I welcome my pain and suffering with gratitude
In which Teófilo reflects about the meaning of his early childhood pain and his gratitude for it.
Though my suffering and pain were blistering and very much my own, I reckon it's little compared to others'. This recognition does not diminish my pain, but places it into a wider context.
Millions, if not billions, do not survive gestation. Some die within their mother's wombs due to illness or malformation. Others die due to accident or gross neglect, say from a car accident or drug abuse. Others die because their desperate mothers abort them. Others are aborted because they were inconvenient, over 50 million in the US alone since 1973. Mom could've exercised her "right to choose" on me. Then, my asphyxiated, or burned, or cut-in-pieces carcass may have ended up in some landfill. Or liquefied and down the drain. I would have been unable to love anyone, or to contribute to the common good.
Of those who are born, many live in desperate poverty. They may die in infancy due to willful exposure, hunger, crime, or war. Others die from illness in their childhood or adolescence. Still others grow up to live a feral existence of dire survival with little education and even less hope.
I'm thankful Mom didn't abort me. I'm thankful she went against the opinion of those who say abortion leads to more fulfilled women. I thank God and her I didn't suffer from any major ailment or extreme neglect. Mom did clothe me, feed me, and watched out for my general welfare. She could've been much worse than what she was. I do thank her for all the good things she was still able to give me.
Suffering has made me a grateful man.
Like I’d said before, my suffering has led me to the love of my life. Without the specific suffering I underwent I wouldn't have met her. The sons I have now would never have been born. My potential for love may have remained unfulfilled and I could've grown up to be an unhappy man.
I have come to respect and even cherish my pain. My pain is part of who I am. It has had a part in making me. Without my pain I would've grown up a shallow person, indifferent to the suffering of others. Without my pain and suffering I would've lacked empathy and compassion for others.
I'm convinced that suffering has meaning. The meaning grows out from Love. Now, I don't presume to divine the meaning of suffering for others who've suffered more than me. I don't claim to know the meaning of their suffering beyond my own. Their suffering has meaning because we hold a common humanity. Our differences are only skin deep.
Suffering has meaning because nothing in the universe goes to waste. Consider the unlikelihood of any one us being here on this planet. Almost 13 billion years of change and evolution has led to unique men and women. We're unique and irrepetible. There's no one like us and will never be. Our rarity makes us invaluable.
If any one of my ancestors had died or failed to reproduce, I wouldn't be here. A single bad sea crossing from Europe, Africa, or South America may have doomed me. Not to speak of natural disasters, wars, epidemics, and the like: one ancestor dead and I wouldn't be here. Their own sufferings led to me and mine, to my own children.
Suffering proves to me that God exists though this "proof" is also a paradox. I'm convinced that God exists because I suffer. My suffering has meaning beyond what I can see. Suffering is somehow engraved in the very fabric of the cosmos. The cosmic meaning of suffering can only come from a supreme meaning-giver. Thus, God exists.
Moreover, on the Cross, God gave suffering and ultimate meaning by embracing it for the love of others. If that doesn’t give suffering a meaning then I don’t know what does.
I know these arguments aren’t going to make believers out of skeptics. I'm sure that an enterprising skeptic can show me the error in my arguments. Perhaps what I call "meaning" is but a series of still possible outcomes occurring in an otherwise chaotic universe. Still, a random series of events doesn't account for Love. Love does away with all randomness. Love also does away with fear and along with Truth, sets us free.
For that I’m thankful too.