I Want You To Suffer
Some of the worst moments of my life paved the way for the greatest joys I have ever experienced.
Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This week, I discuss the importance of suffering.
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I Want You To Suffer
We are coming to the end of Holy Week, where we celebrate the Passion of our Lord. Christians all over the world participate in some sort of abstinence this week in order to sacrifice in memory of His suffering. I am coming to the end of a seven-day fast. I’ve had no food since last Sunday at dinner time. I won’t break until Easter Sunday when we celebrate Christ’s resurrection.
This is the longest I have gone without eating in my life, and today I am struggling to continue. The physical effects of not eating can be felt in every movement I make. While my mental capacity was at a peak Thursday, by Friday morning, I felt slow and mentally clouded.
Despite this, I won’t give in. Suffering is an important part of life. It’s something our modern world works to prevent as much as possible.
I’ve been thinking about the purpose of this fast all week long. My hope was that I would gain some sort of mental clarity about what God wants for my life. But the overwhelming lesson that keeps coming to mind is that God wants us to suffer for Him.
Suffering has such a negative connotation. We avoid it at every turn. Part of this is because our human nature begs for ease. But we are called to do hard things. This doesn’t mean that we are supposed to put ourselves in situations to purposefully cause us pain and heartache. However, when there is a cross for you to bear, you should willingly take it and carry it.
I’ve had chronic joint pain my whole life. We have never found the root cause, so I just live with it. For decades, I would take daily pain relievers like Tylenol or Advil, until eventually I gave myself a stomach ulcer. I had to stop looking for relief from the pain in order to heal. Doing this completely changed my perspective on suffering.
I know it may sound crazy to say, but once I stopped looking for a way to numb the pain and embraced the suffering, I finally started feeling relief. I still take an occasional Advil when the pain is too much for me to handle. But for daily relief, I turn to prayer. I’ve even begun thanking God for the chance to use this suffering for a good greater than myself.
Suffering, whether it’s loss, pain, hardship, can be a hard thing to understand. It’s easy to wonder why a loving God would allow these things to happen to us. But He is not asking any more of us than what Christ or our Blessed Mother went through — some of the worst moments of my life paved the way for the greatest joys I have ever experienced.
When I finally woke up to the idea that pain can be used for a greater purpose, that maybe I don’t see the reasoning behind it now, but eventually I will, I began noticing all the ways in my life that I avoid doing the hard things just to make my life easier.