Light Affliction

A set of scales, old ones, the kind with a pan on each side, and somebody quietly putting weights on the far pan while you are looking at the near one.

Nobody calls their own pain light. Certainly not at the hour you are reading this, with the thing still unresolved and the tiredness underneath it going into its second year. And there is a fair objection to this verse that is almost never said out loud in church: it sounds like a man who has not been through much telling people who have that it does not really count.

Except that the man who wrote it lists his own record later in the same letter, and it is not an easy read. Five times he received forty stripes save one. Three times beaten with rods. Once stoned. Three shipwrecks, a night and a day in open water, cold, hunger, sleeplessness. He is not grading your suffering from a study. And read the sentence carefully, because he is not calling it small, he is calling it comparatively lighter, on a balance, against something on the other pan. The line before tells you what makes the comparison possible: though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. And the line after tells you the condition: while we look not at the things which are seen. Paul is describing an act of attention, and he knows it is an effort.

Also, note the verb. Worketh. The affliction is not the price paid for the glory. It is producing it.

Here is the warning, and it is aimed at the well-meaning. This verse is a weight Paul puts in his own hands. It was never issued to you for use on somebody else's grief, and a person who says it to a bereaved friend is not quoting Paul. They are ending a conversation.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 62 is What Is Man (Psalm 8:4).

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