like me, who don’t go thru these things, are lucky enough to have a job, education, money good health, and go on their way of life like everything is okay. I don’t want to be like those people. 

I am sick of all these mass shootings increasing where there seems to be no solution or end to all of this. Let’s face it: the world is extremely ugly. I want to be caring. but so far, is just being a burden, because I know no matter what, I have to accept the world how it is and it always been like this for thousands of years. no one has a true answer. And I like to be a caring person and a Christian. sure maybe all of this brings glory to God, but why put us in this disgusting world in the first place? I never asked to be born here and now I have to earn my way to God and hopefully endure the suffering to “learn” a valuable lesson. how do I make sense of all this? How can I tell a kid who is suffering all his life with cancer and only have 4 more years to live? “Sorry kid. God is either just using you for his glory, or is just part of life and you just have no choice but to accept this truth. There’s no other way. But you will make it through. ” How can they accept that?  Where’s the value in all this?

All I have are thoughts on the matter of suffering. There are days I am just as confused, upset, and angry as this writer is.  Here is what I wrote in reply:

What you appear to be asking about is the ages-old question of theodicy – where is God in suffering and if He allows suffering, is He a good God? Men and women have struggled with this question for centuries, some of them quite deeply. There is no pat answer. Everyone looks at this from a different perspective. I can only offer some thoughts, but nothing that is a real, true answer.

1. Suffering can first of all be a natural consequence of our decisions. When I was a fool, back in my sinful teenage and early twenties years, I chose to follow sin. These choices led me into a lot of pain, sorrow, and suffering, yet as all fools do, I kept right on choosing sin for the momentary pleasure it gave me. Was it God’s fault that I overdosed on drugs? Was it God’s fault that I caught sexually transmitted diseases? Was it God’s fault that I woke up with a throbbing headache and miserable hangover? Some suffering cannot be blamed on God, but on our freewill choice to do that which He has warned us is not good for us.

2. Suffering may be the way that God keeps our eyes on heaven. This life is not the true life. It is an illusion of truth. We live in a world that we think is good and normal and desirable. People who have life good (the rich, the powerful) don’t think about heaven. They have their heaven here, so they don’t think about God or about loving Him. The good things of life become idols which they cling to, ignoring the God who loves them and desires their love in return.

3. Suffering in places like the Middle East, or like the Christians of the first century, who lived day by day in concern that they would be rounded up and fed to the lions, focuses your thoughts on death. The monks of many centuries ago would often keep a real human skull in their cell to remind them of the nearness of death and how short life is. Too much pleasure, too much good stuff in life (all the “toys” of life we have in rich countries) can turn our thoughts away from being ever-vigilant and ever ready to meet death in a state of peace with God. I can’t imagine what it is like to be in the Middle East at this time, but I am sure that the Christians over there are very aware of death and make sure they are in a state of friendship with God by means of partaking of the Sacraments.

4. This one I don’t understand fully, but I will mention it. The Church teaches that our suffering can have value for others. By accepting our suffering and offering it back to God as a sacrifice, we join that suffering to the Cross of Christ, filling up that which is lacking in the suffering of Christ. (I can’t find the verse in which St. Paul said that, but it is in the Bible). This seems odd to the Western Protestant ears, and the first time I read it, it was like a slap in the face, but somehow our suffering completes the work of Christ on the Cross. In short, there is something salvific, according to St. Paul, in the suffering we “offer up” to the Cross of Christ.

Oh, I found it……Colossians 1:24 “I now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up in my flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ, for the sake of His body, which is the church”

That is hard for the Western mind to accept in the way that Christ’s sacrifice has been presented as full payment of a legal debt. The Eastern Church does not recognize this particularly Anselmian and Augustinian approach to salvation. Somehow, St. Paul says, our suffering is completing the work of Christ. That is hard to understand, and perhaps harder to accept. We want life to be good….no, we want it to be heaven on earth because we don’t understand that this life is not heaven. It is still under the effects of Adam’s sin.

One last thing….I write these things, but I myself often have problems with saying “Where is God?” in doubt and fear. Where is God when little Alfie is being murdered by heartless savages in Great Britain pretending to be doctors when they shouldn’t be allowed near a sick person? Where is God when Islamic butchers run wild and kill the innocent in the Middle East? Where is God when people are cheated out of their life savings, when crooks and thieves are allowed to run our country, when the wicked hold the upper hand, when no one will close down Planned Parenthood? Why does God not intervene in a spectacular manner?

It is all too easy for me to imagine what I would do if I were God. I would smite the doctors trying to kill little Alfie with paralysis and pestilence. I would make the bombs of the Islamists go off early and fulfill their desire for suicide without having any innocent people killed. I would……this, that, the other.

But I am not God.

I do not see as He sees. I do not understand everything that ever will happen. I am a poor, sinful speck of dust in a universe so immense it boggles the mind to think of it. How dare I tell God what is right? Perhaps there is a whole plan playing itself out that in the end will result in more good than I could possibly imagine, something so beyond my comprehension that if I were to see it, my mind would not be able to comprehend it. Perhaps suffering is something so miniscule in the great scheme of things (although when we are going through it, it certainly does not seem miniscule) that in heaven we will look back on it and despise it as trivial. The many milenia of martyrs for the true faith are all in heaven now, wearing their martyr’s crowns and enjoying the special privileges of their faithfulness to Christ, even unto the point of death. Do you think that a one of them regrets now having gone through the suffering they endured?

I will be the first to admit that I do not do suffering well. I don’t like it, and I don’t like seeing others suffering. As I said, if I were God, I would walk through every hospital I could find and empty them all out. Little Alfie would walk out of that whorehouse in London that calls itself a hospital. There would be no cancer, no COPD, no spina bifida. There would be no poor having their faces ground under the boot heels of the rich. Every man who raised his hand to brutally beat or sexually molest a child would suddenly disappear in a flash of lightning with howls of anguish.

But there would also be no saints who shine like the sun for exercising their faith through suffering. There would be no people who, after lying in a hospital bed thinking about death, decided to repent, call for a priest, and ask for the Sacrament of Confession. There would be no deathbed repentance similar to the thief on the cross. There would be no examples for the rest of us that God is sufficient in our suffering, that He is faithful to those who love and call upon Him, and that the next world is worth the small price we pay here and now. There would be no examples of courage to inspire us to great deeds of moral value.

I can do two things with the suffering I see…..it can either cause me despair, or it can cause me to seek to say with Lot “Yea, though He slay me, yet shall I trust Him.”

I am not there yet, but I aspire to someday say the latter with all my heart.