When trying to make sense of how our perfectly good, wise, and powerful God can coexist with all the evil and suffering in the world, we can easily be overwhelmed by looking at all the evil in all of human history all at once, but that is not a fair way of looking at the issue since no person will experience all of that pain.

Randy Alcorn reminded me of this in If God Is Good, saying, “There is no sum of human misery, only individual misery…. Despite the horror of disasters, we must understand that suffering does not have a cumulative nature…. All of us remain limited to our own suffering.” He points to this helpful quote from C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain:

We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the ‘unimaginable sum of human misery’. Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity x: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity x. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must remember that no one is suffering 2x: search all time and all space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone’s consciousness. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain.

No one suffers the sum of suffering. This doesn’t negate the suffering one person suffers, of course, but it does keep the suffering that is actually experienced by human beings in perspective.

Obviously, there is much more to consider when we’re thinking about the problem of evil and suffering, but this is one element of the answer that I don’t hear mentioned often enough.