Before the days of cherry-flavored additives, medicine used to taste bad. My mom used to give us the medicine in one spoon, and quickly with another spoon stick some sweetened condensed milk in our mouth to get that yucky taste out. I actually looked forward to the medicine to get the sweetened condensed milk! To this day, I associate sweetened condensed milk with bitter medicine.
Many circumstances in life are like medicine. It doesn’t taste good at the moment, but it turns out to be good for you. Working out, going to school, cleaning the toilet…painful but necessary and turns out for good.
I have come to realize that life is just that way. Trials in life tastes pretty bad. And since we believe that all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose, it makes sense that hard times will produce some good, some how. Having a clean toilet is worth the work of having to clean it (though some might argue that point).
While the principle is the same, needless to say, hard times in life are A LOT more difficult to endure than cleaning a dirty toilet.
Last Saturday a friend’s son, 22 years old, only one year older than my son, suddenly died of a virus infection that attacked his heart. Can you imagine the pain and the grief of the family?
Actually, I can. I had another son who died 19 years ago. I didn’t think I would live through it. The emotional pain was so intense that it felt like physical pain. My heart felt a crushing weight that I can’t even describe.
Nineteen years later, can I say that it all worked out for good? If I had a choice, I wouldn’t have chosen to have my son taken from me. It wouldn’t be true to say that I think it was worth the suffering for the good that it produced. I even question why Jesus had to suffer a gruesome death. Why couldn’t he die an easier death and still produce salvation for us? But somehow in God’s economy, there is something about pain and suffering that works towards a purpose that couldn’t be accomplish any other way.
Maybe it’s like running a marathon. Running a 5K gives you a certain amount of satisfaction. But running a 10K, though it’s harder, gives you a greater satisfaction. It’s a law of human nature that is set into our system that just works that way.
So I’ve taken the view now that when things don’t go my way, there is no reason to believe that it’s not good. It’s not a psychological crutch or an excuse for God to explain why people suffer.
It’s just a reality of life.