Some thoughts on misery and faith

Warning: this post doesn't claim to solve any mysteries or make any grand claims. I hope it doesn't sound preachy. I only wanted to venture some insights on what is for some a very difficult, painful topic.

I have recently been reflecting on misery. I’m not talking about having a rough day, or a string of bad luck, here. I mean real misery – the kind that doesn’t go away, that doggedly follows you all your life; the kind of misery that makes you want to scream out, “Why am I like this?! What possible purpose could this serve?!” I’m talking about the kind of misery and the kind of trials that you’re dead sure are far worse than what most people go through, and that are so huge and insurmountable that they make you want to just give up.

Let me restate the principle question that got my wheels turning: What possible purpose could such immovable, unconquerable, overwhelming trials serve? This is, in my humble opinion, one of the most difficult questions of life. And I don’t pretend to have the answer, though many have been offered over the years, and I am sure there is some truth to most of them.

Still, they always seem a little insufficient. I mean, if we’re talking about questions like: why do people have to suffer? Or: why isn’t the world perfect? Or: what is the role of trials in life? Then yeah, most standard answers are usually sufficient and can provide enough context and perspective to help people deal with day-to-day hardships, or even a hard week or month or year. But what we’re dealing with here are the types of problems that probably won’t go away for the duration of one’s mortal experience. Someone who longs to find a life companion but who spends his or her entire life single and lonely; those who suffered abuse in childhood and must live with the scars for the rest of their life; those who feel endlessly confused or conflicted about their gender or sexual orientation; someone who cannot, no matter how hard he or she tries, overcome or change a debilitating personality trait or habit; those who suffer from severe, chronic depression; and the list goes on.

These trials are different in that they can severly impair one’s ability to find joy and happiness in life; and also in their longevity – most of them cannot be banished forever, and can only be moderated with the greatest of effort and personal exertion. They’re the kinds of problems that you do battle with every single day, and never feel like you’re making progress. They aren’t accurately described as a “rainy day”, or month, or year. They are the thorns in our sides that God sees fit, in some wisdom privy only to himself, not to remove.

It’s really hard to know why these kinds of trials, and the misery they inflict, are “allowed” in life. It seems they are simply too hard, too hurtful, too impairing, too unfair to be inflicted on anyone, no matter how you spin it. I don’t intend in this post to offer the magic response that will make everyone feel better, heave a big sigh, and say, “Ah, so that’s why!” Instead, I only want to offer an insight (or a series of them) that I’ve had recently that shed further light on the issue for me, that led me to a greater (if still very incomplete) understanding.

Through interactions and conversations with several friends over the past few months, I’ve come to recognize – slowly – that the key principles underlying this mystery are probably agency, grace, and faith – in order of importance. By agency I mean the freedom God grants us to choose what kind of life we will lead, and how we will act (or react) to what life throws at us. By grace, I mean the divine strength and enabling power that comes from Jesus Christ by virtue of his atonement in the garden of Gethsemane and on the cross. And by faith, I mean the active choice to believe in God, despite everything.

Agency is one of the fundamental principles on which this life operates. It sets us apart as individuals, in that we are – thanks to agency – the ultimate masters of our souls. On this board of directors there is only one member, who also happens to be the CEO. Agency gives us the freedom to decide who we are and who we want to become.

But it also sets limits on the ways and the extent to which God can intervene in our lives. This is because agency (the freedom and ability to choose between opposing options) is essential if we want to learn and grow. If our heavenly Father wants us to mature, he has to give us the necessary space – even if it makes us feel alone at times.

This conundrum isn’t unique to God: every parent faces it, in fact. Think of a parent with a toddler who is learning to walk. At first, the child’s father holds her hand, helping her gain a sense of balance and preventing her from falling. But there comes a time when the father has to let go and allow his daughter the space to try it on her own. If he doesn’t, she will always rely on him and never learn. But if he lets go, she is bound to fall and tears are inevitable. It is easy to see the fear, frustration, discouragement on the face of a toddler after a couple of falls.

A casual observer might characterize the father as uncaring, since he let his daughter fall and cry when it was clearly within his power to prevent it from happening. Obviously, he allowed his daughter to suffer. But in reality, the father’s helping hand was limiting her agency; she needed the freedom and space to try to walk on her own.

So then, if this analogy is appropriate, are we destined to go through life alone? No. Because the same principle that sets us on our own and makes us feel alone also provides the key to gaining God’s grace: his help, strength, and love. Again, it is agency – through the medium of faith.

And again, the analogy to the child learning to walk is instuctive: while the father must eventually let go and give his daughter space to learn (and fall) on her own two feet, he is never far away. In fact, he is as close as he can be without interfering with his daughter’s growth and impairing her ability to mature. And, if she looks to him and trusts him and listens to his encouragement, he can become an enormous source of strength and support, enabling her to get through this (from her perspective, at least) trying experience. And he does this without diminishing her agency.

The father’s help, support, and encouragement are analogous to God’s grace, except that the latter is infinite; it is an endowment that Jesus gained when he chose (again, agency at work) to suffer for us and in our place in Gethsemane and on the cross.

So why doesn’t he grant us infinite strength to vanquish our demons? Because receiving grace is conditioned on our asking for it, and God will never violate our agency. In other words, God cannot intervene in our lives until we invite him to do so. This requires we use our agency – asking him to help us is a conscious act – but in a specific way. We have to choose to believe in God, to trust that he will hear our prayers and answer them, and come to our aid when we most need him – even when he won’t give us proof of his existence and it’s sometimes hard to see his hand in our lives.

I guess what I’m trying to get at here, in a nutshell, is that trials – like them or not – force us to exercise faith. And exercising faith is an extremely important part of what life is about.

A word about faith here. I won’t try to delve deeply into the topic, as it’s worthy of volumes. But I want to point out something that often gets lost in our understanding of faith: it is an extremely active phenomenon, by its very nature. Exercising faith is very much that: it’s a workout. A spiritual workout. And often an emotional and mental (and sometimes physical) workout too. You don’t exercise faith simply by thinking – you have to act, and it requires a great deal of trust, diligence, determination, and – above all –  patience. Building faith is like building cardio-vascular endurance or muscle strength – it requires consistent effort, couple with the firm belief that what you’re doing will pay off, that it’s working.

Ironically, faith is what you most need when you feel like you have the least of it. When you’re at the end of your rope; when you can’t see much past the end of today; when you’ve just about lost all hope of ever being happy again, and the future has nothing in it worth living for; that is precisely when you need faith the most. The bright side is that you don’t need any faith to start building it. Just like building muscle strength, no one is so weak that they’re incapable of getting stronger. What you need, at first, is nothing more or less than a desire to believe. If that’s all you can muster, then act on it.

Again, faith is the key to accessing grace. And grace is the only thing that will get you through the kinds of trials I mentioned earlier.

So, to return to where I started: why are debilitating, insoluble, chronic, crushing trials and burdens allowed? And what purpose could they possibly serve? I don’t pretend to have a decisive answer. But one thing I know for sure: they provide us the opportunity (if we will choose to take it) to exercise faith and call on the grace of God constantly, daily, with everything we have.

This may not seem like a compelling reason, and it may not make you feel grateful to be dealing with what you’re facing. But at least consider this: developing that spiritual strength and maturity is crucial – now and in the future. It’s one of the major reasons we are here on Earth right now, instead of with God in heaven, where we were before. But that, of course, is a matter for a different post.