Sitting by the side of the road after my engine had overheated, I reflected once again on the wisdom of not ignoring the early warning signs that something is wrong. Ten days earlier the heating inside my car had stopped working, but I was too busy to take the car into the garage. If only I had done so I would have discovered that the car was leaking coolant from a broken rubber hose – the fault that in the end led to my breakdown.
The writer CS Lewis spent the early years of his life as a convinced atheist, on the basis that belief in a loving, all-powerful God could not possibly be reconciled with a world of pain and suffering. After he came to faith in Jesus Christ in his early 30’s he wrestled with this problem and finally came to this conclusion, “Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
Like the heating failing in my car God seems to allow pain to exist in order to wake us up to the fact that something is wrong with the world – our relationship with Him is broken. The question is whether we will pay any attention and ask for help.
