Why You NEED Pain in Your Life

EVERYTHING we ever experience is designed for at least one central purpose: to learn from and apply lessons; to quietly extract all the learning potential from experience is the quantification of our purpose.

Human beings rarely see this, however. We don’t ordinarily learn much from either the positive things that occur to us, or the negative. The positive we take for granted and the negative we whinge about. All those learning opportunities go begging.

And here’s the key rub: it’s especially the painful lessons we’ve had and are now having (yes, present-tense) that are our learning ground, enabling and platform-producing, for future blessing in ours and others’ lives. That’s the cold, hard and effective truth.

Now to the aspect of “programming” which defines the process. Like the common computer, we too are undergoing, and are destined for, programming—programmed to life’s cool and harsh realities and lessons, and all in-between. We’re to be programmed in wisdom (if we’ll allow).

Programming occurs in such ways as to make us personally so very experienced in these matters if we’ll cooperate with its intent—but there’s a catch. The pains of life are entirely necessary in the process of this programming. Again, it’s sad but true; but so paradoxically magnificent—the ultimate corrective to pain—the blessing beyond it.

We have a Divine Provider who is keen on us seeing and feeling the problems of the world first hand—as the only way to truly empathise. “This is what it looks (feels) like,” is the Divine statement—the wisdom of life. “I need you to understand it before you can truly be an advocate for its truth,” is again what might be said. (We should all be advocates for truth.) This idea might sound ridiculous but I would ask you to check this with the benefit of your hindsight having tested it.

An illustration: when I was bullied as a teenaged apprentice I learned over those few quite horrendous years that the last thing I would be doing when I got the opportunity was bullying any apprentice under me. I became an advocate for young people in training.

Those who propagate the disaster (a.k.a. the ‘generational curse’) and ‘give as good as they got’ simply are not “programmable” and this is the key blight on an arrogant humanity that dashes hope against the rocks. These will not learn that injustice must be stopped, and that this must start fundamentally with them. They become betwixt by the injustice and useless to the lesson, and the programming opportunity goes to waste.

If we will only see the thin but visible benefit in our pain, and the specific future purpose for it regarding the compassion that blossoms from within the midst of it, we will have the faith and the strength to get through and ‘suffer well.’ Keeping this front of mind and firm in heart is the problem.

But, we still hate such a message. Yet, our disdain for such a thing won’t change it.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.