A reflection on suffering

For my write-up today, I shall write about my reflection on suffering. I do know of people around me who face or have faced a lot of hardship in life. There are friends in my church discipleship group who undergo alot of trials in life. In church, I know of people with Down Syndrome, autism, cerebral palsy, schizophrenia, depression. A pastor in my church has the terrible misfortune of losing his wife to cancer, and suffering Parkinson disease which will progressively see him degenerate into total paralysis. His children are only less than 10 years old. I know of a law graduate from the varsity christian fellowship who found out that he has an eye condition that would progressively deteriorate into total blindness. I have been wondering about how to make sense of suffering in this world. I have also been trying to make sense of the difficulties and suffering that I have been undergoing in life.

I think personal suffering raise our own awareness of the sufferings of those around us. For me, I think I am now better able to empathise with the trials of others, or at least, I am more motivated to try to. 

When I surf the medical forums to try to find a solution to my headache, i come across people who suffer the same symptoms as I do. There was this person who suffered from this pressure in the head sensation for 6 years! And he is still suffering today and desperately trying to find a cure to his ailment. I suppose I am not the only one in the world facing this problem. I don't think I would have known about this guy nor would I have cared to truly empathise with his plight had I not experience this myself, and I do pray for a solution for him as well as for myself.

I am not sure how comforting it is to say to someone who is suffering to "count your blessing". I suppose there are people out there who suffer worse, but that does not detract from the suffering a person is going through. Nevertheless, it does try to frame things in perspective. I did find inspiration from reading the accounts of Nick Vujicic, who was born with tetra-amelia syndrome and had no arms and legs. Watching the life of pi, and how the protagonist lost all his family members in the shipwreck. I can only imagine the plights of those who lost family members in tragedies or disasters. I really don't know about the plights of widows and orphans in my society. I do have friends who come from single parent families, but I have never been quite able to understand the difficulties that they go through. But when they reveal that information to me, there is a tone in their voice which speaks of a long history of hardship.

I suppose we try to deal with our illnesses by finding out solutions, but let's not forget the spiritual dimension behind illnesses. When researching for a solution to my tinnitus, I came on the internet a lady who did a series of youtube videos detailing her struggle with tinnitus and deafness until she found a solution in the end. A particular video somewhere near the end of her video series struck me deeply because it resonated with the sentiments that I had felt, where she said that there would be times in your suffering where you would wonder whether God loves you, or whether God has forsaken you for your sins, or you start blaming your illnesses on yourself for your ignorance, and you start losing faith in God. All these, she said, are lies the devil were putting into your mind. I suppose it helps reminding ourselves that within our physical suffering, there is an element of spiritual struggle to it, and not to lose our faith amidst the trial.

I once had a conversation with a friend who relayed about the experience of his grandfather in his final stages with cancer. The cancer causes the walls of the organs in the body to burst, causing excruciating pain. It is the unheard cries of suffering that goes on behind the walls of the sound-proof rooms designated for cancer patients nearing their death, as they rant with madness at the pain caused by the cancer ravaging their bodies, their face contorted with agony. We had initially been talking about how we had screwed up for the law exams. Being aware of such face of human suffering does put certain things into perspective.

As I was coming back from school today, I past by two paralyzed kids from the school of mentally challenged MINDS being strolled by their caretakers. Their bodies were contorted, their skins blistered, and the expression on their face seemingly betraying a lack of mental percipience. I think they were suffering from cerebral palsy. Who knows what goes within the mental faculties of these individuals. Perhaps some sentience lie within those defected bodies, silently crying out for some way to express their grief and sorrows.

Sometimes, I do wish that suffering was simply a test, a temporary one that God has placed in our lives, to teach us a certain wisdom through its process, and that after we have obtained such wisdom, we shall be restored to health. Or that suffering was a test of faith not unlike that in the book of Job, and that God would restore us to health and stature after we have been proven true in our faith. It does inspire some form of hope that we may see an end to our respective sufferings in this life at some point of time.

It would take quite some fortitude, but there would come a time where we should step out of our comfort zone to reach out to others in their hardship, to comfort them and help them, and see things beyond our personal struggles. I once read an insightful blog post on how everyone of us is a mixture of light and darkness. Some of us have more light than darkness in our lives, and some, more darkness than light. But then there are some of us who allow the darkness within us to cloud the light within us, and become self-absorbed that we are unable to see beyond ourselves to see the plights of others. Again, when we suffer, we can easily allow our hurt to become our identity. With my having Asperger's Syndrome and social difficulties, I am prone to bitterness and misanthropy, and I was quite so during my teenage years, but it helps that I have been able to improve socially and obtain friends in life who truly care for me, and I want to try my best to achieve certain degree of social functionality and to be able to reach out to others.

I suppose as I go about in life, trying to do well in school, get a job, and if possible, find a nice Christian girl to marry and start a family, I don't ever want to lose sight of the existence of suffering, or the fleetingness of life. It is so easy to become self-centered and lost with a materialistic mindset of pursuing success here in Singapore society and forget how vulnerable we are to suffering or death, or to lose awareness and compassion for those in hardships and trials. I want to be in awareness of the trial and hardship that people here on earth face, knowing how hard it is to be facing these ordeals, and to contribute in my own ways to alleviating the sufferings of those around me, and that are in the world.

I suppose one starting point which we can do for people who are suffering in our midst is to pray for them. I was listening yesterday to a podcast of an interview of the Christian apologist William Lane Craig with regards to the terminal cancer of the late prominent atheist Christopher Hitchens who was then alive. William Lane Craig was talking about how there were actually many Christians who were praying for a miracle healing for Christopher Hitchens, and also for his conversion. Espousing the usual naturalist world-view of atheism, Christopher Hitchens criticized the faith of the religious in miracle healing as superstition and advocated seeing the doctor as the way to dealing with illnesses. Ironically, the doctor that Christopher Hitchens was seeing for his illness was the eminent genticist-physicist, Francis Collins,who was an evangelical Christian. Francis Collins, perhaps being respectful to the beliefs of Christopher Hitchens, said that he would hope not for a miracle healing for Christopher Hitchens, but a medical miracle. This of course, as pointed out by William Lane Craig, did not disavow the role of the supernatural in healing because a miracle is implicitly connotative of the role of supernatural powers. William Lane Craig surmised that the correct expression that Francis Collins was trying to convey was a medical breakthrough. Nevertheless, he said this did not discount the possibility of God being instrumental to helping the doctors find a medical breakthrough to treat the illness. God can intervene to help cure an illness by either miracle healing, a medical miracle, or empowering doctors to find a medical breakthrough. I found it insightful in what William Lane Craig said about praying for illness. He said that sometimes, we should be praying for the spiritual fortitude of the person in affliction instead of a cure, that he or she would not lose faith in God. God has a role too in maintaining the spiritual well-being of a believer in his or her affliction.