Viral blog post outlines the human need for suffering – Deseret News

Warning: The article linked to in this post includes strong language.

A powerful blog post has gone viral since it was posted last week.

Heather Kirn Lanier writes that when she was expecting, she tried to make a SuperBaby. She detailed the extreme things she did in an effort to create the perfect child, ranging from giving up wheat and getting rid of her microwave to keeping her cellphone an arms length away from her belly. She opted for a natural birth and discussed with doctors her desire to avoid cutting the cord prematurely to make sure that her baby got all of the vital nutrients.

However, her baby was born with Wolf-Hirschhorn Syndrome, a diagnosis that carried with it a 34 percent mortality rate in the first two years of life as well as intellectual disabilities and serious physical limitations, including the possibility of never walking and seizures.

Lanier explains that she learned the same lesson Jesus taught his disciples when asked if it was the blind man who sinned or his parents. She learned that there is no blame to be placed but rather, this suffering is a crucial part of the human experience.

Perhaps the point of life was not to achieve some kind of perfection. Perhaps illness was an integral part of lifes dance, she writes. Perhaps fragility was built into our very design. Perhaps fragility was also strength.

Lanier breaks down the error in seeking to create SuperBabies" and imagines what "SuperPeople" would be like.

And on their holidays, they would gather around fires propping their lean, tall, muscular bodies onto core-boosting exercise balls and tell stories of the generations past, when people were not Super but Regular, Lanier wrote of the fictional species. In those bygone days, RegularPeople had autoimmune disorders and chronic pain. They had broken hearts and failed dreams. They had something the SuperPeople only know through history books: suffering.

Suffering will not be easy, and it will not be comfortable, but it will be, and you will become, Lanier explains in conclusion.

Read the entire article here.

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Viral blog post outlines the human need for suffering - Deseret News