Of Pain

Found this among my facebook messages. It's part of a rather long and preachy message I sent to a friend on May 28, 2010 during my grandmother's wake.

i think that pain is a wonderful mechanism designed by God for life on earth. imagine what life is like for someone who has leprosy or whatever disease that causes the victim to not feel pain. makatamak sya ug tunok or masunog sya or masamaran sya, dili niya ma-feel. how could he protect/defend himself? how would he know that something's wrong?

pain, i think, is one of the best indicators of disorder, of malfunction. pain tells us when we are straying from the good path.

i think of heaven as [a] place devoid of pain because then, pain would not be necessary. but for here and for now, where we co-exist with evil forces, we need pain to tell us that something is wrong and needs to be corrected.

we also need pain to mark our mistakes, the places we should not go back to, the things we should not do again. they come with our mistakes, and they come with lessons. lessons to make us better people and to lead us to better places.

and pain keeps us on our toes - vigilant and ready. remember the dark ages? the church then was way purer because persecution stirred people's hearts and minds, and has thus purged the people. pain reminds us that we cannot, for one moment, relax.

as much as this world is concerned, there is more to fear from the absence of pain than from its presence.

Still true.