Recent musings:
17 years ago, I heard these words with respect to parenting my child: “All this hardship is given to you because God knows you could can handle it. My life is easy because God knows I can’t handle any of what you are going through.”
For 17 years I have pondered this statement set, spoken by someone without much analytical prowess, spoken by one whose shell was thin, spoken by the person closest to me at the time. At the moment I heard these words, my mental state transitioned from belief to knowledge regarding at least two things about the beautiful world I found myself living in:
- Not all people have the ability to think well before speaking.
- All people speak before thinking at least once in their lives even if they possess the ability to think well before speaking.
While these statements appear to reside in the realm of the obvious, it is important to assess statements in light of a person’s particular abilities.
If a person does not possess the ability to think well before speaking, then their statements should never be taken as particularly thoughtful. Instead, their statements maybe accidentally true, but based on emotion, or untrue, but based on emotion, or true and based on something other than emotion, but never true and based on sound analysis prior to the utterance. In general, then, their statements should not immediately be trusted as conveying truth.
If, on the other hand, a person has the ability to think well before speaking, then a conversation about any proposed statement can be pursued and looked at every which way.
This brings me back to the original statement set proposed by my close friend 17 years ago, the statements I have agonized over and examined every which way ever since.
“All this hardship is given to you because God knows you could can it. My life is easy because God knows I can’t handle any of what you are going through.”
Immediately after hearing these statements, I causally believed them to be true, and the heaviness of those beliefs weighed on my shoulders for years after. I immediately wondered what Niagara Falls of trials were headed my way over the next possibly-many decades of my life, trials that I could do nothing about. This put me into a passive position with respect to my life, as well as the lives of my children. I have since come to believe that these statements, taken together, are false.
Packed into these statements, meant as a strange and estranging compliment of some sort, are the following assumptions:
- The events of the months 17+ years ago were hardships.
- God was purposefully giving me hardships.
- I am the sort of person who can endure hardships relatively unscathed.
- God withholds the mercy of an easy life from me.
- There is an amount of hardships that must necessarily be spilled upon the earth, and they are spilled upon those who can endure them simply because the can endure them.
1. Since that day, I would say that I have, indeed, endured a waterfall of events in life that many would consider to be hard. Indeed, I would agree that on a typical night, I fall into bed and consider that the day was hard. A Niagara Falls of Hardship? I would not say so. However, I believe many would consider what we have endured to be not only a Niagara Falls but the contents of all of Lake Erie dumped on our heads on a daily basis. I would say the difficulties we encounter are relatively mild when one considers and compares our lives to the lives of others. Dare I say “most others?”
2. Does God set out to dump hardships on a human being? My own beliefs about God lead me to believe that certainly He does at times. Job, of course, is the quintessential example of such dumpings. However, if one searches the Old Testament, or nearly any ancient text, one finds that hardships experienced by humankind are generally a logical consequence of human actions. The evidence simply does not support any sort of god hovering in the heavens with a bucket of troubles and a great need to dump them out on an unsuspecting victim. Moreover, if one examines the event of hardships in my life over the past 17 years, one would find that there is a human action or set of actions preceding the hardship, and the hardship is a logical consequence of that action or set of actions. Could God have prevented any one of the hardships if He choose? Yes. However, God’s ability to prevent a hardship and refraining to do so does not imply that God, then, purposefully gives hardships.
3. Am I the sort of person who can endure hardships relatively unscathed? No. Humans are not that sort of creature. The nature of souls strictly implies that harm from hardship causes change. One’s handling of one’s soul and care to mind how one changes has a direct effect on whether that change results in perseverance or a metaphysically fractured soul. It is the scathing that allows one’s to grow or diminish.
4. Has God withheld the mercy of an easy life from me? Decidedly no. To state otherwise would be to ignore the physical and spiritual luxuries that pad the landing of my soul as it is battered by life’s events.
5. Finally, is there is an amount of hardships that must necessarily be spilled upon the earth, and they are spilled upon those who can endure them simply because the can endure them? Again, the evidence does not generally support an answer in the affirmative. While there are some who believe there is a balance of good an evil that must be maintained, the ontological statuses of hardships and evil are not necessarily related. Hardships belong in an entirely different conversation than evil.* Instead, the evidence overwhelmingly supports the belief that human action can and does result in various measures of hardship on those around and proceeding from the actor or actors. The same can be said of natural events, such as mudslides, tsunamis, volcanoes, etc.
Why is any of this important? Because when one chooses to take on the consequences of another’s actions, one must expect that the seriousness of any consequences must mirror the seriousness of the initial action. No person can peer down the timeline such that one has full disclosure as to the consequences one will encounter. Instead, one must suspect that one’s own actions can alter the course of the potential consequences of the original actions. Evidence from daily life supports this suspicion such that the suspicion becomes a strong belief over time. Certainly, any parent who has caught their child diving head-first towards a concrete slab (or any other surface) after that child has acted upon the decision to jump from an unstable or high surface knows that one’s actions can alter the consequences of the actions of others.
I have written a lot about adoption and how life as an adoptive family can be drastically different from family life of those with only biological children. There are many reasons for that difference which I will not go into now. Each adoptive parent has to continually come to terms with the unique challenges they face with respect to each of their adopted children each day. Understanding that I am not somehow a dumping ground for God’s leftover hardships has been soul-changing over the past few years and has made me see God in a new light. This understanding has also brought it’s own challenges, waves of anger at various strangers who are some long dead and some living still whose actions still directly affect a child living in my home, and joy and gratitude that I am a result of the actions of a different set of people whose actions helped to make me the sort of person who has become good at catching my children when they fall headlong towards the metaphorical concrete slabs of life.
In the end, though, what I should have recognized is that the statement set was spoken by someone who does not have the ability to think well before speaking. She has the ability to allow her emotions to properly inform her statements, but not her thoughts, at least not to the extent one would need to think prior to proposing such a value-packed statement set.
* One can argue that without evil, hardship would not exist, and that may be true. However, that does not then imply that hardship is always evil or is equal to an evil.
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