A wise man once wrote, “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” (Ecclesiastes 1:18) If Solomon had more knowledge than his peers, he would be equipped to judge whether or not he also had more sorrow. Why do these two things go together?
There is opposition in all things. Hungering and thirsting after righteousness is like pulling back the pendulum on a grandfather clock. When you pull back the pendulum to the right, you know that it will swing to the left to equal displacement. If you want greater righteousness, you willingly submit yourself to God for greater affliction. The more you want, the more you will encounter what you don’t.
When Jacob was shown the ladder of ascent and descent in a dream, it was marvelous to behold. But hearing about or seeing this is quite different than experiencing it. He was shown what would happen from a very different perspective than those actually experiencing the ladder would describe it. This journey is not one of angelic floating through the air. Jacob crawled on his face toward God, figuratively, over twenty odd years of suffering for the benefit of others, and, literally, in an excruciating night of approaching God.
You can’t increase in knowledge without experience, and you can’t have experience without experiencing pain.
Every rung in Jacob’s ladder is another swing of the pendulum—but this time the arm is longer and the path wider than the last. It supplies greater joy and knowledge at the cost of greater suffering and pain.
Challenge increases the contrast between darkness and light. It is the only thing that has a hope of helping the unaware become aware of God’s voice and move towards it. When God’s light shines in the darkness of our hearts—which it does unceasingly—we recognize it to varying degrees. Those who do not recognize it or who recognize only very little of it are well served by a loving God to go through tremendous affliction. When the darkness increases, the light is more obvious, like a diamond on velvet versus held up to the daylight.
There are two secrets of happiness. The first, that everyone seems to realize, is that to get more happiness, you have to seek more happiness. The second, that no one seems to realize, is that to get more happiness, you have to learn to respond better to and even enjoy the opposition to happiness. The way you do this is through acquiring and reconciling yourself to knowledge—knowledge of how things really are.
We can change the way we frame what we now consider to be negative. We can change the way we react to it. The illusion is that pain is always negative. It is a silly illusion, and surprisingly common, because we encounter things almost daily that we frame as positive, even though they cause pain. Exercising, having kids, eating cake, drinking alcohol, sitting in a car, all of these things are painful experiences. Yet we regard them as positive.
Life is not meant to be and cannot be a constant series of objectively beautiful moments. Instead, it is like a road trip through Montana: an almost constant series of objectively bland moments, punctuated with scenes of tremendous beauty. Most people don't do anything close to what they could do to multiply those beautiful moments. But even if you do, you are still going to end up in a place where the majority of your life is things other than those. If you want more happiness out of life, you have to develop a perspective that allows you to derive value from what others do not appreciate—those much more common moments that are not exciting, not what you would have picked, and maybe even painful. If you make the effort, you can learn things about life that make you appreciate the normally undesirable. You still won't like it as much as those rare special times, but because these other times are so numerous, just learning to appreciate them a little more will mean you get a lot more happiness out of life compared to those who don’t appreciate them at all.
One way to interpret disagreeable experiences is to recognize that they are exactly what is needed to teach you precisely what is necessary for you to enjoy the next level of reality. Every disagreeable experience is an invitation from God, showing you that he knows you are ready to qualify for the next level of joy. Maintaining your godly character through the experience will require new knowledge from God—tools that you currently lack, but that are required to contend with greater proportions of reality. This process is how you proceed to greater joy.
It is important to understand that a step towards that life isn’t the same as instantly receiving an increment of more joy. Degrees of happiness don’t seem to be continuous, like awareness is. You accumulate awareness bit by bit. While the bits can be large or small, there seem to be no jumps. Our experience with God and our joy seem to be discrete. They seem to stay at one level for what seems like a long time, then jump ahead radically, all at once. When scriptural personalities have collapsed in a state of joy, it is not from an incremental experience. It hit them all at once. When God appears to you, it is all at once.
Were you to be in God’s presence in a reconciled state, you would marvel at the love you feel. It is indescribable. And yet, you may be surprised to discover that you feel at least as close to him while suffering for others here and now than you do in his literal presence.