.by Rev. Bob Johnson
Do you ever have the sense that, as you read the newspaper, watch the evening news, or even listen to the radio, that you are a bystander? Much of what we experience is secondhand. We are several steps removed from actual events. Yet, the events happening across the world enter our living rooms, in a matter of hours from the time of the actually happening. They enter so often, we become the proverbial spectators, distanced from the actual event.
In a different way we stand as bystanders even in our own lives. If a person becomes ill, they are removed from the home to a hospital. When a loved one dies, the body is removed, and suddenly the responsibility for its preparation for burial is in the hands of strangers. The savageries of war are better known by many of us because the TV brings its horrors into our homes directly on the evening news.
One author has written that this causes us to distrust life. Life becomes something to conquer, to struggle with and against. Life becomes an enemy each time there is pain or frustration. We do not embrace life, but creep through our days reacting to our world and hoping our faith and our prayers will be the magic wands that take away pain or frustration. Pain and health are needed elements in our lives. We can hardly know the wonders of health and a full life if we do not know pain and frustration. Life tests us as we experience pain and frustration, for then we know there is meaning and joy in this existence.
No one likes pain or frustration. Yet without them, life and death are never connected, and neither are joy and sorrow, but they are all a part of life. Each of these "feelings" has a reason for being. For as St. Paul says, "All things work together for good to those who love God."
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