The Struggle to Actively Struggle

I think today I want to write about resisting struggle, but that may or may not be where this post ends up.

First and foremost--I need to learn to take my own advice. I can't tell you how many times I tell people that active struggle will produce for them a full life, one with a broad spectrum of awareness, emotion, joy, pain, love, and everything in between. I consistently voice against numbing pain and unpleasantness through entertainment, spending, food, or what have you. But man, lately...I've been succumbing to the demon Numbness in an extraordinary way. It's a daily battle (or should I say daily defeat? Because I usually give in before the battle even begins.) It's easy enough for someone to tell someone else who is struggling with something to not give up, to keep going, that light will come, and that the beauty of life is in struggling. But what do you say to someone who isn't struggling today, but every day? With the same stuff? At what point does active struggle in a situation like that become a waste of time?

And that's kind of where I'm at. Active struggle feels like a waste of time to me. I guess you could call that hopelessness. Which everyone says is the worst possible place to be in. Which makes me feel ashamed that I would even succumb to something like that. Which makes me want to actively engage in my pain, but for the wrong reasons--for obligatory reasons. And as we all know, that never ends well.

So, I guess my ultimate question is...what is this whole struggle/pain concept all about? To struggle, in order to build character, in order to...what? To what end does having character get us? A full life? A better world? But then what? Why does Christ want to sharpen our character on earth? In order that we can sharpen each other?  In order to build the character of the body of Christ? But again, to what end? A better world...but, a world that will eventually perish, right? So, then what? Is pain and struggle simply a product of The Fall of Man, something we just have to deal with while we're here, and just make the best of it until we reach heaven? If that's the case, then numbing myself out sounds justified!

When I think about things like this I always wonder what it would be like to have a secular point of view with these kinds of questions. What do secular philosophers say about struggle and pain, and what the point of it is? Is it reduced to biology? Is it unexplainable without some type of source inflicting the pain?



In one of Gregory Boyd's sermons I listened to recently, he spoke about how a lot of Christians are content to dismiss hard questions and say, 'Just accept the mysteries of God.' Gregory said that's simply a pious way of saying, "I don't care enough to think about it."