Recently I had cause to return to where I spent my teenage years and early adulthood.  I came home a week later with two lasting impressions.

The first thing that blew me away was Melbourne’s suburban sprawl.  The country roads with their dairy farms, where my friends and I rode our bicycles as 14-year olds, are now densely packed suburban streets.  It was somewhat disorienting.  My recognisable landmarks had virtually all disappeared.  I took the train from the city out to where I used to live.  It was trip that for some 12-months I did back and forth five times a week.  If I dozed while traveling on that train, one look out the window and I would generally know what the next station was.  Not anymore.

The other strong impression was almost just as disorienting.  This was the place where I had spent my carefree teenage years.  Life then was wonderful and one didn’t really have a care in the world.  I have fond memories of cycling with friends to the beach or a nearby lake on hot summer days.  And then of course... graduating to a motor car.  And what can I say about first navigating relationships with the opposite sex?  Wonderful memories!

My friends and acquaintances back then basically lived the same care-free life.  We spent time together on Friday nights at the church youth group, Saturday afternoons invariably included an outing somewhere and on Sundays we were with family and friends at church.  Back then there were not too many clouds on the horizon.  I caught up with many of these folk – some I had not spoken to since youth group days and I still tended to think of them in terms of those ‘good old days’.

So what was disorienting?  This: the changes in the human landscape were almost as dramatic as those of the physical landscape.  Of course I knew things had changed for them just as for me.  We get married and have children and that brings responsibilities.  Mortgages and business contracts, employment opportunities and home maintenance mean that we’re no longer the people we were in our teenage years.

But it’s much more than just that.  It’s rather that over the intervening years the brokenness of life in a fallen world increasingly takes its toll – and not too many are exempt.  Some I spoke to were now widows or widowers.  In one family... a bitter beak up and divorce; in another... a family business collapsed.  For someone else it’s been a very long battle with cancer.  Suicide has intruded into this family and in that one a sibling has ruined his life with drugs.  Age had brought its own struggles with decreased mobility and deteriorating health.

Of course the teenage years were not entirely free of trials and suffering either.  I recall a boyhood friend whose newly-wed brother died shortly after his wedding while playing cards one Sunday night with his bride.  As a 14-year old I accompanied my dad to the funeral of one of his mates who died of cancer.  Yet by and large it was a carefree life and we were not greatly impacted by life’s brokenness.  But now it hit home to me how every family had its trials and tribulations.

It made me think of a previous Aussie Prime Minister.  Malcolm Frazer once famously stated that life wasn’t meant to be easy.  The Apostle Paul put it a little differently.  He said, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now”.  Paul went on to talk about our own groaning with life’s brokenness.

It’s helpful to put our trials and tribulations into Paul’s framework of labour pains.  Okay, I’m a bloke and I (thankfully!) have never experienced labour pains.  But I did experience them ‘vicariously’.  I was there at the birth of all five of my biological children and their mother was usually in labour for 10 to 12 hours.  I recall that after one birth I ended up with teeth marks in my arm, so I do know just a little about labour pains.

So why does Paul speak about our troubles and the brokenness of the world in terms of labour pains?  It’s because of what the labour pains normally lead to: the joy and delight of welcoming new life into the world.

So here’s a wonderful contribution to our theology of suffering.  Pain and hardship are not meaningless... just as labour pains are not meaningless.  God is ushering in a new world that will begin when Jesus returns.  And now God invites you to see you pain and suffering in terms of labour pains for that new creation.

John Westendorp