Jesus taught us how to bear, handle, and transform our suffering into a new kind of life instead of an old kind of death.
Pain teaches a most counterintuitive thing: we must go down before we even know what up is. Suffering is so strong it destabilizes us and reveals our arrogance, our separateness, and our lack of compassion. Suffering is, ironically, the most effective way we learn to trust, allow, and give up because simply put, suffering is when we have completely lost control.
Too often, suffering makes us cynical, bitter, negative, and blaming. If we cannot find a way to transform our wounds, we would certainly give up on life and humanity. The natural tendency of our ego is to protect itself so it does not get hurt again.
Spiritual maturity helps transform us so that we do not keep handing the pain on to the next generation. We learn to identify our own wounds with the wounding of Jesus and the sufferings of the universal Body of Christ. We can then see our own suffering as a voluntary participation in the one Great Sadness of God. With this, we can build something new, good, and forever original, while neither playing the victim nor making victims of others. With this, we become channels of grace into the world!
Philippians 3:10-11 “I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead. I want to suffer with him, sharing in his death, so that one way or another I will experience the resurrection from the dead!
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