08/12/2025
When I look back over my life, I wish I had an eraser where I could erase my mistakes, hardships, failures, struggles, and disappointments. Wouldn’t it be majestic to live a pain-free, smooth-sailing, blue-sky life?
John Ortberg describes in detail a fascinating psychological exercise based on the following scenario:
Imagine you have a child, and you are handed a script of her entire life laid out before you. Better yet, you are given an eraser and five minutes to edit out whatever you want…. With this script of your child’s life before you and five minutes to edit it, what would you erase? That is the question psychologist Jonathan Haidt asked in this hypothetical exercise: Wouldn’t you want to take out all the stuff that would cause them pain? (The Me I Want to Be, 232).
Let’s let this play out. You are reading your child’s life story, and you discover that in fifth grade, a bully pushed her down on the playground. Erase it.
Read a little further, and you find out that she wanted to play basketball in high school, but she didn’t make the final cut. I would erase that.
She goes to college and starts dating a guy who treats her poorly, breaks her heart, and she spirals downward into a bout with depression that lasts two years. I would most definitely erase that.
She graduates from college and finds a job she really likes. A year later, she learns that she’s up for a promotion, but then she calls to let you know that instead of that promotion, her position has been eliminated. You would erase that too, wouldn’t you? (Idleman, When Your Way Isn’t Working, 196-197).
Our natural instinct is to erase those difficulties from our lives and from the lives of others, because we think we’re being protective. But what if the pain is part of the protection? What if we need to go through life’s struggles in order to develop strength that can protect us from greater harm later in life?
I have a friend whose three-year-old son recently got a bad cold from his daycare. As a dad, my friend wants to protect his son from all those cold-causing germs, but if he somehow could do that, would he be exposing and not protecting his son from greater illnesses later?
I believe this is why the Bible speaks so clearly on finding joy in the struggle rather than attempting to eliminate all struggle in life. “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds” (James 1:2). “In all our troubles my joy knows no bounds” (2 Corinthians 7:4). “For the joy set before him [Jesus] endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2).
I need this reminder, and maybe you do too: Although we don’t seek out suffering, we shouldn’t erase it, either. Suffering produces perseverance then character resulting in hope. To skip over suffering would mean we skip over hope, which we would never want erased from our lives.
So instead of reaching for the eraser, I’ll trust the Author. Every joy, every struggle—He’s weaving it all into a story I’ll one day look back on and say, “He knew exactly what He was doing.”
