The Meaning Of Suffering

The Meaning Of Suffering

- Diana Aydin

Why, God, why? Why me?

That’s a mystery I’ve been wrestling with since I was 14 years old. I had just undergone brain surgery to remove a benign cyst sitting on my optic nerve. I woke up sick every morning for nearly a year from taking the medications I would now be on for life. My hair wouldn’t grow back the same. I felt like an outsider at school. I turned to my parents and to my twin sisters for support. Still, it took a long time for me to recover. Then, at age 24, when life finally seemed to be getting back to normal, another blow. Multiple sclerosis. Just like that, my life became a series of MRIs, daily injections that left painful welts and even more unanswered questions. Would I lose my ability to walk one day? Would I be able to endure a life of pain and the loneliness that comes with it? Pain is like a prison. It isolates us, cutting us off from others. After all, only we can feel our pain.

I’ve read many things on the mystery of suffering. I’ve considered all the explanations. How we live in a fallen world where suffering is the price of sin. How some suffer more because they’re being tested, as if it’s some sort of gift. None of those reasons answered that question in my mind. If God exists and God is good, why do we suffer? Where is God when we do?

I decided to seek answers by talking with those who confront these questions every day: religious leaders and writers who possess intimate knowledge of suffering—mental and spiritual suffering as well as physical.