Romans 5:1-5

I am going to make an assumption here. I am going to assume that if I asked each of you how you gained wisdom in your life, nearly every one of you would answer, "My greatest wisdom has not come through a comfortable existence. It has been achieved during periods of struggle and pain."

There is no way a human being can grow without suffering, struggle and pain. They are part of the human condition. One of my favorite stories illustrating this truth concerns the English Botanist Alfred Russell Wallace, who lived about 150 years ago. Every time I tell this picturesque story, people say, "I've heard that story before, but today I really heard its message for the first time. Thank you."

It seems that one day in his laboratory Wallace was observing an Emperor butterfly seeking to get free from its cocoon. The scientist was struck by the little butterfly's painful struggle and the length of time it was pushing and pulling, working to get free. He wondered, "What would happen if I assisted in the process?" And so he took his scalpel and he cut down the length of the cocoon. He watched to see what would happen, and these are his exact words:  

The butterfly emerged from the cocoon, spread its wings, drooped perceptibly - and died. 

That butterfly needed the struggle. It needed the pain, all that intense work. Otherwise, the juices would not be distributed into every square millimeter of its large, beautiful wings. Without all the pain, there would be no beauty, no color, no character, no life.

Struggle and pain are necessary to create a beautiful, living creature. We too need that effort and work, yet there are people who refuse to see the growth potential in struggle. When they encounter adversity, they resist. They become bitter, they push against the pain and they stay frozen within themselves. They say, "This is an unjust world.  I don't deserve all this struggle."

By refusing to allow pain to act as a master teacher, they miss many of the salient and important experiences in life.

When disastrous problems strike, how can we deal positively with the pain, the losses and the tragedies that life places before us?

My first idea is that we can remind ourselves to see pain as a teacher when problems strike. We can remember to ask: 

What is there that I need to see and learn? What is the life lesson that is contained in this painful experience? 

Not long ago, at a dinner party, I happened to be seated next to a woman I had met about five years earlier. I did not know her well, but as we engaged in some small talk, I could sense that something was preying on her mind. I finally said, "Do you mind if I ask you a question? Are you all right?"

Hesitantly, she said, "Yes...why do you ask?"

"I'm sensing a sadness. Something inside of you is churning and churning."

Almost immediately, two streams of tears came down from her eyes onto her cheeks. She said, "Arthur, I'm going through the most difficult period of my life. I am experiencing unbelievable changes. I am in such pain. I know deep down this will be one of the most important periods of my life. I'm going to achieve enormous growth in it. My head is telling me that and people are telling me that. But I don't feel it. It just hurts."

She was like that butterfly. She was pushing and pulling and struggling intensely to get free, but she needed to do her work if she was to emerge stronger and better able to live.

She said to me, "I don't even know how to pray. I can't put a prayer into words."

That gave me a little bit of an opening to offer some spiritual advice. I said, "You're from a Jewish background, aren't you?" 

"Yes."

I said, "I've got a prayer I'd like to give you. I think it will prove helpful to you in your process. It's called the Jesus Prayer, but because most of the words in it come from the Psalms, it can fit into both our backgrounds. Would you like it?"

She said, "I would love it."

I took out a little card and wrote out the prayer for her, with one change. Rather than starting it with the words "Lord, Jesus Christ, have mercy on me," I wrote:

Dear God, have mercy on me. Make haste to help me. Rescue me and save me. Do Your will in my life.

Then I handed it to her and I said, "I have found that there is one way, and only one way, this prayer will work. You've got to say it hundreds and thousands of times so that you're breathing it in and breathing it out, so that it becomes natural to you. When you do this, two things will happen. First, you will begin to feel new reserves of inner strength. Second, remarkable coincidences will start to happen in your life. Things will be brought together in your associations and your relationships. That's the way the Spirit works."

I know this woman will benefit greatly from that prayer. Even though her heart was not in the struggle that lay before her, she was aware that she was going to grow enormously.

I began this sermon with a question. I'd like to ask another one now. How do you handle your Bible?

