Pain and suffering in the Bible. Does pain and suffering disprove God?
The story in the Bible has brought us into a garden. The first two humans have been placed inside a garden named, Eden.
My whole life I imagined how beautiful this garden must have been. If scenes from Jurassic Park & Avatar could have a baby, thats how I pictured Eden.
Though I am sure that the garden was visually stunning in ever way, what makes the garden so spectacular, and the fact that mankind was placed inside it so important to the story is this...THE GARDEN WAS PERFECT.
I DON'T MEAN "PERFECT" LIKE SOME HIPPIE-DIPPY UTOPIA.
I mean "perfect" as in, no pain, no suffering, no sickness, no war, no disease, no hunger, no death.
I'm sure everybody has a different vision for what a perfect world might look like, but I believe with full sincerity, that if we stop and think for a moment, this garden represents a place that each and every single one of us has longed for. All of us have an innate sense that we want to be there, no matter what you believe about the Bible's story.
YOU MISS THIS GARDEN.
To explain why I believe that, we need to talk about pain for a second.
Our physical pain communicates a truth. Physical pain lets us know that something is wrong. The message that physical pain tells us is that something isn't working the way that it's supposed to. Yes, physical pain communicates "ouch!", but the message behind "ouch" is that something is not working as it is intended to. This is true of a broken finger, or an upset stomach.
Most of us know this to be true of physical pain, but we don't apply the same logic to emotional pain. When we feel emotional pain we often focus on the feeling of "ouch" without realizing that, just like physical pain, emotional pain is pointing to something bigger.
EMOTIONAL PAIN IS OUR BODY ACHING FOR SOMETHING MORE, SOMETHING DEEPER, SOMETHING LIKE THIS GARDEN.
The day I stood in a hospital room and held my Moms hand as she took her last breath. I wasn't hurting for the sake of hurting. I wasn't simply hurting because thats just what you do in that moment. My heart was reeling, and I hated it because my body was screaming out, "THIS IS WRONG!"
That moment felt foreign, and it felt wrong, because it is. My body didn't cry out and wish it never had to feel those emotions because it was a pipe dream, rather, it knew I was never designed to experience that pain. The longing I had for something more, something different, wasn't just emotional pain--it was homesickness.
"IF WE FIND OURSELVES WITH A DESIRE THAT NOTHING IN THIS WORLD CAN SATISFY, THE MOST PROBABLE EXPLANATION IS THAT WE WERE MADE FOR ANOTHER WORLD."
-C.S.LEWIS
Whether you've realized it before or not, every single one of us has hungered for the lifestyle that is represented in the garden. Any moment where you've been hurting emotionally, wishing you didn't have to feel this way, you've been missing this garden.
We never want a perfect world more than when we are aching. This story begins by telling us that the place our hearts have longed for, we were created for that.
The beginning of this story just got even more amazing. But it won't stay this way for very long.
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