DAILY BYTE [This week our devotions have been written by the Rev Anna Layman, a minister from the United States who is working in South Africa for a couple of years.]
Which is easier? Avoiding certain people, issues, and places that cause us to confront suffering? Or, opening our eyes to the suffering within ourselves and all around us? The answer seems obvious…but, in our frequent blindness, are we actually being harmful, preventing ourselves and those around us from seeing the world and God as they truly are? Are we preventing ourselves from being surprised by God’s presence in the midst of our own suffering and the suffering of others?
I was just nine years old when my family visited Yad Vashem, which literally means, A Memorial Place and a Name. And it was a place and a name that changed the way I’ve looked at humanity and God for the rest of my life. Yad Vashem is the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority in Israel. It is a place of commemoration and study that focuses on the extermination of people during the Holocaust in World War II. Now, remember that I was nine years old. I grew up in American farm country. I had no concept of a Holocaust – a mass slaughter, a reckless destruction of life. In my personal experience, it had never occurred to me that such suffering was remotely possible.
But, I vividly remember that when we got off the tour bus that day, not everyone got off the bus, and I wanted to know why. I asked my mom why I had to go, if other people chose not to see. She responded firmly that we had to learn about these things because they’re real. We had to learn so we could change the world and prevent them from happening again. I didn’t know what she was talking about.
But it didn’t take me very long to figure out because we entered the museum, and all over the walls were plastered images of every imaginable and unimaginable form of suffering. Young women and children who were skeletal and naked stared back at me with their hollow eyes until I could no longer bear to look. So, I closed my eyes and felt my way along the walls, bumping into people and corners until finally, my dad caught sight of me, blind and crying, snatched me up in his arms, and carried me out. That night, my mom found me wandering the halls of our hotel, weeping. I don’t understand, I said. Why are people doing that to one another? What if this happens to all the Christians next?
Little did I know that human suffering is not confined to any one group or people of certain beliefs. Little did I know when I was nine, that when you become a Christian, you do not grow a protective bubble around you so that nothing can ever harm you. As we grow up, we all face this shocking realization, and we re-face it every morning when we look in the mirror still to find ourselves human. We are vulnerable, and suffering is, undeniably, all around us and within us. I simply hadn’t cultivated eyes to see it yet. I was not appreciative when I was little that my mother had the wisdom to make me get off the bus, but seventeen years later, I am so grateful that she made me see and confront life, as it really is.
Seeing images of the Holocaust was a wake-up call in my journey of confronting suffering. It’s quite a drastic example, and I hesitate to use it for fear that it could prevent us from focusing on forms of suffering that may be less dramatic or obvious but are equally challenging in our daily lives. Suffering from addiction. Homelessness. A life-zapping job. Exams. An abusive relationship. Depression. A sick child. A parent who is facing imminent death.
These things are real. Where do you see suffering in your own life or in lives around you? How might this suffering surprise you in the way it teaches you about who we are, as human beings, and who God is? Do you need a wake-up call to see life the way it really is, for better or worse? Has your vision been blurred so that instead of the reality of yourself and others, you merely have seen “trees walking”?
FOCUS READING
Mark 8:22-25
They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man's eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, "Do you see anything?" He looked up and said, "I see people; they look like trees walking around." Once more Jesus put his hands on the man's eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.