Perhaps you, like me, make a lot of marks in yours. You underline, circle, make check marks and write in the margins. If you were to look at my Bible, you would see that it is all scrawled up.

I can open it to many pages and find exactly the insight I need to face many life issues, especially the painful ones. In this way, my Scripture has become very personal to me.

St. Paul's Letter to the Romans captured my attention years ago when I was a teenager.

Paul was a brilliant man, a tremendous intellect, yet he did not talk academically. Everything he said emerged from the fire of his own furnace. And these words came out of the suffering of St. Paul:         

We boast of our sufferings.

Does that sound a little prideful, a little masochistic? No, it really is not. Paul was saying that our suffering contains something that is valuable, golden, precious and rich. We should be happy to embrace our trials, because they produce our endurance and strength. All our hard work makes us greater and builds our character.

If someone says to you, "You have character," that will probably make you realize that your character was born out of pain. And what does character do? Character produces hope, the expectation of something to be fulfilled, something good about to happen. 
Paul said this about hope:  

Hope does not disappoint us. It does not let us down, because God?s love has been poured into our hearts.

So Scripture acknowledges the human condition, the reality of the way life works. Isaiah, wonderful, brilliant Isaiah, wrote:

I have refined you, but not as silver. I have tested you in the furnace of adversity.

We all know what that's about. And we also know that Jesus said:

You will have pain, but you will have joy in the morning.

So our faith journey is one that carries us through pain, through fire, through difficulty, through hardship. But as we pass through difficult times, we build our character, endurance and hope.

Dr. Gary Zukav, author of the book Soul Stories, looks at these questions from a slightly different perspective. He asks how much "digging" we have done in our lives. When unpleasant events have happened, have we dug down to see what we can learn from them, to discern their meaning? Have we dug into our pain until we found the gold? Because when we do that, our lives become like gifts that God has designed especially for us.

A friend of mine tells a story that illustrates just this point. For more than twenty years, he was an officer in the British army, where part of his assignment was to take young male recruits and mold them into manhood.

He told me, "Many of them were incorrigible. If they weren't in the army, they would be in jail."

It was an enormous challenge, but he finally found one way to help get these young men in touch with themselves. Each year on a date close to D-Day, he would take them to Normandy Beach.

You remember D-Day, the biggest invasion in the history of the world, when the Allied forces invaded Europe. When he went there each year, he had his young recruits stand on the beach. He showed them where the German machine guns had been positioned on the hills when the invasion occurred. He described how those German machine gunners would strafe and strafe and kill hundreds and hundreds of young men who were coming off the boats in their attempt to liberate Europe.

He would also invite veterans of that invasion to come along with the young recruits. One of them was an old man who had a tremendous limp. He he would stand in a certain place and say, "This is where my leg got blown off." Another old man would take the young recruits to another spot and say, "This is where five of my best buddies were killed."

He would also take his young men to visit the cemetery there. If you've seen such European cemeteries, you know that they contain row after row of white crosses, each bearing the name of a soldier.

One year, one of the young men had been told that his grandfather was buried in a particular area there. So he went and found where his grandfather was buried, a grandfather he had never known. My friend told me that this young man was one of the hardest of the bunch, really incorrigible. But as he stood in front of his grandfather's cross, he broke down into tears and sobbed and sobbed.

I said to my friend, "What was the result of bringing those young fellows to the Normandy beachhead?"

He said, "Most of them began to get their lives straightened out. I think it was because I helped them get in touch with their pain. They didn't run away to any of the addictions that divert people from looking deep inside."

When we look deep inside, eventually we will find the gold. When we find it, we will find what St. Paul talked about. We can boast of our suffering because it has produced our strength, our endurance, our value and our character, which is the part of us that produces hope and expectation.  Hope, God's hope, will never disappoint us. Through it, God's love is poured into our hearts.

Let us pray.

We don't understand why life is made the way it is, Lord, but we know that pain is a part of it. Help us to have a new outlook and a new regard for it. May our pain be used to build our character and our strength. May we find the gold in it. May we find the way to the joy which Jesus promises. These things we ask in His name. Amen.