Last
night I got a call from a family friend informing us that they lost their
daughter of less than four years. The child had earlier been diagnosed to be
suffering from infection of one of the major internal organs and was flown
abroad for treatment. She returned improved from the foreign treatment and
waited to return to school in September. This would no longer be as she passed
on last weekend after being ill for about a week.
Speaking
with the woman on phone, I could feel the heartache, the confusion, the grief
that should be expected of someone who suffered such a loss. Consoling her was
a bit difficult because you couldn’t really find the right words to say in such
circumstances. With imagined questions like: Why did God not keep my daughter?
Why did she not die when the ailment was really serious? Why did we have to
spend so much taking her abroad, yet she died? In all these, my wife called my
attention to the fact that the family would still be happy that they did their
best to keep her. She pointed out that if the girl had died without being taken
abroad for any reason, that reason would have been blamed for the death. In
that case, the situation provides the family two choices: either to mourn
pitifully or mourn gratefully.
As
my wife and I discussed the sad event, I wondered what would be the motivation
for any of the choices the family would settle for and so asked my wife if
anyone knew their level of closeness to God and specifically if they have
personal relationship with God. This is because I know that people, who have
high value priority for spirituality, would respond differently from those who
have low priority for spirituality when it comes to handling pain. The reality
is also that pain has a way of either pulling people to higher level of
spirituality or pulling them away from spirituality. Well my wife did not have
an answer to this, so we resolved to visit them whenever we can.
The
incident and the way they viewed spirituality reminded me of how a parent
handled similar loss in the year 2000. I lost a close friend at 22 years of age
to cancer. Before the ailment became serious, the parents were just nominal
Christians, attending church services religiously and not participating in
other spiritually uplifting activities at my local church then. They would
rather pride themselves of being materially comfortable than spiritually
minded. However as the situation
worsened and I visited their home regularly to check on and stay with my
friend, I realized that they had become more spiritual, willing to participate
in such activities they would have ordinarily termed extreme before then. When
eventually my friend died, they became more spiritually minded in their actions
and dealings. Some of us were consoled of my friend’s death because we saw that
the pain drew the parents closer to God. It was a shift from being
materialistically focused to being spiritually focused.
Could
that be the same reason behind what happens during prison incarceration? Some
people go to prison and come out reformed and softened, others go to prison and
return hardened. There is pressure in pain and everyone responds to such
pressure differently. For Jesus Christ, we are told that he learnt obedience by
what he suffered (Hebrews 5:8). Again prophet Isaiah reports that God used
affliction to refine the Israelites (Isaiah 48:10). This subtly explains what
happens to the mind during pain. The emotional pressure it elicits causes a
shift of mind either towards the positive or towards the negative. Information
or lack of it is a major factor in determining which direction the mind goes
during pain. Proper information leads to proper understanding, which helps in
decision making during pain. Wrong information leads to wrong understanding and
misleading decision making during pain.
If
someone knows that there is already negativity in pain, the person would not
give attention to negative information. When emotion is allowed to becloud
reasoning, negativity prevails. It is important that we are in control of our
emotions even while in pain, to avoid value shift from negative to negative.
Pain can re-order value from destructive to productive, if we allow reason to
guide decisions above emotions while in pain.
Talks
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