When I was a teenager, ads for anti-acne and “skin cleaning” products insisted that we could tell that the product was working because it made our skin “tingle” (i.e. burn). This clever marketing led my generation to erroneously connect pain with the medicinal efficacy of a skincare product.
I say “erroneously” because these nasty, burning products did nothing to keep the zits at bay: Instead, they burned because they were, in fact, really irritating our poor skins. The irritation had nothing to do with curing acne or keeping our pores clean, it just made our skin problems worse. Fortunately for younger generations, consumer advocates like Paula Begoun came along to set women straight: Girls now know that if a cosmetic product “burns” it is irritating and harming your skin, not healing it.
So eventually I got over the notion that in order to make my skin look better I had to apply stinging astringents. But I didn’t necessarily get over the notion that pain=healing. I kept with me the idea that the “right” choice for a Christian was almost always the most painful one.
Now I am perfectly aware that pain is unavoidable and that, indeed, oftentimes the right choice in a given situation is one that results in suffering. At the same time, however, I want to challenge the idea that we, as Christians, should assume that the most painful choice is always the correct one.
Discernment is always a difficult task, and it is made more difficult by the fact that it is often colored by our own desires and needs . But we can just as easily fool ourselves into making the choice that will cause us the most pain, just because we think that it is necessarily the “holiest” option. But just as we can deceive ourselves into thinking that God wants us to make the easiest, most pleasant choice for ourselves, we can also deceive ourselves into thinking that God always wants us to suffer.
The ugly truth is that humans are prone to self-deception. We are also prone to constructing self-images that, while inaccurate, we are deeply invested in maintaining. In choosing pain over something more pleasant, we may not be practicing selflessness, but instead might (emphasis on “might”) be engaging in a selfish boosting of our own ego. After all, if we can cast ourselves as sacrificial and selfless with our choices, the better Christian we (and others) will think that we are. In the end, though, we have made a choice that is primarily focused on us, with little concern for God’s desires or the needs of those around us.
There is no easy answer to difficult choices, of course (in fact, this is what makes them “difficult”). Thus, the easy/hard, pleasant/painful dichotomies need to be recognized as simplistic and false. Recognizing our humanity, with our creaturely needs and limitations, and honoring this aspect of who we are, isn’t selfish and it isn’t bad. In fact, it is the first step towards understanding ourselves in relation to our God and others. It is also the first step in learning that our suffering (or our joy) is not the most important consideration in our choices, nor, for that matter, in God’s decision to love us anyway.
