Search Google for two particular words and you will find more than 347,000,000 answers. The two wonderful words that so many of us spend our lives searching for are simply there: most comfortable.
If you’re comfortable, it’s a sure thing you are doing things wrong.
PETER DRUCKER
There are 347,000,000 ‘most comfortable’ products that can be yours: the most comfortable shoes, most comfortable chair, most comfortable car seat, airline seat, dog bed, headphones, underwear, or comfort food in a comfortable limousine…you name it, you can have the most comfortable one. And who doesn’t want to be more comfortable, especially when we are in emotional or physical pain? But the truth is that comfort teaches us nothing, whereas there is much to learn from our pain and discomfort. The challenge is not merely enduring pain, but rather finding a way for the pain we suffer and the pain we witness to change our lives forever and for the better.
“How was Africa?” many people asked after I returned from my congregation’s volunteer mission to help build a series of vegetable stalls outside a small Ugandan village. Ugandan women who sell their garden vegetables on the roadside alone are vulnerable to attach. Constructing several stalls all together makes everyone safer. “Was it fun?” people wanted to know. “Did you see the gorillas and the elephants?”
I am a man of words, and yet I had no words with which to answer those questions. How could I describe a country where 85 per cent of all children are wither physically or sexually abused and where, on the walls of the schools I visited, there were slogans painted everywhere like Scream when you are attached and Silence will kill you? How can I describe walking through an AIDS clinic that had to supplies of any kind – not an aspirin, not a bed, not a bandage, nothing – because graft and corruption siphon everything off at the top? Everywhere I looked in the orphanages, I saw young children with even younger children on their backs, raising their own siblings because their parents had died of AIDS. Little distended bellies, infected eyes, and no one who cared. I met a grandmother who supported her entire family with a few chickens and their eggs. A widow with three young children, barely more than a child herself, with one gaunt cow that produced a dollar’s worth of milk a day – that’s it. That’s what she had to keep her family alive.
I am uncomfortable because I can do so little. I am uncomfortable because I can do so much.
Here’s the final entry in my journal from that mission. These are the only words I could manage:
What can I do other than to notice you; so black, so chocolate surrounding the while of your eyes and your teeth? So beautiful and alive, you precious children following me like a gaggle of geese, reaching for my hand – so beautiful, so terrible, so thin, so infected, so young to carry the water and the sorrow of a continent. What can I do but notice you?
What can I do but notice the empty clinic, smelling of urine? What can I bring but my silent apology for my blessed and privileged life? What can I do other than to wonder if I would ever have the strength of a woman surrounded by her chickens, widowed, old, proud, dirty, shovelling shit beneath a dollar-a-day cow while I nibble my box lunch on the way back to the cool, quiet hotel room where my neatly folded laundry awaits?
I am uncomfortable because I am here. I am uncomfortable because I will not be here. I am uncomfortable because I can do so little. I am uncomfortable because I can do so much. I am uncomfortable because there is nothing to say. I shall leave you poor children today, but you shall never leave me. You shall, this place shall, make me forever uncomfortable, forever blessed.
Comfort dulls our edge – pain sharpens our perspective. Witnessing real pain forces us to cease feigning blindness; to really look at the world and at ourselves. This is pain’s greatest challenge and its greatest gift.
People talk a lot about wanting to change the world. I think in a way it’s an unrealistic idea because it is impossible for any of us to change the entire world. But we can let the pain we suffer and the pain we witness inspire us to change what we can. Our community. Our family. Or maybe just one life.
An excerpt from More Beautiful Than Before –
How suffering transforms us
by Steve Leder.
