Ever get the feeling that someone up there is trying to tell you something? I started Lincoln's Melancholy and now for class I have been reading Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning. Perhaps two books on suffering and loss of meaning may seem far from providential but it's really clicking with me. Not only on a theoretical level, although "pathology" seems to be less pathological now, but also on a personal level.
How do we find meaning when we "suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous forune"? Is it possible to be positively transformed by negative experiences? I have swung back and forth on the issue, not wanting to undermine the terrible pain that we all can endure. But hearing that a survivor of the Holocaust can see meaning in his sufferings may mean that perhaps I'm just too afraid of moving on to realize how much I have been changed for the good by my period of depression as an emerging adolescent.
The Bible says that trials develop perseverance and perseverance, character and character, hope (Romans 5:3,4). But sometimes those on the outside lack the awareness that trials would not really be trials if we saw their meaning immediately. We may believe that which does not kill us, only makes us stronger; but, in the midst, suffering is suffering. But the other side of the coin is a negative pessimism that is convinced that our suffering really was in vain, all in the hopes of glorifying ourselves. But I must do neither. I must be honest about the suffering that took place (by neither amplifying it nor diminishing it) and the character development it has achieved.
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