God's Megaphone

Instead of sharing my own words today, I wanted to take the time to share the words of C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite authors and theologians. Lewis wrote broadly on the topic of pain in his book The Problem of Pain, and one of the passages in the book stood out to me.

We live in a world that’s full of pain. We know that pain is evil and from the Devil; a world of pain is not what God originally intended but is what has occurred because of man’s own fall into sin.

But what if God uses our pain for a greater good? What if He is able to speak to us through our pain in a way that He does not normally speak to us?

The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt…

And pain is not only immediately recognisable evil, but evil impossible to ignore. We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shovelling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure.

But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world…

- C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1940)