Tailor-Made Suffering

Photo of painting "Earth" by Birgit Huttemann-Holz found here-- http://www.georgiamuseum.org/kressproject/view-entry/earth


Human nature makes it nearly impossible to avoid comparing one's lot to another person's. Only a month ago I was having a dark day and off-handedly remarked about it to a choir member. She threw her arm around my shoulders, leaned in and said she understood and felt similarly. "Would you like to swap lives for a week? You might not feel the same when you're done." She said it in a manner which slightly insinuated, "Try living my life and you'll see you have nothing to complain about." We laughed.

Thinking about this conversation later slowly resulted in a numb realization. Despite the terror of facing our own miseries, in the end, we would not (and just plain cannot) trade it for anyone else's suffering. The problem with suffering, besides the pain of it, is that it seems to be tailor-made. No two people think or act alike. No two people have the same memories or experiences or relationships, and even if they do share circumstances, we are affected by them differently. This woman and I probably could have swapped lives for a week, but while we may have come away with an appreciation for each other's situations, I'd expect two equal and seemingly negating results: neither of us would find the other person's situation as unbearable as our own, but neither of us would want to permanently trade lives either.

My suffering is intense because it plays upon decades of previous memories, disappointed longings, conversations with God, experiences, and the sheer fact that I have been the one bearing it all this time. There is no weariness like carrying an unrelenting burden. Taking on someone else's suffering would not feel as weighty because I am not that person. How can I feel the suffering of a wife and mother of two when her family are strangers to me? How can she feel my suffering if she hasn't spent years living alone in dire poverty with no hope of change? How can I weigh her disappointment when I do not share her longing to move around the country? How can she weigh mine when I spent my entire childhood moving around the country and long to stay in one place and make a home?

In a small way, I have come to appreciate my dose of suffering since this conversation. I have appreciated my suffering in the sense that I no longer disparage myself for being overwhelmed by its immensity. Instead of hiding my sorrow or playing it off like, "Oh, this is not as bad as what some people have to face," I embrace it as the sorrow that only I can know and bear. I have been convicted about giving in to the temptation of being inwardly infuriated at people who throw fits over seemingly "minor" sufferings. If they are on their own journey, with unique personalities, memories, hopes, and relationships, what is suffering to them may be foreign to me for the mere fact that we are different people with different lives. Who are we to rank each other's pain?

Most of all, I have learned to embrace my suffering because, as the cliche so aptly encapsulates, "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't!" There is some sorrow I see in other people's lives which I truly never wish to experience. Even if I do, it will not touch me the same way. In the midst of pain, I have moments when I can see that I have changed because of my tailor-made suffering. The changes are simultaneously surprising, encouraging, confusing and sometimes troubling, but I know, if I were given the chance to undo these years of suffering which have brought me to this state of being, I may find myself unable to part with them irrevocably.