Spider webs and suffering

It's the complexities of suffering that trouble me the most, I think. I walked into a public restroom last night and there was a fairly large beetle hanging upside-down in a tiny web, just above the floor. It was flailing around trying to get free. I was mesmerized immediately, until the bug was completely still and I saw this tiny spider creeping down to the point of its caught leg and then he flailed again, as if he knew his fate. And I thought, "How cruel." Being removed from the situation, I could rescue the giant beetle, but then my only inclination would've been to stomp it a few minutes later. Now on the other hand, letting the beetle remain left a colossal meal for the tiny spider, just trying to make its way in the world. Right? I also considered stomping them both, but then what good is that? I thought about the bug hanging there waiting for its slow death, already creeping down its leg. Was it afraid? Was the spider excited to have baited its prey? Was there suffering there? Can bugs feel? I couldn't stop thinking about it.

So many around me are suffering. I have a close friend, my age, suffering intense physical and emotional pain from cancer, her life has been paved with trauma for years now, attacking her family where it hurts the most. My little brother has been taken off the payroll where he is employed now, voluntarily, as a youth pastor and has now taken a secular job in sales. This week we met them at a prestigious Children Hospital where his brand new baby had to undergo angioplasty on his tiny heart. I have numerous friends that have prayed for years for a baby, seemingly to no avail. Their wombs lie dormant while their arms and homes yearn for a child. I am acquainted with two people, a man and a woman, serving time in prison for whatever their crime or innocence, who every moment are surrounded by "terrible evil" surviving only minute by minute, with years left to serve. Each of these have resigned their soul to the savior for life and yet suffering seems to ride the current of their wake. Who can explain the mind of God? And how can I justify the complaints in my own life when it seems so miniscule in comparison to the real terror and heartache of those in true suffering now?

And yet I do, we all do. We all suffer secret hurts and pain from past lies, jabs, and cuts. It is scarcely ideal for a Christian not to suffer, but can't it be an even spread? Why does my sister suffer so heavily when my I am riding high in the universe? These questions haunt me. I am at a loss for what to say, everything in me is inclined to defend our Father and His allowance of these things as He is truly sovereign, but how can I defend His ways when I know them not? I can only cry when you cry and hurt for your loss, and pray when I don't know what to say. It's the way He rolls, and if we are His, it's the way we roll.

In the ever-present Orthodoxy, that I believe I will never finish, as I accidentally re-read an entire chapter with only vague familiarity because of its complexity of language that confuses my feeble mind, there is an important segment that talks about how one can never fully appreciate good until he endures the bad. And the degree to which the good can be regarded is directly connected to bad that they have known. My marriage has suffered intense, critical pain; we have battled almost to the death for its life and here I stand on the other side of the mountain, completely content and in love every morning that I wake up next to the hero I married. Is that the justice of God; that if you suffer so deeply, you can relish the true abundance that is life in Christ? Or is it just the way of life in a fallen world, that some suffer real bad while others skip through through the days, occassionally skinning their knees, band-aid the booboo and keep on skippin'? These are the thoughts that plague me today.