“When you are happy,” he says, “so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be-or so it feels-welcomed with open arms.

Clerk) in 1961 and then accredited formally to Lewis with a reprinting in 1963. The book is so raw that it was first published under a pseudonym (N.W. In A Grief Observed, Lewis’s book about the loss of his wife published posthumously, he doesn’t start off with a satisfying answer about where God is in times of struggle. Here are several points worth considering. His book The Problem of Pain (1940) and A Grief Observed (1961) are helpful guides to working through suffering theologically and emotionally. Lewis is a good person to turn to, to both feel the hammer at your head and also find some instruction on how to unravel the difficulty of pain. How should we teach about suffering? C.S. There is nothing easy about pain and there’s nothing easy about its instruction, both before it begins and in the mix of its weight in our lives. That someone is often God, especially if we have eyes to see the brokenness in people’s lives. He says that there should be a someone with hammer at the head of every happy man, “reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show its claws”. I like to quote Anton Chekhov, the famous Russian short story writer and a Christian. The suffering of life doesn’t seem to pair with the goodness of God.

The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis