Suffering and Sin

In the New Testament, Jesus and his disciples encounter a blind man. “Who sinned,” his followers ask, “him or his parents? Why is he blind?”

“Neither,” Jesus said. “He’s blind so that you and everyone else could know that he could be healed.”

I don’t find this answer especially satisfying. I want God’s glory, I want widespread faith, I want healing. But I don’t want to think that we suffer just so that God can show how powerful He is. I’m still developing my theology of suffering but, so far, that’s not it.

I still don’t have a theology of suffering, but I appreciate the distinction Jesus makes here between sins and bad things that just happen to us in mortality. Suffering doesn’t mean you did something wrong, Jesus says. Sometimes, it’s just suffering.

I have a hard time telling the different between suffering and sin. In Ella Enchanted (which is a fabulous novel that everyone should read), Ella writes, “There are two sorts of people in the world: those who blame everyone else and those who blame only themselves.” Like all “two sorts of people” constructions, this is very simplified, but if I were to identify with one, it would definitely be the second sort—the one who tends to think that things are their fault. We could pretend that this is the more virtuous of the two, but I think it probably comes from a need to feel in control. If it’s my fault, then I can fix it.

There are so many things I can’t fix, including most kinds of suffering. Sins are the easier one, in some ways, because, through the Atonement, I can become new and different. There is not control (there’s never any control), but there is choice, and the choice is mine.

But the suffering that’s just suffering—most of the time there’s not a lot I can do about that.

When I first got really depressed in 2020, it felt like sin. I don’t think I named it that, but that’s what I thought it was, deep down. I was hurting so bad, I was hurting the people around me (pain never stays ours, does it?), and I was having such a hard time talking to God. What else but sin could do this?

One day, though, sitting in the park near our house, listening to kids laugh, watching the sky turn pink, the thought came to me that depression wasn’t a sin. It was a trial. It was pain, it was suffering, but it came from sickness, not sin.

Sins are hurts that we take on ourselves through behavior that doesn’t line up with the ways God has asked us to live. But trials, challenges, those are just the bad things that happen. They’re broken anatomy, out-of-balance chemicals. They’re car accidents and bosses that aren’t nice to you.

In General Conference last October, Sister Annette Dennis told a story about a man who was very proud of his hunting dog. One day, when he tried to show her off to his friends, she wouldn’t do any of the things that he’d trained her to do. He shoved her in the kennel, angry about how she’d embarrassed him, and it was only when he got home that he realized that she was injured—cut to the bone. Sister Dennis tells the story to encourage us not to judge others. But it goes to my point too: sometimes, things that seem to us and others to be disobedience or misbehavior aren’t that at all—they’re just hurts.

Illness isn’t sin. Trials aren’t sin. Suffering isn’t sin. Mental health difficulties aren’t sin. Repentance doesn’t take it away, doesn’t wipe it clean, doesn’t heal it. Illness is like blindness. It’s a challenge. You can’t repent your way to healing a challenge.

Sometimes, of course, something is both. People who are in pain sometimes behave badly, which is a different thing than experiencing a trial. There’s a brilliant Invisibilia episode on this, but the long and short of it is that being in pain does not give us permission to be jerks. And it can be hard, to differntiate between the darkness we experiencing and the darkness we passing on.

Like I said in the beginning, I don’t have a strong theology of pain. I don’t know why bad things happen to good people, I don’t know whey there is cancer or genocide. But I do think it’s important to differentiate pain and sin, in ourselves and others. When I know the difference, it allows me to call down the applicable parts of the Atonement. And while, as Elder Holland said back in 1999, “Some blessings come soon, some come late, and some don’t come until heaven,” my experience is that God will tutor and give me the grace to grow as soon as I go to him with sin, and that He’ll heal me as He can when I go to Him with pain. Somehow, the system seems less effective when I mix the two up.