In L. B. Cowan’s “Streams in the Desert,” a book of meditations given me by a friend, a recent entry has this line: “Who can estimate how much we owe to our suffering and pain?”

That’s a sentiment that runs against the American grain in this century. In 2023, for instance, some 60 million Americans sought treatment for their mental and emotional health, a figure double the size of that in 2006. In 2022, approximately 1 in 10 prescriptions in 43 states were for treatment of anxiety or depression. Clearly, an army of therapists and psychologists, reinforced by medications like Zoloft and Lexapro, stand at the ready to alleviate mental and emotional pain, mechanics and repair shops for broken hearts and strained nerves.

But to return to that question: How can we possibly be indebted to suffering? If so, what benefits can it possibly deliver?

First of all, suffering can act as a wakeup call. “We can rest contentedly in our sins and our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shovelling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure,” C. S. Lewis writes in “The Problem of Pain.” “But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world….”

Many of us who have experienced the death of a loved one – parent, spouse, child, friend – find ourselves barraged with memories but also charged with a new apprehension for what we have lost. This same phenomenon occurred on a national stage, when the Covid lockdowns shook people awake to the dangers of big government and inept experts. The stupidities of that pandemic – the relatives forced to die alone in hospitals and nursing homes, the businesses closed never to reopen, the incalculable numbers of children damaged by school closures – shattered our complacency.

In Richard Attenborough’s film “Shadowlands,” a fictional C. S. Lewis delivers a lecture in which he hits on another major good that may come from suffering:

I’m not sure that God particularly wants us to be happy. I think He wants us to be able to love and be loved. He wants us to grow up. We think our childish toys bring us all the happiness there is and our nursery is the whole wide world. But something must drive us out of the nursery to the world of others. And that something is suffering.

Here suffering not only wakens us, it calls us to “grow up,” to become adults, to face tribulation and to extract from it wisdom and a compassion for others. Of course, trials and tribulation don’t always have this effect. They can leave the afflicted stunted, bitter and angry, or uncaring, afraid to trust or love again, blaming God, circumstance, or others for their misery.

Here the Covid analogy again works well. Many Americans emerged from those long months of misery with a healthy mistrust of government and more aware of the manipulative propaganda that drove the Covid agenda. Like our country’s founders, we acquired a healthy skepticism of government and its heavy-handed attempts at control. “I am more and more convinced, of the propensity in human nature to tyrannize over their fellow men,” wrote Mercy Otis Warren to John Adams in 1775. Having witnessed firsthand this propensity, many of us today share that same conviction.

Suffering can deepen and expand our powers of appreciation. Post-Covid, and especially after the defeat of big government in the 2024 elections, many of my family and friends have come to a deeper respect and love for liberty.

In my own case, personal trials and age have brought me an unexpected greater sense of beauty. Everything from a sunset to a grandchild lost in a book on the sofa sparks an aesthetic appreciation I’ve never before known. Author Mark Helprin sums up this experience in his novel, “A Soldier of the Great War,” writing:

To see the beauty of the world is to put your hands on lines that run uninterrupted through life and through death. Touching them is an act of hope, for perhaps someone on the other side, if there is another side, is touching them, too.

Therapists and drugs may bandage and even heal our wounds, but the scars remain. If we bear them rightly, those marks remind us of who we are and where we have traveled, and we can then bring the understanding and need for kindness taught to us by suffering to a world very much in need of both.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: PickPik