After I returned from the war in Vietnam, I found myself in Fort Meade, Maryland, where it had been determined that I would serve out the final two months of my two-year Army commitment. In charge of my new unit was a young second lieutenant (I’ll call him Winky), and for whatever reason, one day Winky invited me to join his Bible study group.
“I’m afraid you’re talking to the wrong person,” I said as politely as I could.
“But why not come just once?” he asked me.
“Let’s just say that me and God are not on real good terms right now,” I answered.
“I’m afraid the war in Vietnam has done that to a lot of returning soldiers,” he said. “But come and give it a try anyway, what do you have to lose?”
One thing led to another, and before I knew it, we were sitting next to each other on a park bench trying to make some sense out of all the human suffering going on in the world in general, and Vietnam in particular. At the time, I didn’t know the man from Adam, but I was immediately struck by how kind and compassionate he was. And since kindness is always in short supply in this world, I decided to hear him out.
“Have you ever read the Bible?” was one of the first questions he asked me.
“Parts of it,” I said.
“Well,” he explained, “one of the major themes in the Bible is human suffering. It has been with us forever, and it always will be.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“This is just my opinion,” he assured me, “but I think part of it has to do with the fact that suffering is one of the few things which can make us more compassionate, more sensitive, more charitable, and more capable of loving others. In other words, it makes us more God-like, and in my way of thinking, more acceptable in the presence of God.”
“You mean when a person goes to heaven?” I asked.
“Right, and the sooner we can pick-up the qualities which suffering can actually help give us, the sooner we can get off this earth and move on to bigger and better things.”
“So,” I said, trying to make some sense out of what he was telling me, “You’re saying that the guys who skate through life, the people who don’t do much suffering, the ones who don’t have to die young in a stupid war, the ones who seem to live forever without contributing much of anything to anyone, those aren’t actually the lucky ones?”
“Exactly. In fact, if you aren’t suffering from time to time in this world, and if you can’t see and feel all the suffering which is going on all around you, then you are probably living a pretty meaningless life.”
I’m afraid I never did spend much time attending the second lieutenant’s Bible study classes, but I’ve always been thankful for our little talk on that cold, clear winter night when I was stuck on the wrong coast playing civilian soldier. The understanding that suffering can have an upside if we insist on it has often helped me try to put the unimaginable into a proper perspective that I can better grasp and even pretend to understand.
I think C. S. Lewis may have said it best when he wrote: “Something must drive us out of our own self and into the world of others – and that something is suffering.” Or, as Anthony Hopkins simply said in the last line of the movie “Shadowlands” (which is about the life of C. S. Lewis), “Pain is part of the happiness – that’s the deal.”