Pain in This World

I’m increasingly fascinated by the fact that for most of our lives we seem to associate pain with having done something wrong. It’s punishment, we feel, because we made a bad decision or we went against some rule or principle. It’s amazing how many of us, in dealing with our own lives or the lives of others, like Job’s friends, are sure that if there’s pain in our life that we must have done something wrong, that we’re being punished, because God is just and he would not punish people for no reason. Well, you know, that’s an interesting concept that we can talk about later, but the point is, we all seem to associate pain with punishment. The fact is that pain is just part of the journey. We seem to understand the concept of growing pains. Teething, for example, is a painful process. We haven’t done anything wrong. It’s just part of being alive. When we reach the age of five, our baby teeth start to come out and the new ones come in, and we’re in pain, but that’s just part of our growth. I’ve come to the conclusion that all pain is just part of the journey, and I know people feel this just can’t be so, because they know they’ve made bad choices. They made mistakes, and therefore it was painful. But again, from a certain perspective, there’s no such thing as a mistake. There’s no such thing as a bad choice, because we didn’t make those choices to begin with, so the pain is just a consequence of being alive, not a consequence of a bad choice.