Love understands pain
No matter how difficult a life we’ve had, we have all had some experience of love. We know the thrill of love’s emotion; we can recall love’s energy which lifts us beyond ourselves.
Love is wonderful. It is grand, exciting, uplifting and invigorating. But love can also be painful, particularly when it is lost, or when it is put to the test.
Being a proud father of three wonderful men, I know that on a number of occasions, my love for my boys has been put to the test. In the early years, through bleary-eyed ,midnight nappy changes and seemingly endless hours of screaming, I had to keep reminding myself of that famous Bible passage in 1 Corinthians 13 - love is patient, love is kind, love is all-enduring. My fatherly love continued to be tested into their teenage years, but the hours of screaming were replaced by hours of moody silences, slammed doors and bleary-eyed waiting for a wandering son (or two) to come home - long after their curfew had passed. These are just a snapshot of the small pains I have experience as I have loved, and continue to love, my highly treasured offspring.
Love brings us to the highest of heights, and to the lowest of lows. You can open your heart and have your love and commitment rewarded; you can pour your life and soul into it and wind up bruised and broken hearted.
There is certainly a tension between love’s grandeur and love’s pain. You see this resonating through music of all eras with lyrics like “love lifts us up where we belong”, “love makes us look like we are fools” etc. Perhaps the most memorable of the lyrics of love has been the anthemic Beatles classic “All You Need is Love”.
And though the loss of love, through a parting of ways or through fatality, leaves the one left loveless feeling as though they themselves have died, most would never trade that sense of having loved – even as they suffer in the pain of loss.
Love is a risk, and love, no matter how wonderful, will always involve some sort of pain and require some form of sacrifice.
Often at Easter we, as the Christian Church, gloss over the pain and darkness of the Easter story and fast-track to singing a song of celebration.
God knows the pain of love on Good Friday. God knows the emptiness of love lost on Easter Saturday. God knows that love is patient as it waits for Sunday sunrise, a love which is kind in its selflessness and all-enduring in its suffering.
Love, simply, is the Easter story. The love of the Easter story though is devastation and celebration, darkness and light.
When we gloss over the pain of Easter’s story and the heady darkness that cloaked the world at the death of Christ, we gloss over one of the most gut-wrenching realisations of the Christian message: God loves us. God loves us, to the point of death and back. God loves us in the tension of love’s heights and love’s heartbreak.
And we learn from that model of love. Here within the Uniting Church of South Australia we’ve been particularly moved by the suffering of children who have been caught up as slaves within the chocolate industry – a particular problem for West Africa where there are thousands of trafficked children picking cocoa beans.
The love of chocolate is very strong in a lot of us, particularly at Easter time. But I’d like to ask you, on behalf of Stop the Traffik, an international organisation dedicated to ending human trafficking around the world, to consider what it means to choose love for our fellow human beings this Easter – though it may create some pains for us. You can make a change in the trafficking trade, simply by being wise consumers. Buy fair-trade chocolate and perhaps consider how you could be involved further in changing the industry.
It’s a small and simple action of love for us, but can make a world of difference to those trapped in the torture and cruelty of slavery.
Love and pain are often intertwined, but love is the greater of the two.
Rev Rob Williams
Moderator - Uniting Church SA
For more information on trafficking and chocolate, visit stopthetraffik.org.au
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