One evening a few of us gathered together to pray for various community needs.
There was the usual list of human struggles represented in our requests: prayers for those afflicted with various sicknesses, calls for God’s wisdom as a son faces financial decisions, help for a couple struggling to preserve their marriage, and a petition for comfort as yet another family faced the death of a beloved father and father-in-law.
There was nothing out of the ordinary, as human suffering goes, except that pain is never ordinary to the one who’s experiencing it.
There’s something very interesting about pain, though. No matter how similar our anguish it is always uniquely our own.
“I’ve had the same thing,” we hear or say and yet our experience simply cannot be translated into that of another. How many of us have grappled with a well-meaning comment, “I know exactly what you’re going through.”
“No, you don’t,” we say to ourselves, and sometimes to another, “No one can possibly know what I’m feeling.”
Worst of all, perhaps, is the nagging question that comes to all of us: Why? I have no divine revelation in these matters, I simply know that no one is exempt and for me the healing glory of Easter is wrapped up in the knowledge that there is someone who really does know how I feel.
As a believer in Christ and in Easter, I am not exempt from human ills and failures (if you don’t believe that, ask my family and my friends). What Easter does make me, though, is a recipient of God’s unconditional love. No matter the season, the situation or the surroundings, His indescribable love prevails.
“How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God” (1 John 3:1-3 - NIV).
Easter blessings.
