This Light, Momentary Affliction

“For this slight, momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” 2 Corinthians 4:17.

I never realized until I became a parent just how much discomfort is involved in growing up. Having lived through the process myself, I never gave it another thought, merely thinking of my childhood and especially my teenage years with a, “Thank God that’s over, and now I can get on with doing things” attitude.

Incidentally, I cannot understand those people, and I know more than a few, who tell teenagers to “enjoy highschool and college as much as you can. They are the best years of your life.”

WTH? I had a reasonably happy and unusually smooth and effortless adolescence, and I cannot imagine going through it again. You could not pay me enough to go back to being the ignorant, self-absorbed, narcissistic little know-it-all that I was.

This is brought home to me by watching my daughter Evie. That poor baby has struggles! The other day she spent 10 minutes trying to eat my nalgene water bottle, and the whole time it simply refused to be eaten. She could barely lift it because it was half full of water and therefore too heavy for her and her shrieks of frustration got louder and louder until she finally dropped it and broke down in tears.

This is a daily occurrence. She cannot sit herself up yet, so if she topples over while reaching for a toy, she is stuck until someone rescues her. She can pull herself to a standing position if someone gives her a hand to pull on, but if Daddy is being mean and cooking food or something, she is stuck on the ground.

She tries to stand and pitches forward or backwards, and she bumps her head. Her gums get sore because razor sharp teeth are chewing their way through them, from the inside. She gets strapped into car seats, locked into high chairs, taken out of the bath before she is finished playing, and made to wear clothes!

The struggle is real, people!

Discomfort is part of the process. It is how we grow, and God has so designed it that as our level of strength and maturity increases, so does the level of discomfort. Think infancy is uncomfortable, try toddlerhood on for size! Take a few years off for “normal” childhood, but don’t get comfortable because, Oh, Hello Puberty! Just a few short years around the corner and let’s just say it gets mixed reviews.

Of course, I reassure her, using the Bible verse quoted above, but what I am really doing is reassuring myself. Take learning to walk, for instance. It involves gravity, which means it involves bumps, bruises, dings, scratches, and pediatricians trying hard to maintain their composure while you explain that all those bruises really do come from her running into furniture and walls. But the end result?

Of course Evie cannot imagine dancing, or sprinting, or hiking a mountain, but none of those people in the pictures above questions whether learning to walk was worth it. They don’t even remember the agony, which seemed like the most terrible thing imaginable at the time. No thinking, reasoning adult would ever even consider wanting to go back to the pre-walking state because “it just wasn’t worth it.” The glory of being able to hike up a mountain and survey God’s creation not only renders learning to walk worthwhile, it retroactively makes it glorious. The first step a baby takes is her first step on the journey to that magnificent summit.

This is why Paul’s statement is amazing, and why we need to take it at face value, and really meditate on what it means. Paul is calling all of life a light, transitory affliction. It’s nothing, not even worth mentioning. Elsewhere he says, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us, for all creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” Romans 8:18-19.

He wasn’t talking about the terrible inconveniences that we like to complain about either. He was talking about the sufferings of the Apostles and Martyrs.

What a claim! The suffering of a family where a young wife is dying of cancer, is to the glory of Heaven as an infant bumping his head on the carpet is to Riverdance. The rape and murder of Christian and Yazidi women and children in the Middle East is a shin bruise compared to the glory of Heaven! I saw a little girl in the Philippines once who had literally hundreds of cigarette burns all over her legs, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. In the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan I saw the corpses of hundreds of innocent people, including children, wiped out by an unstoppable force of nature. And God says that this too is only a slight and momentary affliction! Is He crazy?!

Am I talking like a crazy man yet? Are you disgusted by how cavalierly I dismiss the suffering of these innocents?

Believe me, I am not minimizing their suffering. St. Paul does not say that suffering is nothing, but that it is nothing in comparison to the glory to come. My goal is not to make you say, “Oh well, I guess what they are going through isn’t so bad.” No. It is so bad. It is terrible and a crime that calls out to heaven for redress.

But I believe that God will answer that cry with redress, with redemption. My goal is to encourage you to wonder, “What glory could possibly make this worthwhile?” and then to believe that even though we cannot imagine such a glory, it does exist, and has been promised to us. The same God who rewards an infant’s teething pains with a lifetime of bacon and pizza and carrots and apples, will likewise reward all the growing pains of all His beloved Children with some equally unimaginable glory.