Tapping into Pain

I roll out of bed with a groan, deciding once again that 6:00--in the dark--is too early for any sane human. Grinding out my electric toothbrush, I sigh to the mirror about how tough it is that I have to brush my teeth more than the average person. Oh, yeah. I really need to charge up my phone and iPod this morning--they're almost dead. Maybe I won't get the paper this morning--it's cold out there and I don't really care about reading it. If my brother wants the comics badly enough, he'll get it himself. And hey, wonderful. The only oatmeal flavor left is banana--that stuff is disgusting. I guess I'll just have some bread. Yuk. Or maybe nothing. Anyway, I really need to get started on my history paper. My computer is taking a long time to boot up this morning. Come on, hurry up. Ah, here's my brother with the paper--hey, stop deconstructing the entertainment section! I want to read the movie reviews...Man, isn't life hard? As I turn away, the front page of the paper catches my eye. "Genocide Continues in Africa" or "Thousands Die in Iraq" or "Teen Murders Family". I slide the paper away and turn back to my computer screen. Can't it load any faster than this?

****

I hadn't looked at myself in this way, really, not until our pastor challanged us in his Sunday sermon. "We worry more about our investment portfolio than about the AIDS crisis. We get more upset about a ding in our car than about the genocide in Sudan." And so he continued. I returned home with a cold hesitation in my mind, a new way of reading the paper in the morning. Our world is so full of death and pain; it washes over us in waves every day, every hour. If we let each thing break our heart, we would be incapacitated with constant grief.

Occasionally, I have been stopped in my tracks by a sudden interaction with the pain in our world. The first time was when I was probably twelve or thirteen, and completely focused on myself and my own little world. I never read the paper, but one day when I was sitting at the table a picture of a child with only one arm caught my eye, and I started idly reading the related article. By the end of it, I was in shock. It had to do with the court testimonies of various villagers in some place I cannot even remember--as these people related the atrocities they had suffered at the hands of young radical militants. This was the first time something so awful had confronted me, and I went my way in stunned silence. Several weeks later, I was in the middle of some everyday task when I suddenly broke down crying, lost in the terrible pain of people I didn't even know.

Then I got older. I read the newspaper every day. My heart grew harder, and the sympathy hid itself away somewhere. Once I paused over a photograph of a little boy crying at his father's funeral. Another time over an article about an abused child who went on to shoot up a school. I caught glimpses of a pain greater that my everyday frustrations--something great and terrible, something that breaks even the heart of God. Once I tried to put my sudden, raw frustration into writing:

"The world weeps.
There is blood
There is sweat
There are tears
Smeared across faces
Stinging gritty eyes
Tearily void of innocence.
It isn't right.
Dreamers grow cynical.
Lovers are wounded.

The world weeps
Because its surface is scarred with
The unimaginable
The unexplainable."

So what can we do? Will we close ourselves away, making oatmeal flavors our greatest concern, pretending we cannot read those headlines? Will we descent into hopeless dispair?

My favorite band--Jars of Clay--once wrote a song called "Oh My God". It is a powerful, prayerful lament for all of the evil and pain in the world. For a long time, there was a line of this song I couldn't figure out.

"Oh my God, can I complain?
Take away my firm belief,
And graft my soul upon your grief."

Why, I wondered, would I want to pray for God to take away my firm belief? I think I know now. I have a firm belief. I go to church and sit at home and believe firmly in God and truth. And yet I miss the heart of God. Of course God mourns for every agony in the world. His heart breaks. And to truly find the heart of God, I must be willing to tap into the agony, to feel the pain, to weep for the whole aching world.

Of course, there is hope. God will judge the evildoers and will bring the world to right. This cannot be forgotten. But as I write this, someone has died in agony somewhere. Satan has destroyed one of God's precious children. Pain wraps itself around our planet. We tear ourselves apart from the inside out. I cannot lock myself behind church doors. I cannot hide in the comforts of a loving home. I must let myself feel the same grief God does for every shock of pain. Alone, I am utterly selfish, as evidenced by the opening of this post. But I must be willing to feel the pain, to love the oppressed, to reach out my hands to something larger than myself.