Pain Is The Beating Heart
"Behold, and hearken, O ye elders of my church, saith the Lord your God, even Jesus Christ, your advocate, who knoweth the weakness of man and how to succor them who are tempted." (D&C 62:1). Jesus Christ knows our weakness and knows how to succor us when we are tempted. To succor means to run to the aid of. Christ does not say that He knows how to prevent our pain (though He does). Nor does He say that He will stop all temptations before they ever reach us. Christ did not suffer for us in the sense that He took the bullets that were meant for us, leaving us unscathed. Rather, He took the bullets so that He would know what it's like to be shot and how to recover from it. People like to point out that pain and suffering and evil make it obvious that there can't exist a God who is both all powerful and yet loving and benevolent, for what kind of God would allow such pain and suffering befall those that He allegedly loves so much? As it turns out, our kind of God. God loves us enough to allow us to be tempted. He loves us enough to allow us to fight against evil, to endure suffering and to learn wisdom and compassion and patience and understanding through our pain. He also loves us enough to have gone down into the trenches with us, to feel every pain and ache and misery that we endure, not because He's a masochist, not because He's got anything to prove, and not because He's trying to help us get out of the pain ourselves, but because He needed to know exactly what it feels like to say goodbye too soon, or to wait until it’s too late to say goodbye at all, to wallow in a chronic and debilitating disease with no hope for relief, or to break our heart day by day and hour by hour as we watch our loved ones waste away. He needed to know what it's like to stare up from the black abyss wondering if help would ever come, not so He could figure out how to stop it from happening to us, but to figure out how to help us get through it. Pain is not a bug in an otherwise perfect plan. Pain is a central feature of that plan, indeed the beating heart of it. For if there is no plan at all without the Atonement of Jesus Christ, whose pain we know not, how sore we know not, how hard to bear we know not, how exquisite we know not, and if Jesus Christ's pain was so important to the plan, then why should we believe that our pain is any less vital? This life we've been given is a test. Not a test to see if we're strong or clever enough to avoid pain and suffering altogether, but a test to see if we could trust in the Lord, trust that He has a reason for our pain and suffering, and trust that if He can't take this cup from us, He can at least drink from it with us and run to our aid when we need it most. God didn't plant the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden because He hoped that Adam and Eve would be strong enough to resist the temptation. He put it there because He knew their weakness and He knew that the knowledge of both good and evil that they would gain through pain and suffering could not be earned in any other way. God gives us opportunities of knowledge of good and evil through our pains and suffering and temptations, knowledge that we could get in no other way, but He does not sit idly by in some kind of schadenfreude, watching us fall and chuckling to Himself at our weakness and stupidity. He runs to our help, he succors us in our temptations, He is right there alongside us taking the same pain that we are, and showing us how we can recover and thrive and grow from grace to grace.
