It's All Performance Art 14

Throughout my twenties and thirties and into my forties I worked in care giving, which included palliative care, and in the last fifteen years, I have worked with people suffering from mental illness. I am not going into details here because I still want to protect the privacy of the people I was helping to take care of. I have learnt much about the impact of affliction and suffering on the human soul, and while it has sometimes been horrific and ugly, I have also been amazed at the absolute light that has shone through the sufferings of some of my patients and clients. There are those who have raged against their torment until their last dying breath, and there are others who have bravely and serenely accepted what was happening to them and where they were going. The kind of disempowerment that happens through this kind of suffering is universal, but the way it is accepted and experienced is something very individual. I have learned, I think, to be a bit braver in the face of suffering, and more confident and trusting for the best when powerless, and that joy can still spring up in some of the darkest and most hideous places. I have learned that God is so real that, instead of protecting us from suffering and harm, makes himself all the more real to us in its midst, as Jesus suffering with us. This is still a difficult conversation to have with people who demand to know how a God of love and compassion could permit so much suffering in this world. Such people really don't want to know God to begin with, but simply to satisfy themselves that their excuses for not believing are airtight. I often wonder if this could be because a lot of people instinctively sense that believing in God is not simply an intellectual position, but the response to the divine call on our hearts, and that this is going to be life-changing. Which isn't to say that we will ever be perfect, and really those who resist God will micro-scrutinize those of us who do believe and will take any apparent flaw or personal failing in us, or whatever does not live up to their exacting and politically correct standards, and scream "Hypocrites!" So be it. They do not want God to exist, so why even try to disabuse them of their unbelief? But when we are touched by his presence and love in the midst of the darkest places, this has a redemptive quality that influences and transforms for us the suffering that we are enduring, and somehow the darkest night is transformed into a time of rest and repose that will herald the dawning of the coming light. My life was not made easier for becoming a Christian, rather, that was when a lot of my troubles began. But the joy and peace springing from the love of God made real in our hearts and lives is the redemptive compensation for all that suffering, and only those who have tasted to see that God is good are going to know this. The rest of you are just going to have to find out.