Being nice is a poor diagnostic indicator
A clinical saying from a hospital dictation room opens a raw conversation about suffering, eternity, and what C.S. Lewis and Paul knew that medicine can't explain.
And what a dictation room taught me about suffering, eternity, and the question we're all afraid to ask.
It wasn't a grand rounds lecture. It wasn't a textbook. It came out of a dictation room.
I was working as a nurse practitioner in the hospital, rounding alongside Drs. Matt and Whitney Krolikowski — infectious disease physicians — just as the worst of Covid was finally, mercifully winding down. We were doing what clinicians spend half their lives doing: sitting in a small room, working through a patient census, half our attention on our notes and half on whoever was talking. The kind of conversation that happens between the formal moments of medicine.
Somewhere in that ordinary rhythm, one of them said it. Offhand. Almost as a footnote to whatever patient we were discussing.
Being nice is a poor diagnostic indicator.
I knew immediately what it meant. Every clinician does, the moment they hear it. The sweetest, most gracious, most apologetic-for-bothering-you patient in the room? When that imaging comes back, it's often not good. The patient who keeps thanking you, who tells you not to worry, who smiles despite the pain — and you're standing there hoping the scan proves you wrong.
Sometimes it does. Often, it doesn't.
That phrase has stayed with me ever since. Not just as a clinical observation, but as a doorway into the oldest theological question in human history: Why do good people suffer?
The wrong measuring stick
Here's where I think most of us go off the rails. We approach suffering with an assumption baked in — that God's goodness should produce our comfort. That a loving God equals a pain-free life. And when that equation doesn't hold, we either rage at God or quietly walk away from Him.
But what if we're measuring the wrong thing entirely?
C.S. Lewis put his finger on this with characteristic precision in The Problem of Pain. He drew a distinction between what he called a "grandfather in heaven" versus a Father — and the difference is not small. A grandfather, Lewis argued, just wants everyone to have a nice time. He doesn't much care what they do as long as they're enjoying themselves. But a Father? A Father is invested in something deeper than your comfort. He is invested in your character, your formation, your becoming.
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.
— C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
Lewis understood that the stakes of human existence are staggeringly high — not in spite of suffering, but sometimes because of it. If we are being formed into something eternal, then the process of that formation is going to feel like exactly that: a process. Not a vacation.
We decided comfort was the goal. He never said it was.
The eternal calibration
Paul wrote something that used to frustrate me. From a prison cell, having been beaten, shipwrecked, and run out of town more times than I can count, he had the audacity to call his suffering "light and momentary."
For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
— 2 Corinthians 4:17–18 (NIV)
He wasn't being glib. He had genuinely recalibrated. He had done the math — and when you hold the weight of eternity against the weight of a human lifespan, the scale tips in a direction that changes everything.
Peter makes the same case with different imagery — and it's worth sitting with:
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in various trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith — of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire — may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.
— 1 Peter 1:3–7 (NIV)
Refined by fire. Greater worth than gold. Two witnesses — Paul and Peter — arriving at the same place from the same source. The trials are not random. They are refining something.
Lewis arrived at the same place from a different angle. In Mere Christianity he wrote that God is not trying to make us comfortable — He is trying to make us good. Not just decent. He is after something that looks, in the end, like Him. And that kind of transformation doesn't happen in a greenhouse. It happens in a crucible.
What if this life — all of it, the grief and the diagnoses and the unanswered prayers and the long nights — is not the destination? What if it's the hallway? God's primary goal was never our comfort on earth. His goal is our eternal life with Him. And everything operates within that larger frame.
That doesn't make the scan results any easier to deliver. It doesn't make the grief less real. But it means the grief is not the end of the story. It means what we experience here, as devastating as it can be, is preface — not conclusion.
Back to that patient
Here's what I've come to believe about those gracious, peaceful patients: their kindness isn't what caused the cancer. But their character is what carried them through the room with that kind of grace.
That settled peace you sometimes see in people walking through the hardest moments of their lives? That's not denial. That's not emotional suppression. That is a person who has already made their reckoning with eternity. They know where they're going, and it changes how they hold what's happening to them here.
Lewis described it as the difference between a person who treats this world as home and a person who knows they are a pilgrim passing through. The pilgrim doesn't panic when the road gets rough. They expected it. And they know where the road leads.
I've seen it too many times to call it coincidence.
Suffering has a way of stripping everything down to what's actually real. It burns off the pretense, the self-reliance, the illusion that we are in control of any of this. And in that burning, sometimes — not always, but sometimes — something truer rises to the surface.
A challenge
So here's the question I want to leave with you. Not a comfortable one.
If this life is all there is, suffering is just cruel and random and none of it means anything. But if what's happening here is preparation — if the point is not comfort but transformation, not ease but formation for eternity — then the question changes completely.
It stops being: Why is God letting this happen to me?
And it becomes: What is He forming in me through this?
That's a harder question to sit with. But it's also the one that leads somewhere. Lewis said we are far too easily pleased — settling for comfort when we were made for glory. Fix your eyes on what is unseen. The temporary has a way of looking much smaller from that vantage point.