WE MAKE OUR HEARTS HARD

No one likes to suffer. Pain hurts. To deny that truth is to live in another world. There are degrees of hurt, of pain. We know that. There are also different kinds of pain. The pain from a broken leg is different from the pain of a broken heart. Both are painful. The degree of pain and how one endures that pain is different, also, according to the one who is suffering.

Some are better than others in dealing with pain. Some people have a higher threshold for pain than others, but a higher threshold does not mean no threshold. Pain is pain, suffering is suffering, and no one escapes either in this life in this world. Jesus did not. Neither do we. One can debate why one has to suffer at all given our faith in and all-good and all-powerful and all-loving God. But that is another matter for another time.

In the meantime, suffering and pain are the lot of each and every one of us. How we deal with physical pain is one matter. Therapists of every kind have ways to help us do so, some better than others. Mind-over-matter often helps. Medication can help even more. What both do is mask the pain making it easier for us to function. But the pain is still there and it is felt if the mind rests or the medication wears off.

Often, however, the greater pain is not the physical. It is the mental suffering that stops us dead in our tracks. It is the suffering without physical pain that sometimes overwhelms us. It is the suffering, the pain, that is inflicted upon us by another, by circumstances beyond our control, by something we did not do or simply by who we are that causes so much personal grief.

Persecution, the color of our skin, our sexual orientation, where we were born, our physical features – all these and more cause us pain and suffering because others deem them to be humiliating, debasing and degrading and then make that known to us by what they say and, even more, by the way they treat us. We see that every day in this world of ours by the way others are unjustly, unfairly and unlovingly treated simply because they are somehow different.

But we all are in one way or another. Yet what is important is how we respond to the other when our hearts and souls are hurt because of who we are and not because of something we have done. We can harden our hearts and souls and act accordingly, which will do nothing to transform the one who is hurting us and will not lessen our pain. Or we can soften our hearts and souls by forgiving their ignorance and acting accordingly. 

The truth is that when we harden our hearts, we only make the pain, our pain, worse. It is when and only when we soften our hearts, consider the source of the pain and forgive the ignorance and foolishness of the one or ones who are hurting us that we can find peace of mind. Even more, in the process of forgiving, we might convert the one who has hurt us. Jesus’ forgiveness on the cross of those unjustly inflicting on him both physical and mental anguish is our example. Jesus could not die with a self-hardened heart. We cannot live with one. As with Jesus, so with us: the choice is always ours.