When I was a boy I remember listening to a favorite song of my parents. It was a sung by Frank Sinatra – whose voice can make anything sound good. The song went like this,

Next time your found, with your chin on the ground
There’s a lot to be learned, so look around
Just what makes that little old ant
Think he’ll move that rubber tree plant
Anyone knows an ant, can’t
Move a rubber tree plant.
But he’s got high hopes, he’s got high hopes,
He’s got high apple pie, in the sky hopes
So any time your gettin’ low
stead of lettin’ go
Just remember that ant…
Oops there goes another rubber tree plant.

The song tells us what to do when we’re suffering. He says, in essence, that suffering puts you in a position to learn some important lessons about life. Of course, the lesson that we’re supposed to learn is that we can get ourselves out of it. We just need to look past the impossibility of it and do it. It sounds great when you’re listening to it outside of your own real suffering as it appeals to our own vigor and resourcefulness. Even without Sinatra singing, it is a message that leaves us with hope – at least as long as we don’t put it to the test.

But as a kid, I remember taking seriously the words of this song. I guess I really can do impossible things if I just try hard enough. In our backyard there was a mimosa tree that I loved to climb. It was a mature tree, probably a few feet around the trunk, and gave our patio lots of shade. But wouldn’t it be great if this tree were just a little closer to my room. I spent several afternoons eyeing the trunk of that tree carefully, putting both hands against the trunk, and pushing. I pushed and pushed and pushed, just waiting to feel the tree move the slightest bit. But no matter how much I tried it didn’t move. That song would play through my head before each effort. Why wouldn’t the tree move? We know that a little boy can’t move a mature tree. We’re adults.

But we’re no different when it comes to the problem that suffering presents. Suffering hints that things are not right. It points us to the hope that there is something out there better for us to experience yet remains out of our grasp. But the song that we most often hear is do something to get ourselves out – to have high hopes – even though no amount of effort is going to make everything right.

Suffering shows us, perhaps more than anything else, that there is a chasm between where we are and where we want to be. It shows us that there is a great chasm between man and God. Because this chasm between man and God is too big for man to cross, we must hope in God.

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