God’s Own

On Threads recently, someone posted that their small child posed the question in the first line of this poem, and asked how we would respond. While the best answer I could come up with may sound rather derivative and Biblical and traditional, that does not make the question any less profound. Hope you enjoy the poem.

A child asks, how did God make pain?

Let’s see. Perhaps, I can explain.

First, He took a fist of sand,

Formed it warmly in His hand,

Breathed in life, and made a man,

With Eden, his terrain.

Eve, she sprang out from his rib

And was his friend through good and ill.

They blithely played upon the hill.

No trouble came in sight,

Until the snake spake to his wife.

The couple took an apple bite,

And knew the difference—wrong from right,

Clothed from naked, dark from light,

Joy from sorrow, pleasure/pain—

And knew they’d earned their God’s disdain.

So, cast out, in the cold and wet—

A sword barred entry back—the sweat

Soon bathed his brow. With toil and fret,

She soothed, forsooth, her babies’ cries,

Lamenting loss of Paradise.

So, did our God make pain, as such?

For pain is absence: missing much

That panacea, God’s own touch,

Which once, in Eden, Man enjoyed,

But with one fateful act, destroyed.

Now pain is felt by girls and boys,

Each scrape and cut, a mere refrain

Of something greater:  God’s own pain.

For worries about what comes at the end of the world, read Monsters and Demons. For more on motherhood, read Motherhood and Books. For the pain of chaos in a homeschool day when children are still around, read A Day in the Life: Chaos Theory or A Pirate’s Day in the Life.