The Problem of Pain

Well due to all our musings from today about hurts and relationships I decided to go to a pro. Here is a quote I found from Lewis and his book, The Problem of Pain. When it comes to really loving people I get fired up. We're suppose to no matter the cost to our own lives. The term has become so watered down and meaningless. I doubt if any of us knows what it truly means to love but we are all in the process of learning.

The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so as we attach a trivial meaning to the word "love", and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. "Thou hast created all things and for thy pleasure they are and were created." (Rev. 4:11) We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which Divine love may rest 'well pleased.' To ask that God's love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impedded and repelled, by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us loveable...........What we would here and now call our happiness is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as He can love without impediments, we shall in fact be happy.

But God's love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, causes all the goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence and then into real, though derivative, lovability. God is goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get it. In that sense all His love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give and nothing to receive. Hence if God sometimes speaks as though the Impassible could suffer passion and eternal fullness could be in want, and in want of those beings on whom it bestows all from their bare existence upwards, this can only mean, if it means anything intelligible by us, that God of mere miracle has made Himself able so to hunger and created in Himself that which we can satisfy. If He requires us, the requirement is of His own choosing.

Frenchie is out for the evening...