This year World Health Day is raising awareness of “super-bugs” that resist our treatments for deadly diseases such as malaria, HIV and TB. These diseases are caused by microbes that like nothing more than a challenge. The medicines we develop to kill them are just that – a challenge to be overcome - and they respond by changing so that the treatments become less and less effective, leaving us despairing in the face of nature that seems indifferent to the suffering of humanity.

It’s a reminder that nature can destroy as well as support human life. A Jesuit priest who works in the rainforest of the Congo told me recently he would happily chop down all the trees that make up the second largest rainforest in the world, if it meant malarial mosquitoes could be eradicated. “I can’t bear to take one more child to their grave” he said.

I was silenced by his remark. We were at an environmental meeting together and any platitudes about the wonder of nature seemed hollow.

I have no answers about the role of suffering in the world through disease. We live on a hugely complex and interconnected planet and we are dependent on the micro world as well as held hostage to it. Microbes clean our water, make soils productive for crops, keep our bodies healthy inside and out, and do all kinds of vital jobs that make human life possible. Without microbes we would all be dead. But each year malaria kills between one and three million people, and water borne diseases kill 13,000 children. This is the harsh reality of life on earth.

Suffering is part of the fabric of our existence - all faiths have their own answers and all individuals face it as best they can. In the Bible Job was angry and accusatory, demanding that God give him answers to his pain. God responded by asking him why he should know all the answers. ‘Where were you when the foundations of the earth were laid and the stars sang for joy?’ He asked.

Maybe we are not meant to understand the purpose of suffering, but to accept its reality and use wisdom and compassion to find the way forward; to search for a way for humanity and the natural world to co-exist in harmony, so that all of life on earth may flourish.