God's Megaphone

In light of my upcoming Wednesday night class on C. S. Lewis and the Lenten devotional I'm writing, "Faith, Hope, and Love in a World of Hurt," here's a rough entry from that devotional, which contains a famous quote from Lewis on how God uses suffering our lives.

This is a tough truth, but C. S. Lewis, at least, was willing to say that we are often asleep, or at least, deadened to God’s voice. We can become complacent. So God uses pain in our lives to rouse us. True faith, Lewis asserts in The Problem of Pain implies full surrender to God. Sometimes the only way to get us there is through suffering. 

The human spirit will not even try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it…. We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who as watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did no know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasures. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

As usual, I turn the question to you: What do you think? Can pain and suffering lead us to faith? Is it a useful tool in God's hands?