You know, the cynics are wrong.
Well, maybe not all the cynics. For instance, people who are cynical about the Kardashians’ effect on good taste and women’s mental health are right. But there’s a broader class of cynic out there — the cynic who says that pain is the most real thing we ever experience, and because pain is so much more excruciating than peace is comforting, it’s better to stop living or even to never have lived at all.
They measure life’s worth on a scale. On one side, they heap life’s pain, and on the other, they heap life’s comforts, joys, and happinesses. (We might call those things “peace” for shorthand.)
In their calculus, if the intensity of pain outweighs the comfort of peace, life simply wasn’t ever worth living.
If you’ve lived through the lingering cancer death of a parent or the unexpected suicide of your child, you know what those cynics mean. In those moments — and in later memories of those moments — what they say seems so true. The pain collapses the side of the scale it’s heaped onto.
That pain can have the depth and pull of a supermassive black hole, devouring dust and dirt and planets and stars and whole solar systems; and it seems that no peace, no comfort, could ever outweigh it.
Against pain like that, even the happiest memories aren’t much of a match. And over time, as you feel like the searing flames have died down to embers covered over with a thin layer of dust, all it takes is a fleeting thought, and those flames flicker back to life … and burn.
So is the jaded Wesley in “The Princess Bride” right? Is it true that “life is pain, Highness — anyone who says differently is selling something”? And if pain can be so much more powerful than peace, is it better to have never lived?
For the answer, let’s look back to Horatio Spafford, a man who lost much of his wealth in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Soon after that, he sent his wife and four daughters ahead of him on a ship to Europe. Their ship sank in the cold Atlantic Ocean. Their daughters were all lost.
Days later, Spafford got a two-word telegram from his wife: “Saved alone.”
As those two words registered, he probably felt enough pain to outweigh by triple all the joys he would ever have. There was just more pain than anything else. The needle on the pain scale was buried with such force that it broke off. But he didn’t allow the pain to erase or annihilate him.
Spafford set sail to meet his wife, and as he neared the area where his daughters lay entombed at the bottom of the ocean, he penned the words that would become one of the most famous hymns ever written.
“It Is Well With My Soul” has brought comfort to countless people, Christians and non-Christians alike, who have suffered incredible loss. In fact, I daresay the hymn has brought not just comfort, but also great joy and even at times that flirting felicity we foolishly chase called happiness.
It has been estimated that the hymn, written in 1873, has spilled out of up to 40 million funeral services in the 150 years since Spafford penned it. The hymn’s hopeful, comforting, and even joyful lyrics have been heard by up to 1.5 billion unique people.
Let’s put that in perspective. If we were to line up those 1.5 billion people shoulder to shoulder, they would stretch around the world more than 20 times. And I’d suggest that the majority of those people received at least some comfort, if not great comfort and healing, thanks to Spafford’s perseverance.
Let’s go back, then, to our scale that measures pain.
Measuring the pain one person has in his entire life versus the peace he has over his entire life is a losing game. Pain is too strong, and an individual life is too short.
Horatio Spafford lost his four daughters in one day. But that wasn’t the last day. He went on to bring peace and comfort to literally billions over the next 150 years.
You see, while Spafford’s pain spanned his single life, the good he did spanned billions of lives. (And by the way, God also helped heal his pain during his lifetime.)
We shouldn’t measure pain and peace over our single lifetimes. We have to measure across our lifetimes and into those of everyone else our lives impact, directly and indirectly.
Think about Mordecai Ham, the man who led Billy Graham to Christ. Because of what Ham did, Graham then led more than 2 million people to Jesus at his crusades.
When you start taking into account TV and radio listeners and now internet listeners, you can push the estimate as high as 15 million people. And those millions will lead millions and then billions more to Jesus — all from one man winning one other man to Jesus.
Ham’s actions during a single life ended up outliving him by generations and millions of other lives.
Even the worst, most painful life can shoot the world through with goodness, hope, and joy. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a political prisoner in the Soviet Union, treated brutally and tortured. He was a man of pain whom many of us would think had virtually no chance to do anything that would reverberate into the future. After all, what makes it past concrete communist prison walls?
Solzhenitsyn, however, would persevere and go on to write “The Gulag Archipelago,” a book that helped bring freedom to millions and unlock the doors of the largest prison house of nations in history.
That’s why the cynics are wrong. No life has to be more pain than peace. Not a single one.
The pain may be frontloaded so that we experience it all well before the good we have sown does much sprouting, but isn’t that the nature of life? Farmers don’t sow a field with backbreaking pain, and when they don’t see little green sprouts shooting up the next day think, “What a waste — my back is killing me, and I’ve got nothing to show for it.”
No, they see the season through, till those backbreaking months of work yield a crop that feeds the farmer and his neighbors through the winter.
That’s what we have to do. We plant while we’re alive. We may begin to harvest some before we die, but the harvest will continue after … if we planted and planted well.
So what does any of this matter on a daily basis? Life still hurts, right? Yep, I’m right there with you. I’ve got one of the bad ones — one of the black holes in my past.
But pain be damned, there is absolutely nothing preventing each of us from beginning to sow those little seeds that will grow and be harvested as peace and comfort after we’re long gone.
The best seed, of course, is to share the Gospel. Each soul is of infinite worth because the infinite God of the universe loves each soul. And those who know Jesus are destined for an eternity of joy. If you want something to crush the weight of pain in the long run, that’s it.
But we can and should sow additional things, and those come naturally to the Spirit-filled Christian, by the way. Being kind to someone, comforting another person, helping the poor with something more than your money — all of those things set off reverberations.
Sacrificing yourself. Taking little pieces of yourself and planting them with others, knowing that those sacrifices will bear fruit according to the immutable laws of the harvest: You harvest what you sow, more than you sow, and later than you sow.
Next time the darkness comes, and you think “It would be better to have never been,” remember that we can’t judge the crop 24 hours after we planted it. It takes lots of time — more time than any of us has in this world.
In the meantime, do not — do not — deprive future generations of the good God meant for you to bring to them. Sow the seeds. Cultivate good, true, wholesome things that will continue to ring even into eternity and outweigh any pain that came during our short lives on this earth.
As the Apostle Paul said, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed.” Don’t give up.
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