How We Escape the Labyrinth of Suffering

I was twelve years old when I first encountered John Green’s Looking for Alaska. Twelve, an age far too young for the seductive language, explicit scenes, and philosophical weight packed between its pages. I didn’t understand the literary devices or the adult themes. Yet one question carved itself into my mind permanently: How will we get out of the labyrinth of suffering?

At the time, I was a seventh-grader living in a house thick with whispers and closed doors. My brother’s hidden depression hovered over everything, though no one said the word out loud. I felt small, replaceable, and desperate to matter. So when a friend casually handed me her copy of Looking for Alaska, I devoured the first chapter and promptly decided I wasn’t giving it back.

Nine years later, that worn, highlighted, stolen paperback sits on my shelf beside my equally worn, equally highlighted Bible, the only two bodies of literature I have reread enough to memorise.

Back then, the book seemed to be about Alaska: bold, chaotic, magnetic. I wanted to be described the way Miles described her: “smart, gorgeous, and a hurricane.” But beneath the teenage melodrama, one moment stopped me cold. Alaska’s page-54 monologue about the labyrinth:

“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day… but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”

Even at twelve, I knew those words were truer than they had any right to be.

A labyrinth, as Google dryly puts it, is “a complicated, irregular network of passages… a maze.” Green uses it as a metaphor for life’s suffering; its dead ends, its unexpected turns, its heartbreaks. And he’s right: suffering is layered. Physical, psychological, social, spiritual, every human being eventually confronts all four.

Our instincts, as author Patrick King notes, are simple: seek pleasure, avoid pain. So we numb. A lonely middle school girl overachieves. A shy teenage boy disappears into pornography. A college woman mistakes validation for intimacy. A stressed mother turns to pills. An overlooked employee drinks. A newly injured athlete abuses painkillers. A disappointed Christian walks away from prayer.

Everyone hurts, and everyone tries to escape.

So how do we get out of the labyrinth?

John Green gives an answer: forgiveness. And he’s right, but only halfway. In Looking for Alaska, forgiveness is a poetic concept but not a grounded one. Forgive whom? For what purpose? On what authority? In the novel, Green places Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity side by side as if they offer interchangeable paths out of suffering.

They don’t.

Only one gives a map.

Christianity does not promise a life without suffering; Job, Paul, and Christ Himself put that fantasy to rest. Instead, Scripture gives us a blueprint for endurance and escape. Job 33, in particular, outlines the process: God speaks through suffering, exposes our pride, rescues us from destruction, restores our souls, and invites us into a relationship rather than resignation.

Forgiveness is the key, but not because it is therapeutic. It is the key because God commands it, models it, and empowers it. We forgive not because the people who hurt us deserve it, but because we cannot be free while dragging the weight of bitterness through the maze. And we forgive not from our own strength, but because Christ forgave us first.

That is the difference between a novelist’s philosophy and a biblical promise.

Everyone walks through the labyrinth. But only one path leads out, and it is the one walked with the God who understands suffering, enters into it, and redeems it.

We don’t escape by numbing it.
We don’t escape by outrunning it.
We escape by surrendering it; to the only One who can lead us out.