You will experience hardship throughout your life.
It is tempting to think of hardship as either unfair, or a
punishment for something you have done wrong. Clearly, many of life’s hardships
are the result of things we have said or done. Yet such hardships seem better
characterized not as punishments, but as consequences that follow from our
actions: if you throw a rock in the air it will fall down, perhaps on your
head; if you yell at a friend, he may not seem very friendly for some time. If
you pay attention, these will be learning experiences.
But sometimes hardship comes out of the blue and it seems
clear you have done nothing to bring it upon yourself. Someone hits your
legally parked car; it rains on a day that was supposed to be sunny, leaving
you drenched; your boss is in a rotten mood, which he shares with you.…
Seemingly random difficulties come into your life, sometimes hitting you all at
once, and it can be very hard to take—and it seems unfair. As random and unfair
as these may seem, I believe that they may be neither, and that they too can be
for your good.
Consider a child getting a shot in the doctor’s office. I
can picture this scene with my own children so well. The one that stands out is
the horror on my one-year-old daughter’s face as the nurse came at her with the
second needle in one visit. To my daughter, this experience was pure pain, with
no understanding that there was a good reason for it. She looked at her mother
and me to see whether we were really going to let this happen, and then, as if
to ask whether this was really ok. Our looks of support, but sympathy, left her
confused and perhaps a little mad, but ultimately bravely accepting—she trusted
us enough to somehow know that the apparently senseless pain of the shot must
be for her own good. And it was.
So too, it seems to me possible that hardship in life is
there for good, even if we cannot perceive it at the time—and sometimes not
even later. Hardship allows us to empathize. Hardship helps us remember the
lessons experience teaches us. Hardship can expose necessity, which is the
“mother of invention.”
As adults, we often take hardship upon ourselves when we
know we need it—giving up bad habits, diets, the “no pain, no gain” of
exercise, and, yes, even shots.
Many other hardships seem senseless at the time, but, if we
watch for it, we may come to understand their value. Such a situation is
described by Corrie ten Boom in her book, The
Hiding Place. Taken to a Nazi concentration camp for hiding Jews, Corrie
and her sister, Betsy, have somehow smuggled a Bible into their barracks and
are trying to run Bible studies and prayer sessions for their inmates, but fear
reprisal by the always vigilant prison guards. One night during a prayer, Betsy
suggests that they thank God for the lice covering their bodies. Corrie
protests, but Betsy insists that they should thank God for all things, and so they
pray, “God bless the lice.” As time goes on, they recognize that the guards
never seem to enter the barracks in the evening, leaving them free to worship.
Eventually they discover that the guards are avoiding contact with the
prisoners for fear of getting lice themselves, at which point they both pray
with fervor, “God bless the lice!”
And then there are hardships that we will never understand, sometimes so atrocious that it is impossible to believe they can be good in any way—and we are left guessing as to the reason, if we are so motivated. Such was the situation in which Abraham Lincoln found himself toward the end of the Civil War when he wrote in a letter to newspaper editor Albert Hodges,
I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation’s condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.
And then, in his second inaugural speech,
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
We will never know all. Yet, if our faith is strong, as the “needle” approaches we can trust that this too is for good. With faith, we can see adversity as an opportunity to prepare ourselves for whatever comes next, or to see it as protecting us from something worse. And, with faith, we too can pray with all of our hearts, “God bless the lice.”
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