The Coexistence of Pain, Hope, Confusion and Contentment

My church held our annual missions conference this past weekend, and there were so many things I took away from it. But there was one moment in particular I wanted to write about. As one of this year's exhibits, Samaritan's Purse set up a replica of the tents they used to help combat the ebola outbreaks in several countries. It was a very illuminating exhibit to walk through. To hear the steps the workers had to take, and to see the thin hospital beds arranged as they would have been in one of those real tents.

I remember standing for a moment in the tent where the patients who were confirmed to have the disease were kept. And I couldn't help but imagine what it might have looked like - all the sickness and the chaos and the sadness. There are moments sometimes, like when I hear a bad news story, when I can't help but think of how much suffering there is in our world. And this was one of them.

I have the thought sometimes that every single second there is pain and suffering in our world. Hunger and violence, death and heartbreak. It's a dark thought, I know. But it snaps me out of my own little reality and reminds me that the world is so much bigger than I am often fooled into thinking it is. It also makes me sad. Occasionally a little hopeless.

I know there is hope for our world, of course. I know for all the pain and the sadness and the awfulness, there is still goodness and kindness and compassion breaking through the darkness. But that doesn't make the pain any less painful. It doesn't change the fact that people suffer daily, in every part of our world. And so it makes sense to me how God's heart grieves for the world. A lesson I've learned is that our sadness over others' pain will never outdo God's grief over their suffering. He never intended for our world to look like this.

But one other thing it's made me realize is that my life is pretty close to perfect. I never like the idea of coming away from witnessing others' suffering with mere gratitude that you're not in their situation, because I think when we witness others' pain, our hearts should grieve with them, and the last thing we should think about is our own lives. But eventually it does make me think about my own life, and I come to realize that it makes no sense to find it difficult.

I say that because the past few months have been confusing for me in some ways. I am wrestling to figure out questions I have for myself, to analyze why I feel certain ways about certain things, to face my shortcomings head on (and there's plenty of them), to figure out if I'm supposed to make big changes. And sometimes it feels really hard, and none of this is to say it isn't. But I think there's room for us to walk through messy, confusing seasons while simultaneously believing that our life is so good, that we are exactly where we're supposed to be for the time being. It sounds like a paradox, but it really isn't.

And so that's where I'm finding myself right now. Asking questions, analyzing pretty much everything. But at the same time, realizing that I have all I really need in this moment. And call me naive, but I think those of us who have ended up on this side of life should be focused on lifting up those who have fallen on the other. Imagine how the world would look if we really did that. Imagine how it would change if we turned our gratitude for our health into caring for the sick, our thankfulness for our financial security into giving to those who need it, our comfort in our freedom into speaking up for those who don't have theirs.

It's a challenge to myself more than anything because I keep learning how easy it is to get caught up in our own mess that we neglect the things that matter more than anything.