The other morning when my 14-month old girl woke me up at 5:03 a.m, the Lord was good to bring back to mind the passage that I was blogging on last week: "Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything."
As I was rocking her and hoping against all hope that she'd go back to sleep (she actually did, score one for dad), I considered this passage again.
C.S. Lewis in "The Problem of Pain" says something to the effect that pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Alas, the world somehow, inconceivably, manages to remain silent even in the midst of the pain. Therefore, because the pain "event" does not reach it's desired outcome/purpose, there is a lot of unredeemed pain in the world. There's plenty of pain that does not bear good fruit in people's lives.
It seems to me that the crucial promise that James is making here is that in the life of the daughter or son of the Most High God, all our pain is guaranteed to reach it's mark. But again, we must allow it to do so. We still have a participatory role to play, which is why James bothers to write this, why all the Scripture writers bother to write anything. This is good pastoral advice that frames all our pain in the larger picture of it's intended meaning.
There's lots of un-redeemed pain in the world. For the Christian, even in the face of "many kinds" of trials (from garden-variety to catastrophic), there's no reason why that pain should not bear the fruit of life. We've been given many promises--promises both that the pain will come and that the pain must serve our greater good.
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