We heard yesterday that a friend of a friend has an inoperable cancerous brain tumor. He is 38 with a toddler and five month old twins. Even though I don't personally know this person, he is a close friend of one of B's close friends so it seems different than just hearing that someone in the world found out they have a brain tumor (and B does know him as an acquaintance). B and I can't stop thinking about this person and his family. Apparently, he had migraines for a while but didn't think anything of it. He finally went to the doctor after his arm went numb one day, they did the tests, and within a week he went from being a guy who gets bad headaches periodically to a guy being told he has an inoperable cancerous brain tumor.
Most people can't even fathom that. There is no way to imagine, sitting where you are right now, what it would be like to find out that news one week from now. And somehow, we think that because we can't imagine it, it won't happen. I'm certain that he didn't think this would happen to him. No one thinks it will happen to them.
Living on this earth, people are aware that life is not fair. People are aware that things may happen to them that they didn't want to happen to them. You know, things like getting injured in a car accident, having your house burglarized, getting laid off from a job at a terrible time. It seems that everyone knows and accepts that these things happen. It makes us angry, annoyed and frustrated. But it's pretty rare that events such as those I listed above lead people to shout out the proverbial, "life's not fair!" No, "life's not fair" is implicitly reserved for events that are unexpected, beyond comprehension, and typically not of temporary impact. Even though it's not "fair" to end up in a car accident, that falls within the fairness deductible of our life philosophy that things undeserved will happen. These day to day things exhaust the fairness deductible for which we allow, such that when the bigger things, more expensive to our soul, happen, we are in a position to cry out against the whole life picture.
As I was thinking about this issue of fairness yesterday, I thought for a minute about how wonderful the world would be if everything were fair. What would it be like if everyone got exactly what they deserved, and we could expect everything that happened based on a certain set of rules? Surprisingly, I came to the conclusion that the world would be devoid of any amount of compassion and filled with self-righteousness.
If you could go around constantly comparing yourself to those around you with an objective measure, you would become arrogant if you did well and resentful if you did not. You would not desire to help those who were not doing well because you would assume it's their own fault. If you were doing well, you certainly would have little need for anyone outside of yourself - God, friends, family - because you would be so self-righteous about your accomplishments. It would be a lonely place. If you were not doing well, you would hate those around you who did better than you and have very little motivation to improve; if your life is an open book to everyone else, they would know you were already doing poorly and you would always feel behind (the embarassment factor). There are many, many implications of this "completely fair" world.
(On a side note: When I relayed my thoughts to B on the matter, he pointed out that this is the current state (to some degree) of several Eastern countries who DO believe that your condition in this life is directly related to what you did in prior lives. It's interesting to see how different our societies are as a result; however, even though they believe in a degree of "fairness" I don't believe they think that life has a 100% correlation to what you do/don't do, so it's still not a perfect model.)
The most interesting thing I took from thinking about all this is that in a perfectly fair, yet sinful, world, human beings become everything God never wanted them to be: prideful, uncompassionate, uncharitable, resentful, unloving, self-serving, independent of relationships with each other and with Him. A sinful world seems to necessitate a lack of fairness in order to facilitate the traits that God wants us to have - humility, compassion, charity, love, dependence on one other and on God. (Why the world is necessarily sinful to begin with is a whole other topic.)
From the 80,000 foot level, I feel like this was a really interesting personal revelation. However, in our day to day lives when we are or someone we know is the victim of beyond-the-deductible unfairness, an 80,000 foot level world view is hardly consoling. Even if this world view makes perfect sense logically, the inevitable question of "Why me (or him/her)?" will arise. Even if we know these things happen, no one ever thinks it will happen to them.
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2 comments:
How terrible for your friend. :( You're right, no one ever thinks things like this will happen to them. I almost think we are wired that way because if we always had the tendancy to think bad things were going to happen to us, we would be bogged down by the weight of potential problems and bad things that could happen to us. Does that make sense?
On another note, I think in a world that was "fair" we would all be suffering because in a fair world we would all get what we deserve--and for a sinful world, that means suffering and death. It is only through God's grace and mercy that we can have hope that we won't get what is "fair". For myself, I'm glad that we don't live in a fair world; that God, in his unfathomable grace, chooses to show mercy to some, even though all of us deserve what's "fair".
Very thought provoking post...thanks for sharing!
You've tapped into something that could be plumbed deeply. Keep it up! Congrats on the pregnancies going so well!!
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