Hard and worthwhile is better than easy and pointless

One of my favorite stories in the Bible concerns the Apostles and Christians in the early church. In Acts 5, word of this new religion was starting to spread like wildfire across the city of Jerusalem, and the gospel was gaining more attention by the day. This caught the attention of the religious establishment. Feeling threatened by the growing power and influence of these “Jesus followers”, they decide to arrest a bunch of the church leaders in a show of force and throw them in jail as a way to intimidate and scare them. But not even one day into their imprisonment, an angel of God breaks them out and they are back in the temple courts, proclaiming the gospel right in the face of the very people who arrested them! Not knowing what else to do, the high priest’s people arrest them again, and this time put them on trial. They had the Apostles flogged and then released, warning them not to go around talking about this “Jesus” guy ever again. As they limped out of the court that day, backs and behinds sore from freshly whipped wounds, the writer of Acts says, “The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name”. Day after day, they unceasingly taught and proclaimed the good news that Jesus was Lord. Imagine being so sure of the importance of something that not even being whipped and later threatened with execution can even slow you down! Imagine being flogged and humiliated like a criminal, and then responding by rejoicing! The Apostles had a different value system to the people around them. Rather than being ashamed, they were overjoyed that they were counted as worthy of suffering for the Name of Jesus. They knew that Jesus himself suffered and was humiliated on the cross. And because of that they considered the punishment for following Jesus an honor! The Christian life is hard. We live by different values to the people around us. But it is worthwhile, because we know that choosing to follow Jesus and the pains that come with that are glorious. Most of the world spends their time trying to make life pain-free. We want unchallenging, high-paying jobs with more vacation time. We want bigger TVs, faster smartphones, and everything to be delivered to us by either Amazon or Woolworths online. Many people are so obsessed with trying to make life easy that they’ve made their lives pointless.

Most people aren't big fans of suffering. Freddie De Boer, a progressive writer that I follow, recently wrote, "I believe that the purpose of human society is to reduce suffering, promote well-being, and engender freedom." It's hard to disagree with a sentence like that. No one wants to be against reducing suffering, or on team ill-being. The optics of being opposed to engendering freedom are not great.

But the issue that I have with this declaration is the "purpose of human society" part. Mitigating suffering is a huge value of mine, but it makes me nervous to proclaim it an ultimate value. A value that I'd place higher than not suffering would be finding something worth suffering for.

I do think that the world understands this. It's the basic principle behind athletic pursuits like running a marathon. If running 42.2 kilometers is not something that interests you, then you'd thing what a marathoner puts their body through is madness. It's not madness. It's just not worthwhile to you in particular and that's okay.

Our art often illustrates this idea. In the musical Hamilton, the protagonist Alexander Hamilton calls out his rival Burr for striving and laboring for self-glory, but having no idea what he truly believes in. "If you stand for nothing, Burr, what'll you fall for?" No one wants to die, but if you're gonna have to eventually, wouldn't you want to die for something you believe in? Preferably something meaningful, something bigger than yourself?

Let me be clear that I write from the perspective of someone who, relative to the utter horrors that life can contain, has not suffered very much. But I do think that I could have made choices that would have made life a little more comfortable than it is now. I think that if I hadn't chosen to do Christian ministry at such a young age, to the point of foregoing any training in any other marketable skill, my family and I would have slightly more opulence than we presently enjoy. But the honest truth that I believe from the bottom of my heart is that if I had done anything different to what I am doing today, my life would be unbearable.

Unbearable and painful are different concepts; we always get them mixed up in our heads. We go through painful but bearable experiences in life all the time, such as learning to play an instrument or staying up until 6am writing a graduate thesis or giving birth. What makes something unbearable is not pain, but pointlessness. Nothing would make me more despondent than living a pointless life.

Christian lives are not pointless. We do not concern ourselves with ease and comfort. We labor in this life for the prospect of glory in the next. We know that a reward is ahead. That is why the writer James can say, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance."

The best thing that you can do for yourself is to find something meaningful to give your life to. Ideally something with eternal consequences. Make life hard and worthwhile. Don't give in the allure of that wide comfortable path that leads to an easy but pointless existence. Suffer. And then love the suffering. Give thanks for the privilege of hurting for something worthwhile.