DIFFICULTY SHOULD REFINE US
Difficulty should refine us.
It should make us kinder and more forgiving.
Our pain should teach us concern for the pain of others.
That’s how most people look at it. That’s what wise people realize. When you have a hard time, it is wasted if you do not turn it to good. It is nothing but suffering.
But our trials should be our teachers, and our agonies should lift us.
And most commonly, when someone has gone through personal difficulty, when there has been sadness and failure, when misfortune and sorrow have come into life, often there is an increased sensitivity to others. Having walked through fire, and knowing first hand its agonies, you feel for others when it comes their turn to walk through fire.
Painful experience teaches empathy.
And so a mother who has lost a child may be best prepared to comfort another mother passing through that same vale of tears. Someone who has known unemployment has insight that can help encourage someone else out of work.
Most of us in our lives will encounter seasons of pain and sorrow. It may come by happenstance, it may come by our own poor choices. It may come from crime or death or in a court of law.
But it most likely will come.
If we are wise, and faithful, we can allow it to better us. We can allow it to draw us closer to God, and to the values and understandings that have true worth. And maybe someday, from the perspective of the eternities, we will look back with tears of gratitude on the days we shed tears of sorrow.
But even in this life, the refinement of tribulation is real. Oft times, elderly people are wiser and more compassionate, in part because life has knocked them around and taught them what really matters. And what really matters in the affairs of men might best have been captured in the commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Further, trials humble us. They strip us of pretense and position, and leave us as what we truly are – frightened children making our way through life the best we can. When we realize that in ourselves, we are in a better position to recognize it in others, and have compassion for them.
Difficulty should refine us.
But it doesn’t always. Some people fail the test of their trials, they pay the price of pain but do not claim the prize of wisdom.
I heard of such a man the other day.
You would recognize his name. It has been written in this column.
After rising to relative prominence, he fell. He broke the law and dishonored himself and he entered a season of trial and pain.
But life gave him a second chance, a chance he probably deserved. And three months ago he became the boss at a certain place. From the start he seems to have taken a disliking to a certain subordinate, and last week he fired her. And the other day she spoke to me with tears in her eyes as she contemplated her own season of trial and pain.
Was it an accidental cruelty, or a purposeful hurt, the result of inadvertent ineptitude or arrogant spite?
The person on the receiving end thought it was the latter, but it really doesn’t matter. When you step on an ant, it doesn’t matter why, the ant is still dead. You just hope that life teaches you to watch where you step.
And that didn’t happen.
A man who knows the pain of loss, willfully and undeservedly inflicted it on another.
And that’s the greater sin.
Because if you know the sting of pain, and you then inflict it on another, you do so with full knowledge of the evil of your act. In that case, adversity hasn’t taught compassion, it has taught cruelty. You are not a better man, you are worse. You have not been bettered, you have been embittered.
And that’s too bad.
For the woman who was fired and for the organization the man still leads, but most substantively for the man himself, and his family. She will find another job, but he may have squandered his chance to find another heart. Ultimately, the evil we do we do to ourselves. Ultimately, the darkness of our hearts blinds only ourselves.
We can hurt many others along the way, but the doom we spread is only our own.
I feel sorry for this man, but I also feel anger. He was forgiven and trusted, and then turned around to administer spite and vengeance to another. It’s like the man in the Bible, who was forgiven a massive debt by his master, but himself sold a family into slavery to recover a tiny amount owed him.
He failed, but we needn’t.
We should recognize, even through tears, that the hard days can be the best days. If we meet adversity with patience and faith, if we bear up under it without collapsing into self-pity and bitterness, we can be better people. We can become more godly people.
We can become better friends to those who struggle, and a better examples to those we know. We can do what we came here to do.
Difficulty should refine us.
And it will, if we let it.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2010
