Warning: This Post has No Conclusion

I know conventional wisdom says to know your audience and say what they want to hear and have an intro, three points, and always, always a conclusion. But I just don’t feel like following that right now. I’ve started six or seven blog posts in the last month and I haven’t been able to finish any of them. They’re not assembling themselves into anything coherent and I just can’t seem to find a conclusion or a main point to any of them. They’re all rambling and disorganized.

I thought perhaps that might be useful though, or at least mildly interesting. Perhaps people might want to read thoughts that don’t have a tidy answer and might not even be asking a question. So here goes:

Too often, theological and secular responses to suffering focus on the periphery. Too often, when we ask why a loved one had to die, we’re more concerned with why we had to lose them, rather than why they had to lose everything. As we practice theology, as we seek answers for the hard questions in life, we find meaning that suits the people who are still alive. That makes sense, as the living tend to be the ones having all the conversations in much the same way as the winners write the history books, but the answers of the living invariably fail the dying, just as history books fail to accurately tell the stories of the people who lose.

Because of this bias, we get platitudinous answers that just don’t work if you’re dying, however slowly. They’re usually vague and unhelpful, something about growing through hardship, a door closing and a window opening, or what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Sometimes though, what doesn’t kill just leaves you weaker, a little closer to death. Sometimes, what doesn’t kill you simply hasn’t killed you yet.

But it will. Give it time, and it will.

There aren't a lot of warm, fuzzy sayings for that. There aren’t a lot of comforting theologies that acknowledge this reality. That’s probably because dying isn’t particularly warm, fuzzy, or comfortable. But if we’re going to talk about suffering and death in ways that don’t fail people experiencing pain and hardships and wondering if they’ll live through the next day or week or month or year, we’re going to have to get over that. We have to do better than saying “well, I’m sure your impending death sucks, but at least you’re becoming a better person through it, right? Every cloud has a silver lining!”

Fortunately, I think people are realizing this more and more. There’s a growing focus on actually letting people tell their own stories, and it thankfully includes letting those who are themselves dying have a greater platform to speak on death than people who have thought about it from a distance instead of experiencing it firsthand. It’s still annoying to see books on suffering written by people with incredibly privileged lives who haven't really experienced anything especially tragic or difficult, especially as I’ve been pitching my book on—among other things—why suffering exists for over a year now, but it’s OK, I guess. We're trending towards more Own Voices in literature and public discourse, and that's all I can really ask for.

See, I really don’t have a conclusion here. Maybe I’m just whining. I’ll let you judge that for yourself.