Though suffering is not good in and of itself, it can and often does serve good purposes. These good purposes stand behind suffering as part of God’s wise and good plan. And for us – knowing this – means the difference between despair and hope, between giving up and keeping the faith.
C.S. Lewis said, “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.” (The Problem of Pain, 1940)
How easy it is to become deaf to God when things are easy?
How easy it is to lose yourself in trivial noise when things are easy?
There is something about suffering that removes our focus from trivialities to transcendent truths.
There is something in suffering that is meant to move us away from fragile self-trust and into the firmness of faith.
We can rejoice in sufferings because we know that trials and troubles are not the random, purposeless collisions of atoms and molecules. We know that God’s good hand is not absent but present in our suffering.
God’s love is not about our comfort it is about our conformity to Christ.
God’s is not a love that leaves us as we were – it is a love that transforms us into who we were meant to be.