What to say when faced with Impossible suffering...

Sat and watched The Impossible last night with teenage daughters.

It tells the real-life story of a Bélon family who were caught up in the Indian Ocean tsunami on Boxing Day 2004. The mother, Maria, was horrifically wounded and almost drowned, but manages to find her eldest son Luke. Fearing that dad and the other smaller boys had been killed, there follows a gruelling fight for survival - helped by local Thai villagers, and ending up in a packed and chaotic hospital. I won't spoil the (happy) ending - but the superb acting makes this an emotional ride.

We had to wring the sofa out afterwards.

But it left me with an uneasy feeling about our reaction to suffering on this scale. Of course it's a true story of what might be described as a "miraculous" survival. And the movie pulls no punches about the scale of the devastation - we see in several scenes lines of bodies. But I am now in danger of remembering the Tsunami through the lens of this "feel-good" story about a wealthy western family. The reality is that more than a quarter of a million people died. The vast majority of whom were ordinary Thais, Indians, and Sri Lankans, many of them living in relative poverty.

We can easily do the same thing when we talk about the question of suffering. We glibly jump to the very real "good" that can come out of tragedy in a way that fails to recognise the enormity of the pain.

When Job's three friends arrived to comfort him in his distress - they started out well:

And when they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him. And they raised their voices and wept, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads toward heaven. And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great. Job 2: 11-13

They started messing up when they opened their mouths. That's something I need to learn from them...