Do Not Flee Suffering
Human beings have a tendency to run from suffering and seek whatever will bring the quickest reprieve from such realities. This instinctive movement away from pain is a natural reaction. However, I am convinced that it is not always the most beneficial impulse—especially when we consider the life of our Savior and see His path to glorification, a path we ourselves are called to follow.
Just earlier today, I was struck—quite suddenly—with feelings of great dread and anxiety about all sorts of things beyond my control. It came on so abruptly that I am convinced it was a demonic attack, as my mood had been fairly good just prior. Immediately, my mind sought a way to escape such profound emotional discomfort—though one could hardly call it true suffering. How much more, then, would my body have urged escape had it been real suffering? I opened my computer and instinctively went to YouTube, clicking from one video to the next, earnestly trying to distract my mind and relieve my distress. It was at some point in the midst of this that I felt a still, gentle voice whisper within: “Endure.”
This nudge to endure was exactly what I needed to snap out of my reactionary stupor. I sat there in front of my laptop, suddenly aware of the path before me: distract myself from discomfort, or patiently endure it. I intentionally chose the latter—admittedly, not a choice I often make. Like many in our comfortable society, I have lived a life where suffering is avoided at nearly all costs. In the process, I—and many others—have lost the ability to endure hardship. Worse still, we have lost the ability to pick up our cross and follow after Christ, as He commands us.
I found this moment of learning significant, considering that it fell upon Sexagesima Sunday. In this time of preparation for Lent, it is easy to forget that the path to Easter must first pass through the bloody cross of Good Friday. We often fail to remember that, while we have been given salvation freely by God, it must be worked out in us through labor, effort, and struggle. In other words, the appropriation of God’s good gift—mirroring the life of Christ—includes the endurance of suffering for the sake of our sanctification and deification. We shouldn’t avoid it; indeed, we cannot. This may well be the difference between one who merely knows the Lord through mental assent and one who knows Him through the embodied experience of tremendous suffering—one who, like St. Paul, can say:
“I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Colossians 1:24).
My discomfort today can hardly be compared to the suffering of Christ, but in a real way, by choosing to endure—simply sitting in the present moment of discomfort—I felt a level of communion and participation in God that I could never have achieved through my compulsive escapism. Even now, as I type, the discomfort remains, and yet, I also have joy, peace, and a sense of deep communion with a God who also knows suffering.
This is the path for the Christian. This is the Lenten journey. It will involve struggle and suffering. It will lead us to the foot of a cross, where we watch as God dies. And yet, in the end, this image—this struggle—is necessary for salvation. We need not fear it, for our Lord has already shown us that suffering will never be the telos. In the end, our patient endurance will give birth to resurrection. Of this we can have complete assurance.
“But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed” (1 Peter 4:13).
Works Cited:
The Holy Bible. English Standard Version. Crossway Bibles, 2016.