Suffering

Here is the last part of my 3 part blog looking at different values I have come to find important in my life, Happy Lent Everyone. Join me next week as I start looking at my newest workout program, trying to make time for myself. Also be prepared for some big stuff coming next month as I start looking towards my 27 birthday!!!!!

For me my understanding of suffering is closely tied to of our Lord’s embrace of suffering and death to redeem us from our sins. As God the Son, Jesus could have chosen any way to redeem us. So the fact that he chose to redeem us through his suffering and death necessarily gives meaning to every human beings experience with suffering and to my own also. Because we are joined to Christ, our suffering is joined with his, and participates in the redemption He accomplished. One way I have describe this idea to teens is that at times in our lives things breakdown however we wouldn’t have breakthrough in our personal life if those breakdowns didn’t happen. Because Christ would not have been able to give us Easter Sunday without first going through Good Friday.

Understanding this has helped me be able to offer up my suffering and embrace it as part of my human journey. We offer up our lives and our sufferings formally, in the Mass, by consciously offering ourselves up with our sufferings, along with Christ to God the Father during the offertory. Informally, we “offer it up” simply by asking God, in the midst of our suffering, to join our suffering to Christ’s, and to use our suffering. For me this is a helpful way to move through suffering as I wait on redemption. The relation between our present life and the life to come is the condition for the meaningfulness of our sufferings in this present life. The gospel shows us that suffering is an opportunity given to us to participate in our future blessedness by offering our present sufferings, in union with Christ’s sufferings, to God in self-giving sacrifice.

Suffering is part of the human condition however it is how we react to it that truly effects are perception of the suffering and how we get through it. Throughout my life I have not always chosen the most positive reactions to suffering however my reaction to suffering as changed as I have grown in my own understanding of how I am made in the image and likeness of God and how I have come to a deeper understanding of my own personal freedom. It is the integration and understanding of how God is acting in our lives that helps us come to a deeper meaning and understanding of faith. For me answering and understanding these parts of myself has been a part of my journey to come to deeper understanding of the movement of God within my life.