I Think Maybe Everyone Else Knew This Already

That boy I married fell down the stairs this morning. It started off HOLY F*CK and has ended with Are You Kidding? We've just added it to the list of reasons 2011 ought not to be repeated.

We got to spend some time in the ER, with side trips to x-ray and CT (which I will now always affectionately call Land of Pantless Men) and of course see first hand that life is full of Hard for many, and as Hard as this morning was for us, it was Harder Still for several others that passed through my line of sight.

So then we got to talking about degrees of suffering and all those things one talks about having averted the Worst Case while still living in the Pretty Shitty Case.  And as often happens, that boy wondered about why we believe in a God that can't do better than suffering.  And by 'we', well of course, that means me, since I do faith for our family the way he does car care and the recycling.

Anyway, I found myself saying that at least there was no false promise of no suffering in the Christian faith. That every religion was just an attempt by humanity to explain why life sucks and to make it less so.  And as I said, I kind of realized that was probably true.  Right? Isn't that what every belief system is: an effort to make sense of the inevitable painfulness of being?

I think maybe that could be true.  Which makes me a bit more commited to my own little way of understanding the Creator as the promise of presence in the face of All That Should Not Be.  Because the alternatives are things like Try Harder And It Won't Be So Hard, and Too Bad You Suck, Good Luck Out There, and Maybe Next Time Around It Won't Be So Bad.

I mostly just wish that things weren't so hard these days.  We could do with less suffering, and certainly most of the world could too. But barring the end of difficult, I'll take presence. 

Always Presence.