The Pain of Being God

The pain of being God.

It terrifies me, at 4:37 AM. I wake up crying because I gave up so much for them that I will never get back, because I wanted that love so badly in my loneliness, because they are still in my dreams and I will never have them again, because I loved somebody more than they loved me and received rejection, and God says, "now you know what it is like."

I'm scared by the picture I see.

He loves every single one of you, every single one of us, much, much more than we love Him. That ache of inequality will never be filled by billions of people loving Him, because He will always have the ache of those He lost. His love, from the beginning, formed your details and created all the pleasure you have ever experienced. Every moment of serendipity and goodness, he carefully wove for you through a complex genetic and physics-based scheme of history.

You will never, ever love him back that much.

The guy who wrote the book "A Lament for a Son", the book I read to understand Jonathan's death while I was hospitalized last month, says that through the pain of his son's death he sees "a much more disturbing picture," the picture of God deciding, instead of magically erasing pain, to hang bloodied and beaten and naked on a rough wooden torture stake. To engage in our suffering.

One of my friends from high school, another one I loved more than loved me, used to call God a masochist.

It's deeper than that, though.

"Who, for the joy set before Him, endured the cross..."

He knows a joy that motivates him through all eternity. (For, that moment is eternal for him--he is outside of time, so as Lewis says, "all times are the present" to him. He is always on the cross, and always in glory) It's a joy greater than you or I will ever know, so he engages in suffering greater than you or I will ever know in order to achieve that.

Because, as it says in the Count of Monte Christo, you cannot know how to feel joy until you deeply feel pain.

Oh, the joy of being God...

"I fill up in my body what is lacking of the sufferings of Christ." One of the most confusing things Paul ever wrote.

He enters into our suffering to be bound together with us in substance. "The firstborn must suffer" Hebrews says, so that we have a High Priest who can comfort us and understand our suffering, and, if you read Hebrews again, for a deeper, more mystical reason. The Lament guy puts it somewhat like, "By coming down to relieve our suffering, he relieves some of his" and then something like when we suffer, aching (because all aching is just a longing for the heaven we know is RIGHT--blessed are those who mourn, he says!)...

"When we suffer, we are relieving the suffering of God."

By living, and suffering, we take on some of his suffering.

Maybe that's why he made so many of us.

I am comforted, in my sorrow, by this purpose given to my ache. To know, in a tiny way, what it is like to have unrequited AGAPE-style love (I emphasize this for I know some of you Christians will take this some weird erotic way, as you are wont to do)...

To know in a tiny way, unrequited love, is to relieve a tiny bit of his suffering from unrequited love.

Oh Father, let me cause you less pain. Or don't, and let me then cause you more joy? Maybe this Paradox is why "those forgiven much, love much"--why he spurns the righteous Pharisees and seeks out sinners, who will hurt him the most.

Because then he can have the most Fatherly joy in their feeble attempts to love him back.

Oh, the terror and beauty of this God I love.