Suffering Tattles
A man walks a lonely road.
He comes from a country much like our own. But it collapses, and he flees. He wanders for a long time before he stumbles upon a small town glowing in the dusk. Lights hang across balconies. Music spills into the streets. The smell of roasted meat and sweet tobacco drifts through the air.
A celebration? he thinks.
He runs toward it.
They welcome him with open arms. A feast is set before him. The richest drink he has ever tasted. A pipe already packed and lit. Laughter rings from every doorway.
What a place, he thinks.
But the longer he stays, the stranger things become.
The people always smile. Not warm smiles, but fixed ones. Plastic and unmoving, stretched so wide his own jaw begins to ache. He rubs his face without thinking.
Their jokes are dark. Their songs are catchy, yet often about murder in the night and the mutilation of the innocent. The crowd laughs at strange moments.
They prepare a place for him to sleep. Yet they always keep him busy, steering him away from one side of town. From a quarter where no laughter drifts. Where a sour smell rides the wind.
There is something wrong here.
He cannot yet name it, but he feels it.
Suffering works like that.
The world feels ordinary, even beautiful, until cancer comes knocking. Until a mother buries a child. Until a body begins to betray itself.
And then something in us revolts.
The naturalist can say suffering is a byproduct of evolution. A malfunction of cells. A neurological event. In one sense that may be true.
But that is not how suffering feels.
It does not feel like inconvenience.
It feels like intrusion.
It feels like something that does not belong.
We do not merely dislike it. We protest it.
When a dog starves to death, when a snake devours a mouse, when dementia erases a grandmother’s memory, we do not shrug and say, that is biology.
We say, that should not be.
That word should is doing enormous work.
Suffering does not merely hurt.
It accuses.
It whispers that something is wrong with how this city is being run.
This is where the problem of evil is often framed.
If God is good, why does He allow suffering?
But notice something strange. The objection already assumes suffering is bad. Not merely unpleasant, but wrong.
If suffering is truly wrong in an objective sense, then reality must contain more than particles colliding in indifferent space.
Molecules decay. Cells malfunction. Stars explode.
But decay does not explain tragedy. Chemistry does not generate moral protest. Atoms do not produce ought.
We experience suffering as objectively wrong.
If that experience is trustworthy, then the universe contains a moral structure deeper than physics. Moral structure suggests a moral source. Not an abstract law floating in space, but something personal enough to bind us, accuse us, and move us.
The problem of evil does not disprove God so easily.
In a strange way, it may point toward Him.
For how can suffering be wrong in any ultimate sense unless goodness is real?
And how can goodness be real unless it is grounded in something more than preference?
But Christianity does not stop there.
It does not merely argue that God exists because suffering feels wrong.
It makes a far stranger claim.
It says the Author stepped into His own story.
It says the One who wrote the moral law allowed Himself to be crushed by injustice. The Judge stood in the dock. The Creator entered decay.
The Cross is not an abstract answer to suffering.
It is God inside of it.
Christianity does not say suffering is an illusion. Nor does it pretend it is easy. It says suffering is so serious, so real, that God Himself bore it.
The resurrection declares something even bolder. Suffering does not get the final word.
Why does suffering feel so strange?
Why does it shock us, even though we see it every day?
Perhaps because we were made for a world without it.
If the world was made good, it makes sense that we long for goodness.
If the world is broken, it makes sense that this one feels dislocated.
If our hearts break at suffering, it makes sense that our Creator’s heart might break too.
Suffering tattles on something.
It tattles on a goodness we dimly remember.
It tattles on a Judge we cannot quite escape.
And perhaps it tattles on a God who did not remain distant from our pain, but entered it and promises to undo it.
I see as a man, i learn as a man. I understand as a man. I see wrong, I see pain, I feel pain too. I understand as a man. But there is a part of me that feels beyond what I see. Thank you for reminding me to pay attention.
I have wrestled with suffering and things that don’t make sense. Sometimes, it is just overwhelming. I ha ultimately concluded that if Christ suffered, I should welcome suffering because it refines me. Easy to think in my head, difficult to put into practice. Thank you for this!