Pain

We had a guest speaker at our little church this week. He said one of the most disturbing moments of his life were when he and his wife went to Germany and went into a dark mirrored room filled with candles. On and on into the dark went the candles - each one representing the life of a Jewish child who had been slaughtered during the holocaust. And then he said something. "Each of us, in our own way, can have our own holocaust experience". That's something I've thought for a while, but didn't think it was acceptable to say out loud. But he said it.
I read a book a while ago by a Jewish man Victor Frankl who was in a concentration camp for over 3 years. He founded a form of psychoanalys called Logotherapy. He came to the conclusion that pain fills the space it occupies. That someone can stub their toe and suffer as much as someone in a terrible situation. Please don't get me wrong. I'm not diminishing the pain of the holocaust. I'm just trying to acknowledge the pain we all go through in life. We all suffer.
Anyway. The thing our speaker pointed out to us was this: Never compare anybodies pain. Each persons pain is unique to them. Like me. I have a tendency to think. "what do you know about pain?" But no. We'll never really know what people suffer. Only they do.