He Lets us Suffer...

Time is but a shadow, a dream; already God sees us in glory and takes joy in our eternal beatitude. How this thought helps my soul! I understand then why He lets us suffer..
-St. Therese of Lisieux


I find it so fitting to speak of suffering right now. Why? Because i find that so many people are truly under going so much strife as  they walk this road towards the Lord's will and healing in their lives.  I find it so interesting to journey in the spiritual life. I find that there is process of what happens. Like in every relationship it starts out as if you are eating candy all day and not getting sick.  The sweetness and joy is amazing and nothing in the world could ever compare to the happiness you feel, knowing the love you are experiencing with God. 


As you continue to walk, little by little there is less sweet and a bit of sour, even some bitter.  The interesting part is that it happens here and there so you do not feel it as much.  Then as God continues to replace the sweet with the bitter...you are still walking with him, but you realize that things are different now.  You realize that the sweetness is less, the bitterness more, and you recognize that you are choosing to continue to take the bitter as you long for the sweet. You are realizing that bitter or sweet means nothing to you anymore, it is the journey itself that counts.


The point of the above analogy is the idea of choice and how love is a decision and walking in the spiritual life is a daily struggle, yet we walk. We walk knowing that we will not always get the sweet and sometimes God will withhold both.  God wants us completely without incentives. He wants us to choose to love him no matter what he hands out to us. 
I said to a friend one day who was speaking to me of feelings in the spiritual life--people think that feelings make the journey real, and I say when there is no feelings at all is when the journey becomes real.  It is then that I must choose to love the Lord, with nothing that he has to give me to do so, but with a desire to be completely his.


That is hard place to be when our lives are filled with feeling and touching and lots and lots of sweetness and pleasure. Archbishop Sheen once said: We have a greater capacity for suffering then for pleasure. There is so much truth in that statement, for example:  think about how awesome it is to eat a big feast.  It is so good, yet you have a limit that your stomach can testify to. You will explode if you eat anymore. You can't ask for the grace to eat more.(you can try, but I am not sure of what happens!)   On the other hand, when it comes to suffering, people can spend years and years, sick and in pain, and the beautiful part is that we can always ask God for the grace to endure that pain.  
We can always ask for the strength to continue to suffer as God is calling us to.  We can do this because Christ died on the cross and did not come off until he died to all that God was calling him to die for and suffer for.  He was taken down from the cross.  He did not all of a sudden tell them,  no take me off this thing. I don't want to suffer anymore.


Christ embraced his cross, took up his cross, mounted his cross, suffered on his cross and died on the cross.  He did not give up, but in his humanity prayed for strength. The strength he knew he needed from the Father to endure all he did from the cross. 


Also, I feel that he received that strength from His mother as he gazed into her eyes from the cross. Knowing that she shared that pain that day.  She was there, as well, to bear that suffering that he could only bear.  She was there for him,  and  as Christ gave her to John, he gives her to us to also to ask her to share our pain with her.  She is a mother who more then understands the heart of her children.  


Ask her for that strength, trust, courage and surrender to what God wills for you. She too said yes to God's will. She surrendered her own will for God's, she trusted in all that God would do for her, she courageously walked the road of calvary with her son and with all her strength watched her son die! That day she died too, as she bore more then we could ever imagine...she too, can be that mother of great tenderness to be there in our time of suffering, loss, woundedness and healing. Ask her for the graces you need to endure all that God is calling you too.  


Suffering is inevitable in the spiritual life! It is part of the journey--and is in that part that we are unknowingly transformed by all the pain we endured. It is that suffering that draws us closer to Christ, in fact, unites us with him in a more intimate way. He understands our suffering more then we could ever comprehend.  This suffering is what makes us who we are, and truly who we are called to be. 


God whispers to us in our pleasures, He speaks to us in our conscience, and He shouts to us in our pain.  --CS Lewis