Pain and Sufferring

One of the hardest things that each person must deal with in life is watching people they care about suffer. It is a terrible fact of life that the world we live in is full suffering and pain. Personally, I hate it when I see someone who is in pain even though they believe they did the right thing. Sadly I watched this unfold before me tonight. I have a co-worker who is in emotional pain because she and her boy friend decided to not keep a child (pregnancy in her world). In essence, she bought in to the lie that a pregnancy is something that we can simply chose to abort and that it really isn't a human being that is to be cared for and nurtured. I am watching her suffer in virtual silence because people do not want to hear about how she gets sad every time she sees a baby or that she is hurting. The world has told her such a lie that now she feels like she must suffer in silence. Her boyfriend is in much the same place. He believes the lie even more than she does and because of that he does not even want to talk to her about the emotions that she is dealing with much less any that are probably impacting him. Meanwhile so many of my fellow believers are spending a great deal of energy and effort trying to convince other believers how right they are about some trivial issues.

While I can appreciate the need for these debates I do wonder sometimes if we put too much energy in to them and lose sight of the dead world that is all around us. We fail to see those people who have believed the great lie and now suffer in silence because they are too afraid to believe the truth that they now see deep down in their hearts. It is well past time for the church to rise up and see the world as it is and to get mixed up in the lives of the lost so that they no longer have to suffer alone. To be there to show them that there is another way. To stand-up and say that God loves them and that this world is full of sin and death and that if truly want to be free of that sin then there is only one way and that is Jesus.