The greatest weapon you possess in your battle to survive suffering is, without question, hope. It’s a proven psychological fact that a person (or patient, or soldier, or prisoner) who harbors a resilient sense of hope fixated on some form of future relief will live longer than a person who doesn’t.
In some cases, from a psychoanalytical perspective, it’s what might be called “delusion of reprieve.” Which is just a fancy term for false hope.
I can say with confidence that nothing hurts worse than false hope.
But I can say with equal confidence that false hope is better than no hope at all.
As it stands, however, the problem isn’t surviving suffering. We don’t want to merely survive – nor should we.
We want our life to mean something; we want our suffering to matter.
German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, said “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”
In other words, if we believe there is purpose for our pain, we can endure almost any depth of earthly agony.
This was certainly the case for Viktor Frankl and his fellow prisoners at Auschwitz.
Frankl spent three years in Nazi concentration camps, where his wife and mother were both murdered. He was starved and brutally beaten, forced to work in frigid temperatures wearing nothing but rags, infected with typhus, and perpetually robbed of sleep and any semblance of human dignity.
And yet, in his timeless book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he writes these earth-shaking words:
“Long ago we had passed the stage of asking what was the meaning of life, a naive query which understands life as the attaining of some aim through the active creation of something of value…it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.“
In the same way that hope empowers us to survive suffering, selflessness empowers us to suffer with purpose.
We’ve been asking all the wrong questions. Naive queries, as Frankl first noted more than seventy years ago.
We ask, Why God? Why is this happening to me? What purpose could this possibly have? How could you ever justify such tragedy?
(If you don’t believe in God, you still ask the same questions. You just direct them elsewhere.)
Let me affirm you – when you ask these questions (which you will), you’re not doing anything wrong. It is human nature to assume suffering is nihilistic. Our rational minds, and even more significantly, our emotions, blind us; our focus becomes solitary, egotistical.
Put simply, we are selfish.
Instead of asking “Why God?“, let us ask “God, why?“
Quit obsessing over what you expect from life, and humbly consider what life expects from you. Don’t ask why with a sense of defeat, but rather with a sense of opportunity, with a willingness to go wherever your suffering takes you.
We must rise above our nature, abolish our self-obsessions, transparently make our pain available to God, and to others. We must reject our own nihilism and bow to the mystery; we must kneel, not cower, open, not close.
In your humble selflessness, God will use your suffering to help someone else.
And there is no higher purpose than helping another person.
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