Daily Manna · Day 62 · March 3
Light Affliction
“For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;”
Picture an old set of scales, the kind with a pan hanging on each side. While you stare at the near pan, someone is quietly placing weights on the far one.
Nobody calls their own pain light, especially while the problem is still unsolved and the tiredness underneath it is going into its second year. There is a fair objection to this verse that people rarely say out loud in church. It can sound like a man who has not been through much telling people who have that their pain does not really count.
But the man who wrote it lists his own record later in the same letter, and it is hard to read: "Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep." He adds cold, hunger and sleepless nights. Paul is not grading your suffering from a comfortable chair. Read his sentence carefully, too. He never calls the suffering small. He calls it light compared with something else, the way one pan looks light when the other holds "a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." The verse before tells you what makes that comparison possible: "though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day." The verse after tells you how to keep seeing it: "While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen." Paul is describing a way of paying attention, and he knows it takes effort.
Look as well at the verb: the affliction "worketh for us." Worketh means "works" or "produces." The suffering is producing the glory, the way each weight added to the far pan slowly tips the scale.
One warning belongs here, and it is for people who mean well. Paul used this verse to weigh his own troubles. It was never meant for laying on top of somebody else's grief, and saying it to a grieving friend usually just ends the conversation. Keep it for your own hands. When your own pan feels heavy, remember that God is still adding to the other one, and what He is adding will last forever.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 62 is What Is Man (Psalm 8:4).