Pain

Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God not protect us?

"If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both."

C.S. Lewis quotes this in his book, The Problem of Pain. I can't figure out the original source (there is no citation on this particular quote). But it is a question we have all asked ourselves. Why does God fail to intervene when we are doomed to pain, whether inflicted by ourselves, our environment, or others?

It is at times like this when you think, If God was good, he would have stopped this misery. He would have stepped in and saved that poor person (me or someone else) from such PAIN. That pain is too much. It is unfair for that pain to be allowed to exist. Maybe God is not so good after all, and doesn't love us enough to save us from pain. Maybe God is not omnipotent after all, and would like to intervene, but is stopped by His own impotence. Either way, you feel like God has lied to you. He cannot love us purely with full power to act if He allows such a pain to exist. You feel perhaps angry to have trusted that you would always be taken care of and protected, and yet you weren't. There is war, disease, death, senseless violence, and so many terrors in the world. You trust God to protect you, and yet the pain comes just the same, so God must have failed you, or (dare you even think it) maybe He's not there at all.

C.S. Lewis said this was once his exact reasoning for being an aethiest. (Can you believe C.S. Lewis was once an aethiest?)

A friend of a friend lost her husband when a drunk driver killed him in a car accident. Right after finding out her daughter has leukemia. She decided that God cannot exist if such painful things happen to her. She stopped going to church.

We believe: With God, all things are possible.

Right?

Does that complete lack of impossibility include the intrinsically impossible? Does it include a universe where man has free will and simultaneously is forced to only make choices that avoid pain to himself and others? Where nature has a set of unbendable laws, but yet God could bend them to save us from pain? Does it include a universe where you can have your cake and eat it too? That you physically get a piece of cake and then eat it, and yet still have that piece uneaten in your hand?

No. You cannot have your cake and eat it, too. God honors the rules of the universe. If he seems to bend or break those rules with "miracles" it is because we do not understand all the rules yet. But he obeys them. All of them. That is where his power lies, in obedience.

So maybe he could have created a universe and a set of rules where we would not be subject to such pain. Why didn't he just do that?

Here is what C.S. Lewis says on the matter:

"We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free will by his creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void."

I had a conversation with a guy in college once. He said he was tired of life being hard, of experiencing discomfort after discomfort (it was a fairly frustrating conversation because he seemed to be living a very comfortable lifestyle devoid of pain at the time). He wanted God to take care of all the pain, to just make sure he was always comfortable. I told him he wouldn't get to choose anything for himself this way, and he said that was fine. He just wanted to be babied by God.

Really, to any LDS readers out there, this idea should sound very familiar to you. A place where wrong actions are impossible, where pain is always avoided, and where freedom is void.

Pain, small and big, the kind of pain where your baby gets leukemia and your spouse is killed senselessly by a drunk driver, and all the pain bigger and smaller than that, these pains were never part of Satan's plan.

We signed up for pain. Every single one of us, at that crucial moment, chose to experience pain. Even the kind of pain that we can't handle, that brings us to our knees. The kind of pain we knew was impossible for us to deal with on our own.

I'm sure C.S. Lewis goes on to talk about what to do with all this pain, other than wallow in it. And I'm sure you all know the answer anyway. If you attend church regularly, it is hard to avoid the knowledge of what we do with pain. So I'll let this post simmer while I finish the book.

And I would like to echo C.S. Lewis' disclaimer at the beginning of his book. Just like he, I am only beginning to understand the mechanics of the problem. I do not in the least pretend to have had experienced a great level of pain, nor do I in the least pretend that I have managed my small portion of pain thus far with complete success. But I know which way I'm going with a little more clarity, and I am understand a little more what I am shooting for and why.